Can the family Pond reinvent the bike?

The Cosmic Conc
Can the family Pond reinvent the bike?
The pornographers of the
bicycle industry: Alex
(foreground) and Skooks
Pong with the Super V 4000
By Michael McRae
SOLATED FROM THE FREEWAYS AND
tied on the most expedient solution, to
hubbub ofexurban Seattle, Whidshave some metal off the rotor. The part
bey Island is a bucolic paradise of
wouldn't fit perfectly, but there was no
conifer forests, small farms, and
time to redesign it.
retirement homes with acreage.
At this point, both men were running on
Some nights, the loudest noise on
reserve but looked remarkably sharp. At
the island's interior is the chirping
53, Alex Pong is slim and sinewy, with an
of crickets. But during the small
unlined Eurasian face. He has long, elegant
hours of last September 12, in a
fingers and radiates intensity and intellect.
corrugated metal building on a
Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to a Chinese
dirt lane near the village of Langfather and an English mother, he endured
ley, all hell was breaking loose.
school only until the eighth grade before
The unholy racket recalled the
rebelling against his parents and dropping
sound track of Jurassic Park: a
out. His son's Asian heritage shows only
fiendish outburst of growls, groans, wails,
faintly; tall and darkly handsome, he could
barks, and shrieks that sounded as if T. Rex
pass for an American Indian, especially
had invaded the huge structure and was mawith his given name, Skookumchuck, a
rauding a clutch of velociraptors.
Chinook word meaning "strong water."
Inside, designer-inventor Alex Pong was
Alex Pong was getting edgy. In the preat his drafting table, trying to divine the bicyceding weeks, his sleep had been coming
cle of the future. The lights of his cavernous
only in fits; after an hour or two, his mind
shop had been burning day- and night for
would start gnawing again. The bike's debut
weeks, but Pong's deadline was now only six
was scheduled for the first day of Interbike
days away. As he labored upstairs in his loft
Expo, the year's most important bicycle
office, pulling shapes out of the ether, his 28trade show. Some 35,000 aficionados would
year-old son Skooks, a skilled machinist
converge on Las Vegas to inspect the latest
since his teenage years, was downstairs at the
wares of bicycling's best and brightest, and if
controls of a computerized milling machine
Pong were not present... well, he had to be.
as big as a bus. The behemoth's high-speed
The stakes were simply too high to blow it.
cutters were devouring aluminum blocks the
For starters, Pong's partner, the Cannonsize of physics textbooks, noisily transformdale Corporation, was banking on him to
ing visions into reality on a tranquil, starthe tune of about a million dollars. Only six
splashed autumn night.
months earlier, in February, Pong and the
By the next afternoon the shop had fallcompany formed a top-secret plan to create
en silent. Father and son were huddled
nothing short of what both parties call "a
over a set of mechanical drawings, looking
redefinition of the bicycle"-a dual susgrave. Annotated with scores of dimensions
pension all-terrain aluminum bike that
and scribbled calculations, the sketches
would weigh about 20 pounds and do away
conjured tip a geometry student's darkest
altogether with welded tubes. Not only
nightmare. The elder Pong's attention was
would the bike outperform anything on
focused on one diagram in particular, of the
the market; it would revolutionize bicycle
bike's rear hub. Leaning
manufacturing.
against a nearby wall
Then there were the
was a pair of exotic-lookghosts of Pong's schemes
ing wheels befitting f ,, L4
past. His previous reintheir intended role.
vent-the-wheel proWith aerodynamic rims
jects-an aircraft engine
and gleaming daggerand an off-road motorcyshaped spokes arrayed
cle-had resulted in imlike five-pointed stars,
pressive prototypes, but
they suggested a wheel
neither had come to
set for the lunar rover.
commercial fruition. His
"I screwed up bigfamily has never enjoyed
time here," Pong said as
anything approaching
he tapped the drawing
CNC, yes; TV, no: the lab
the American dream.
in question. Sometime
and make -do domicile
Pong has held only one
during the wee hours,
brief job in his life, as the
he had miscalculated the inner circumfermaintenance supervisor for the Whidbey
ence of a disc brake rotor by 0.040 inch.
Telephone Company . His wife , Sally.
The error had come to light only after
worked nights as a baker to keep money
Skooks had finished fabricating the rotor.
coming in while raising their five children,
There was a long silence while father and
only one of whom finished high school.
son weighed their options. Finally they set("We're all dropouts here ," Pong says proud46
• Leave the
bulging saddlebag behind-one
tool fits all.
• The wheels are true
from the moment
they ' re manufactured.
Adios , spoke wrench.
• Car-like disc brakes, so the
bike can stop on a dime
ly.) The youngest still lives with her parents
in a warren of rooms at one end of the shop,
and after 18 years of occupancy the make-do
domicile has bare plasterboard walls. "There
is no television, no convenient bathroom (it's
downstairs, amidships in the building).
After years of wandering in the wilderness, Pong now faced what could he his
greatest glory. His previous experiences
seemed an apprenticeship for the task at
hand, although his role, he felt, was merely
that of a tool for some higher power. "Almost everything I've learned, I did because I had to follow the agonizing road,"
Pang said. " My insights could not have occurred without an acutely painful process
of gathering lessons you cannot gather in
college. It's an almost Catholic concept: in-
JANUARY
1994 • OUTSIDE
• The three -piece aluminum
monocoque frame is the heart
of the 20-pound bike. And if
you tweak a section in a
wipeout , simply replace it.
• The trailing-link
suspension works like
your leg. Think of the
spring-loaded pivot as a
knee that soaks up bumps.
• A conventional
Shimano
drivetrain for now.
Pong's own maintenance -free components are
on the way.
• Four inches of
travel, front and
rear . No suspension
absorbs more.
• The cranks are
CNC-machined,
like the rest of
the bike-hollow
but super stiff.
sight through pain."
Brightening at the witticism , he added, "I
don't have any control over this project now.
We're all part of a divine creativity, this flow...
I feel like a grain of sand on the beach."
Then, with little more than a hundred hours
left before the deadline, Pong excused himself, returned to his office, and shut the door.
Apart from the wheels and a few other
parts, most of his magnum opus remained,
as he had put it several weeks earlier, still
in his "noodle."
ALEX PONG LIKES TO CALLTHE MARRIAGE BEtween himself and Cannondale's top management a "cosmic accident," and indeed
it was more than just a business deal. It was
more like a fortuitous meeting of tinkerers
whose impulse is to build a lighter,
stronger, more efficient mousetrap, in this
case one made entirely in America.
The seminal advances in outdoor equipment have usually occurred this way, at the
hands of experimenters dissatisfied with the
status quo. Dick Kelty designed the aluminum backpack frame in his Burbank, California, garage during the late 1940s, when
the existing state of the art was either the
"Trapper Nelson packboard or the rucksack,
both of which could be instruments of torture when heavily loaded. Yvon Chouinard,
founder of Patagonia Inc. and Chouinard
Equipment Ltd., began making stronger
pitons and caribiners in the early 1960s, driving to climbing areas and selling his wares
out of the hack of his car, in which he'd set
up a portable forge. In the mid-1970s, an
avid backpacker named Bob Gillis, along
with designers from The North Face, applied Buckminster Fuller's nature-inspired
theories of synergetic geometry to outdoor
shelter and devised the geodesic dome tent,
a great leap forward over the heavy, unstable
A-frames and Pop-Tents of the day. The
North Face produced the Oval Intention in
197 5 and refined the concept into the
lighter, sturdier VE-23 and VF,-24, the ancestors of the best tents available today. At
about the same time, on the opposite coast,
Bob Gore was transforming his experimental plumbing tape into the first waterproof-breathable membrane for outerwear.
The impetus behind these advancesto enrich the outdoor experience by in-
creasing mobility, comfort, and safetynearly maintenance-free drivetrain that
stacles were also formidable, among them
also produced the most popular toy of all,
shifted gears not by means of a derailleur,
start-up costs and the threat of premature
the mountain bike. If you wanted to go offbut some simpler mechanism enclosed in
competition. Even before Pong signed on
road before the midseventies , the best alpart of the frame. The frame itself would be
with Cannondale, his strategy had relied
ternative was a cyclocross bike, essentially
a monocoque construction: Using CNC maon stealth.
a beefy road bike with wider tires. But in
chining (for "computer numerical control"),
He'd initially toyed with the idea of
1974 a group of hell -for-leather riders in
Pong would create a lightweight, hollow alubuilding wooden prototypes. These would
Marin County developed what one of
minum shell whose thin skin would bear
have been fully working proof-of-concept
them dubbed the "clunker": a
models disguised as works of art. At
fat-tired newsboy bike cusi
$10,000 apiece, he knew they would
tomized with multiple-speed
have a limited market, but by selling
gearing, drum brakes, and
a couple hundred of them to collecthumb shifters. Bike builders
tors he figured he might raise enough
Gary Fisher, Joe Breeze, and
capital to go into production with the
Tom Ritchey were among the
real item. As laughable as that stratepioneers in this movement,
gy may sound, Pong believed it
and their radical ideas led to
would work. To his sensibilities, the
today's 25-pound, 24-speed,
plan also had an appealingly Homerfull-suspension machines.
ic twist: The wooden models, like
Cannondale came to Pong
the Trojan horse, would have
not because it wanted to refine
seemed innocuous. They would
the basic theme yet again, to
have been a subterfuge, a feint in the
shave a few ounces or improve
wrong direction in order to lead the
performance incrementally. It
competition astray.
was looking for another great
"Trying to sneak a $450 massleap forward, for someone not
market bike into stores past Shihound by the past.
mano would require a Manhattan
"There's a part of me that
Project sort of operation," says Pong.
would like to go way, way out,"
"If they knew what you were up to,
Pong explains, "but history
it would be like a high-school footshows that designers who took
ball team going up against the Green
this route didn't make a dime.
Looking for a way off the cow path : Cannondale's
Bay Packers."
I'm interested in what came
Dick Resch (above) and Joe Montgomery
before, but not controlled by
PONG AND CANNONDALE PRESIDENT
it." If that is one lesson he has
Joe Montgomery met at the 1992 Ingleaned, another is that conterbike Expo in Anaheim, California,
sumers will lust after well-dewhere Pong was showing his line of
signed products that are easy
breathtakingly expensive high-perto understand. "You do not
formance CNC components. (At
want people to look at your
$650, a crankset alone costs what a
bike and say, `What is it?"' says
midline bicycle does.) Pong's booth
Pong. "You want them to say,
was unadorned: a ten-by-ten-foot
`I want it.' Skooks and I are
space with a table and two chairs; no
very good at doing that. You
carpet, banners, video displays, rock
might call us the pornogramusic, or hard-bodied models-in
phers of the bicycle industry."
neon spandex. Pong had brought a
Pong's ultimate objectivestack of sales brochures dense with
and he had decided on it prior
tech-talk, but they were unnecesto forming the alliance with
sary. People coveted his products.
Cannondale-was to develop
Exquisitely machined, the hollow,
a mass-market bike so obvimuscular-looking cranks were reously superior to the average
markably stiff, resulting in no lost
Huffy or Murray that the most
pedaling energy, and the whole
technologically unsophisticatcrankset assembly was about a halfed buyer could immediately
pound lighter than Shimano's topsee that it was a vastly better
end model. The crowd around the
value for only slightly more money. The
most of the stress, as an airplane fuselage
booth was so deep that whenever Montbike would be as proletarian as the Volkswadoes. In short, the bike would delight congomery walked by, he could barely see
gen and more user-friendly than the Macinsumers, jolt the industry, and be entirely
Pong. Finally, Pong crawled under the table
tosh. His product would be freed from forAmerican-made.
and, still on his knees, offered his hand,
eign suppliers like the giant Shimano
Profits from sales of such a Volksbike quipping, "Hi, Joe. Is this the proper posiCorporation, because Pong would design his
would be enormous, hundreds of millions tion to meet the president of Cannondale%"
own components, with an idiotproof and
of dollars by Pong's reckoning. But the obYong and Montgomery, a trim, dapper
48
JANUARY
1994
•
OU'T'SIDE
53-year-old, struck an immediate bond. The
two men had a mutual love of aviation and
shared philosophies about risk-taking and
the feasibility of an all-American hike. Touring the show together, they glimpsed each
other's lives. After two hours they parted
without making any specific plans, but later,
when Cannondale technology-development
chief Dick Resch visited Whidbey Island,
talk turned serious. Cannondale would manufacture Pong's components under license,
freeing him to proceed on the mountain bike
project. "As an entrepreneur-and this is
both a good and bad trait-I'm the quintessential optimist," explains Montgomery. "If
I like somebody and they tell me they can do
something, I believe them."
If Montgomery had learned anything
since founding Cannondale, it was to follow
his hunches. "If I'd just listened to my bowels," he says, "I'd be so much farther ahead."
A keen outdoorsman and an incorrigible tinkerer himself, he grew up working in his father's glove factory in Ohio, watching in dismay as job after job was exported overseas.
At age 19 he dropped out of Ohio State to
crew on sailboats, but in the late sixties he
landed in New York City, where he worked
as a securities analyst. Leisure industries
were on the move then, and the bike business struck him as especially ripe. Its technology was "pretty archaic," Montgomery
recalls; as he saw it, biking's future lay in aluminum frames with oversize tubes, which
are stiffer and therefore more efficient than
frames of conventional steel. Using cash
from the sale of a saloon he co-owned on the
Upper West Side, he started Cannondale in
1971, setting up shop above a pickle factory
near the Cannondale, Connecticut, train station. The company's first product was a hike
trailer called the Bugger, a name whose carnal connotations so offended one British
woman that she placed a transatlantic phone
call to castigate the naive Montgomery. The
catalog copy, which read, "you really can't
feel it back there," had her foaming.
Cannondale subsisted on making Buggers, bike bags, and camping gear until
1983, when it introduced an aluminum
touring bike. The next year it brought out
its first mountain bike, and sales took off.
(In 1984 only about half a million people
rode mountain bikes; now the number exceeds 40 million.) "Today, as a $105-milliona-year operation, the company prides itself
on innovation. Its $3,500 Super V
3000 has been compared to a Lamborghini. Not much about the
dual-suspension frame looks
conventional: It has no top tube; a
shock absorber is built into the
steerer tube; and instead of the usual
OUTSIDE • JANUARY 1994
rigid rear triangle, it has a fat swing-arm with
thin aluminum walls that sound like a beer
can when tapped. The Super V could pass
for a motocross bike; all that's missing is the
gas tank and engine.
As unorthodox as the Super V is, it still
doesn't hint at the company's ultimate direction, which is away from frames made of
tubing. Cutting and welding tubes is a production bottleneck, because each modeland each size of each model-requires different tube lengths and miter angles. Since
1983, Cannondale has slashed the assembly
time on its frames from three weeks to four
days, in part by using computer-guided
laser cutters. A much leaner operation than
it once was, it's looking for ways to improve
efficiency still further. Which is where
CNC technology comes into the picture.
From Cannondale's point of view, CNC
manufacturing with aluminum, which had
already been embraced by the aerospace,
automotive, and even appliance industries,
was a logical next play in a game plan to
control its own destiny. In the mideighties
the company made a deliberate decision to
build all of its aluminum frames in its own
Bedford, Pennsylvania, factory rather than
farm the work out to Taiwan. The gamble
The next thing in
I is why runners are geeks about weight:
For every ounce laced to your feet, you
lug an extra 550 pounds over the course of a
five-mile jaunt. With this in mind , Reebok's
highly secretive Advanced Concepts Group,
an offshoot of its R&D department that
designs some of the company ' s products
for the distant future , has developed the
Pump Fury , a running shoe that's 25 percent
lighter than more conventional trainers.
Predictably , the most striking thing
about the Fury isn ' t what' s been built into
it, but what ' s been left out-such as the
middle third of the midsole . The thinking
is simple: When you run , you push
off with the toe and land on
the heel, but the middle
part of the sole doesn't do
much. So why put
heavy cushioning
there?
paid off, and Cannondale became hugely
successful; it's currently the fifth largest
American hike maker in terms of revenue,
with growing sales in Europe and Japan,
where American products hold great cachet. (Overseas, the company's bikes are
perceived to be "as American as California
or cowboy boots," according to Dan A]loway, a Cannondale vice-president.)
Montgomery's hope was that eventually
CNC manufacturing would free his company from reliance on many domestic and
foreign parts suppliers, possibly even the
all-powerful Shimano. The Japanese firm
dominates the world market in derailleurs
and other components, and because of the
imperial control it wields over the U.S. bike
industry, it has been the butt of veiled
Japan-bashing. While a CNC bike project
would not be driven by xenophobia, there
was a feeling among the few who knew
about it that such a product could put Cannondale squarely ahead in what the company's officers were calling the "renaissance
of American manufacturing."
IT WAS DICK RESCH WHO USHERED IN THE AGE
of high-technology manufacturing at Cannondale. Formerly a religion professor at
running
Leaving out this material subtracts 1.5
ounces from each shoe . And after testing a
prototype on the streets , I found that the
funky sole didn't compromise stability.
The Fury is also missing laces and, for
that matter , most of an upper . A skeletonlike bladder, inflated with the Pump button
or with a disposable CO2 cartridge, holds
your foot in place , so there isn't a need for
much more material . The design makes for
an odd-looking shoe ; the Fury could pass for
bare innards rather than finished product.
We won' t know until its debut in March
whether this shoe will be as groundbreaking as Nike's 1979 Tailwind - the first running shoe with an air cushion in the midsole. But apparently the $125
Fury is just the tip of the
iceberg in minimalist
athletic footwear. Reebok says it has similar
designs for crosstraining and basketball shoes on the
drawing board now,
to hit the streets
later this year.
-JOEL SILVERMAN
49
Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, he is a
comfortable, balding man whose avuncular
manner and warmth suggest a theologian.
But Resch also has a sharply analytical
mind, and he jumped to business in
midlife, after earning a degree from Yales
School of Organization and Management.
He arrived at Cannondale with a fresh eye
in 1988, just when the company was trying
to boost production. Resch recognized that
the manufacturing process could be refined
only so far before the product had to be
fundamentally redesigned. "It's like asphalting a cow path," he says. "It's a complicated, crooked trail that just gets the
bumps paved over, when maybe the road
ought to be straightened out. But ever
since the first cow went down that path,
every other one has, too."
As an example of bovine thinking, he
offers the spoked wheel. "It's a stupid idea
for a manufacturer," Resch explains, "because each wheel must he trued-spoke
by spoke-by a robotic machine." How
much faster to make a wheel that's true to
begin with? What if the whole bike were
reconceived in this way? Better yet, what if
it were thought of as a single entity instead
of an assemblage of components?
In the Pongs, Rcsch and the other Cannondale executives believed that they had
stumbled across a double-threat team. Alex
wowed them with his imagination, manufacturing savvy, and articulate spiel;
Skooks, with his skill at realizing his father's designs. Although the company's
plans and Pong's were not entirely congruent, both sides saw that they were exploring the recreational potential
of CNC.
"No one makes tubed
bikes with as developed a
technology as we do , but before anybody catches up with
us, Alex will take us to the
next step in the process,"
Resch says . " His genius is
that he thinks whole: what
the bike needs to do and how
to execute it, layering in a creative level of manufacturability. He doesn't say, `Make
the process of making wheels
more efficient .' He says, 'Skip
the problem and rethink what
From
the wheel is.,,,
After their meeting on Whidbey Island,
Resch flew home thinking of Pong as an
"afterburner" whose ingenuity could propel Cannondalc into a more efficient future. The Pongs would supply creativity
and CNC experience; Cannondale would
provide the wherewithal. The personal
50
chemistry seemed right,
too. Never mind that
Pong had never designed
a bicycle before-Joe
Montgomery's bowels
told him that the venture
was worth the gamble. If
Cannondale wanted off
the cow path, perhaps
Alex Pong could help
lead the way.
Having committed to
the kind of future that
Pong's dream bike represented, Cannondale bought a $400,000
Matsura MAIM 600 CNC machine and
had it delivered to Whidbey Island, where
it was one of three CNC machines in the
shop. Another had already been installed
at the factory in Bedford, for making CNC
bike parts, and now both parties could go
to work in earnest. But apart from the
Pong family, no one outside top Cannondale management knew that the CNC
bike was in the works. The first several
hundred models were expected to sell for
between $5,000 and $7,000. The intention was not, however, to add a limited-production bike to Cannondale's line,
but to use the bike as what Resch called a
"test-bed for new technologies." Montgomery had enough faith in Pong that he
bet his son, Scott, a Cannondale vicepresident, that production models of the
new bike would be shipped by March 1,
1994, or he'd eat his hat.
There was one problem everyone
chose to ignore: Alex Pong has never op-
"Design for a design
firm is an orderly process,"
Pong explains. "But I
stare at the page until
my eyes bleed. "
" noodle" to metal : at work on Fat Boy
crated on the same clock as the rest of the
business world.
ONCE ALEX PONG FACETIOUSLY SUGGESTED
calling his family-run business Chaos Components, because it had a backlog of about
4,000 orders. On a good day, they might
ship ten cranksets. Some days, none went
out. Last year, they averaged three a day,
according to Pong's daughter Polly, a 21year-old beauty who is engaged to the
professional hike racer Alan Ball. "Espousing a business plan tends to close out the
magic," shrugs her father.
Officially, the Pongs' operation goes by
the name Magic Motorcycle Company.
Unmarked as it is, the barn-size building
appears to he part of Hanson's lumberyard
next door. Passing by, one might expect the
structure to be filled with two-by-fours and
roof trusses, certainly not $600,000 worth of
sophisticated machining equipment. Nor
would it occur to you that anyone lives
there, unless perhaps you walked around
back and noticed the elaborate garden,
where raised beds are spilling over with
flowers and vegetables. There, on a sunny
day, you might find Sally Pong tending her
tomatoes and basil.
At the opposite end of the building, in
the shop, a hike rack holds a fleet of expensive avant-garde bicycles, among
them a Cannondale Super V 3000
and a couple of slick aluminum road
bikes tricked out with titan iurn doodads and Magic cranks. A prototype
motocross bike, on which Skooks
won the 1989 Barstow-to-Las Vegas
race, is even more eye-catching. Its
front shock absorbers attach to the
huh on only one side, as does the
swing-arm in the rear end-a clever
setup that allows the wheels to be
changed in seconds.
The company was incorporated in
1989 with an aim of building an allAmerican dirt bike, but the investment capital fizzled, so for grocery
money Pong and Skooks started
making CNC bicycle components . Before
that , they'd been partners in a venture to
make a lightweight, high-efficiency radial
aircraft engine. In 1984 they demonstrated
a prototype at the Oshkosh , Wisconsin, airshow; the engine weighed 45 pounds and
produced 30 horsepower throttled down to
JANtAR) 1994 • Ot'TSIDE
2,000 revolutions per minute . (A conventional engine with similar power would
weigh, according to Pong , at least two and a
half times as much .) But the project fell so
far behind schedule that the nervous backers flew from Florida to Whidbey Island,
closed Pong's bank accounts , had his
phone shut off, and padlocked the shop's
doors. " NVe were hours away from completion," says Pong.1 ' he investors confiscated
his unfinished drawings, took them to Singapore, sank another $600,000 into the project, and ended up with a dud.
"Design for a design firm is an orderly
process," Pong explains about his unpredictable schedule . " I design like I write"Pong dabbled at writing crime novels in his
twenties -" I stare at the page until my
eyes bleed."
By the middle of last summer , design
work on the new bike was proceeding
apace. But lines on paper do not a mountain
bike make . To turn them into aluminum,
thousands upon thousands of specifications
had to be calculated for every contour of the
frame . Skooks then had to translate this
galaxy of values into the computer language
of the CNC machine. Magic Motorcycle
also had obligations: Customers wanted
their cranksets . Bills had to he paid. Suddenly it was September.
"We will not arrive in Las Vegas
with a prototype," Pong said when I
phoned to arrange a meeting. "This
won't be like one of those concept
cars at auto shows that you never
see again. The bike will be ready
to ride. We'll be there with our
order pads."
That said, Pong orbited off
into "man's search for truth,"
Murphy's I,aw, Buckminster Fuller , the Seattle
Opera, and the Declaration of Independence . " Phis is the loneliest journey in the
world ," he said . "What I do, I can only do
myself. It's a solo journey, and you go alone."
downstairs, the wonderbike's wheels were
going to he mated to single-sided struts instead of forks. Each strut worked something like a skier's leg: Its spring-loaded
pivot point functioned as a knee, the trailing link as a calf, and the hub as an ankle.
In theory, with four inches of travel at front
and rear the suspension would suck up
bumps like a freestyle skier pounding
The next thing in
he little question of how to stop has
been plaguing novice in-line skaters
ever since Rollerblade introduced its original in 1980. The problem: The conventional heel brake requires advanced footwork
and balance , which can be developed only
through lots of skating. That means learning to stop can come only a considerable
time after learning to go. It
stands to reason
that a more userfriendly brake
would open up the
market to thousands of scrapeand bruise-wary
beginners . At least
that's what the
R&D de-
T
back inadvertently and you'll screech
to an unwelcome stop. - JON LOWDEN
OUTSIDE
•
immense CNC machines were curiously
idle, and the shop seemed deserted. Alex
and Skooks were upstairs in the loft,
mulling over the brake rotor snafu. After
resolving the problem, Alex settled into his
sparsely furnished office, with its lumpy
old couch, two filing cabinets, and homemade drafting table. As a preview of coming attractions, he could offer only a computer-generated rendering of the bike, a
side profile labeled "Mountain Bike, Dual
Suspension" and dated July 17, 1993. As
partments at Rollerblade and the Italian
company Nordica think . Their top boot designers and engineers have been collaborating on the problem.
The fruit of their labor: Rollerblade's
new Active Brake Technology, ABT for
short. The jury is still out-a prototype
hasn ' t been available for testing -- but if
the braking system works well , industry
insiders say it will be the most important
thing to happen to in-line skates since the
invention of the skates themselves. To
stop, all you have to do is roll your braking
foot forward.
For having taken so long to develop, the
device , which will be available on five of
Rollerblade ' s models this year, is surprisingly simple : An arm runs along the back
of the boot from heel to cuff. Just roll the
boot forward and your calf puts pressure
on the cuff, activating the lever and pressing the brake to the pavement . All four
wheels remain firmly on the ground, and
the skater remains in a balanced stance.
break beginners of bad habits: Lean
with Skooks's radical off-road motorcycle
Island, with five days left till showtime, the
skating
The ABT system is also a good way to
through a mogul run.
Pong described the frame as a "cruciform" shape. On paper, it looked vaguely
like a child's drawing of the Star of Bethlehem, only cocked at a 45-degree angle.
Being modular, the suspension would be
easy to remove from the frame for
transportation, and if one of the three pieces
making up the frame were damaged in a
wreck, it could be replaced instead of junking the whole thing. Every screw on the
bike would be interchangeable, so that only
one tool would be necessary for field repairs.
And all of its 12 bearings would he the same
size, too. Their price, $90 apiece, accounted
for part of the bike's projected price tag.
Economies of scale in the mass-production
phase would reduce that, but using hearings
similar to those in the Bradley Fighting Ve-
WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE SHOP ON WHIDBEY
hicle and the Boeing 757 seemed to be an
extravagance that Pong might have forgone.
For now, the bike would come with Shimano XTR shifters and derailleurs. Pong
still needed to develop his Magic drivctrain,
which he boasted would blow the Japanese
giant out of the water. "There won't be any
reasonable basis of comparison," he said.
And how would his creation perform?
"The handling will be different than anything anyone has ever experienced," Pong
said. "The idea behind the hike is that it
reduces the flex and torque of the frame
and wheels , which absorb data the rider
needs to control the bike." He called the
data " signal" ; the flex, " noise."
"On a flexible hike, by the time the
rider gets the signal he's past the bump and
has no way to control the bike," Pon- explained. "Then the flex starts to unwind,
and he tries to do something about it. By
then it's too late. Riders call this `f%icc planting."' Pong's bike would provide mostly
signal, very little noise.
"And how do you know that?" I queried.
"Because two and two still equal four,"
Pong replied , mildly exasperated that I
should ask.
By 2 A. I., his divine connection appar-
JANUARY
1994
51
ently severed, Yong tottered back to his
bedroom for a few hours of rest. Alone in
the shop, Skooks stayed up to finish "hogging" the bike's suspension links out of
thick plates of aluminum. The guts of a
CNC machine are its pneumatically controlled cutters, which slice metal in three
planes. With enough skill at programming,
you can direct the machine to carve a bust
of Bo Diddley or Bill Clinton. The cuts
have to be made in just the right sequence,
no mean feat when the process involves
thousands of steps. Orchestrating the construction of the suspension links alone consumed several hours.
Before starting on the parts, Skooks pondered his father's drawings at length to formulate a plan of attack. It finally came to
him in a rush, like a videocassette on fastforward. Once he had rehearsed the sequence of cuts on paper, he stored the long
string of computer code on disk. Then he
made a dry run, punched some modifications into the MAM's keypad, and finally,
closing the housing door, pressed the start
button. Cascades of milky, oil-based coolant
erupted inside as the whining cutters bored
into the aluminum, sending up a shower of
slivers and shards. When the first cut on one
trailing link was complete, he checked the
results, closed the door, and initiated the
second pass. "This is not hard," he said,
"just tedious."
And so it went through the night, until
4 A.NI. At daybreak, when his father trudged
The next thing in
D ownhill ski boots should be rigid, telemark boots must flex, and never the
twain shall meet . Right? Well , not necessarily. Inventor Russell Rainey has designed a boot that converts easily from
being rigid enough for downhill skiing to
being flexible enough for telemarking or
mountaineering . (Don't look for it yet; production isn't slated to begin until this fall.)
The key , says Rainey , is a mechanical arm
that links the boot 's rigid cuff to its flexible
toe. As the boot flexes, so does the arm.
however , with the flip of a switch , the turn
of a dial , or the press of a button - the secretive Rainey isn't telling which - the arm
can be locked , and the boot becomes what
it was not: stiff.
A former outdoor educator who says he
started tinkering because he'd grown tired
of his closet being cluttered with footwear,
Rainey claims that his new boot , set in telemark mode, flexes better than plastic telly
52
up the stairs to his office
yawning and rubbing his
eyes, the two suspension
links were attached to
the wheels, all shiny and
bright.
Pong remembered an
epiphany he'd had at a
trade show: "I suddenly
ON SEPTEMBER 16, THE
night before Interbikc,
the Pongs boarded a late
flight from Seattle to Las
Vegas, carrying a large
gray Samsonite suitcase
and two unlabeled flat
cartons. Refusing to let the baggage out of
their sight for a moment , they had gone so
far as to buy a separate seat for it , so that
when they presented their tickets at the
gate, they were traveling as a threesome:
Alex Pong , Skooks Pong, and someone
named Box Pong.
I had left them alone in the final stretch
at the insistence of Joe Montgomery, who
feared that Pong would become distracted
and dribble away the final hours philosophizing instead of working. When I met
the Pongs at the airport in Las Vegas, their
bulging suitcase felt like it contained
bricks. They had gone virtually sleepless
for the last three days, but time had run
out. The frame was solid, not a monocoque: 70 pounds of aluminum sculpture,
without springs in the suspension or a
crankset. That afternoon , while they had
been furiously machining the cranks, the
saw that I was king of
all I surveyed."
skiing
boots, thanks to a lighter material in the
toe. In downhill mode, he says, it 's as rigid
as conventional alpine ski boots . Another
clever feature is interchangeable cuffs-a
high cuff for downhill skiing or ice climbing,
when more support is needed , and a lower
one for mountaineering and backcountry
nordic skiing . The only other detail Rainey
will leak is that the boot has a lugged sole
made of sticky rubber , for better traction
while walking.
Rainey, who's being funded in part by
ski-industry giant Lange , is developing the
boot far from prying eyes , at his workshop
in Wyoming 's Tetons . ( lie's so secretive
that he won't let anyone see even the
roughest of prototypes.) Cost is an unknown , as is the boot's name, but you can
bet it'll be cheaper than buying three
pairs -one for downhill skiing, one for
telemarking , and one for mountaineering.
JANUARY
-BOB WOODWARD
1994
.
MAM 600 had broken down. Pong had
tried to finish the job manually on an old
Bridgeport turning machine, but it was
hopeless. Staring in despair at the clock,
he'd said, "That's it. We're done."
At midnight, they assembled the bike
for the Montgomerys and Resch in Pong's
hotel room. On the way up in the elevator,
the group exchanged pleasantries with
Keizo Shimano, the president himself.
"Do you think we should have invited him
up for a look?" Scott Montgomery quipped.
Despite Pong's disappointment, the Montgomerys were entranced as the bike took
shape. They got down on the floor like kids
watching their new Christmas train set
being put together. Even if the bike did
weigh a ton and sagged springless-the
lunar rover as low rider-the prototype
was stunning.
But what to name it? Early on, Pong had
wickedly suggested unveiling the bike on
August 6, the anniversary of the bombing
of Hiroshima, and calling it Fat Boy or the
Bomb. Resch, the voice of reason, was now
lobbying for Super V 4000: "There's something nice about saying, `Yes, ho-hum, this
is our new bike. It is an advanced prototype. We will deliver it this year."'
Super V 4000 it would be. Joe Montgomery liked the ring of it. He stood up
and stretched. Before leaving, he donned
his jaunty moss-green fedora, the one he
had promised to eat if he lost the bet with
Scott.
"HELLO. THIS IS THE CANNONDALE SUPER V
4000. It will weigh 20 pounds, cost five to
seven thousand dollars and be ready for delivery by March. Its front suspension has
four inches of travel..."
Mark Andrews, a self-described Magic
Motorcycle groupie, recited this refrain robotically, every 15 minutes from 9 A.M. to
6 P.. i., without a lunch break, for four days.
During these hours, his only sustenance
was honey water, which he sucked through
a hose running from a backpacklike bladder called a Camelbak. Pong's creation,
OUTSIDE
e
now hearing Cannondale decals, was elevated behind Andrews on a stand, where
the passing masses could see it clearly. At
moments the four-way intersection at the
Cannondale exhibit resembled Times
Square on New Year's Eve.
Still, the jam-up was minor compared to
the crush around Greg LeMond whenever
he put in an appearance for his sponsors.
Or the throng that gathered to watch the
stunt bikers looping through the air in the
back of the 600,000-square-foot convention center. Or the furtive knot ogling the
pneumatic blonde in the Camelbak booth,
whose marathon NordicTrack workout
(while continuously nursing from her own
plastic hose) rivaled Hampton's valiant
performance.
This was, after all, a trade show, with the
emphasis on show. There were more than
900 exhibitors in the hall. To get noticed,
you had to have a better hustle than the
next guy, or a better mousetrap. There was
no shortage of either, although the pitch
words and acronyms flew from virtually
every booth: metal-matrix composite,
OCLV, CODA, elastomer dampening,
gription ... There was enough titanium present to pave Las Vegas's Strip, some of the
precious metal recycled from the military
stockpile in the former Soviet Union:
swords into seatposts.
Strolling the aisles, Pong was reminded
of an epiphany he'd had at an earlier Interbike show: "I suddenly saw that I was king
of all I surveyed," he recalled, admitting
his arrogance. But Dick Resch disagreed.
"There are plenty of clever ideas here. It's
not true what Alex says about being alone
with all the new ideas."
The tinkerers had been hard at workdevising microchip-controlled transmissions, new suspension systems, everlighter alloys for components and frames.
The profusion of new products on display
was evidence that the mountain hike, a
uniquely American creation, was indeed
fueling a small-scale manufacturing renaissance.
By one account Pong's bike was "the
juice of the show," although its reception
was mixed. Scot Nicol, a correspondent for
the bike racing journal VeloNes and owner
of Ibis Cycles Inc., was impressed with its
suspension, which he thought would prevent an energy-robbing bugaboo called
pedal-induced actuation. "It seems
they've done everything right," he remarked. Designer Robert Egger of Specialized's S-Works, the bicycle company's
research-and-development boutique,
called the hike, opaquely, a Model T.
"That's not to put them down," said
OUTSIDE • JANUARY 1994
Egger, who favors black clothing and organic shapes for his far-out concept bikes.
"They're working on function; I'm working more on form. I'd like to put a nice
body on the bike. I take my designs from
nature-soft, rounded." Endurance rider
and triathlete Chris Kostman described it
as "the ultimate Rambo-yuppie statement. People who pay cash for Range
The next thing in
Boardsailors have a saying: "When
you're planin ', you ain ' t complainin'."
Thanks to the latest design in sailboards,
planing ( and hence having a good attitude)
should no longer be hard to do. The reason
is in the nose : not having one , that is. The
new no - nose boards , which are narrow at
the bow and thick at the stern , are noticeably faster and more maneuverable than
any other type of production sailboard.
No one knows for sure who invented the
no-nose board . Some trace it to a European
custom board maker named Marco Copello, who started fashioning similar boards
for sailors on the World Cup circuit two
years ago . Actually , the physics behind the
design is pretty basic : Less mass at the
Rovers will want that bike." Former
Olympic road racer John Howard liked the
aerodynamic efficiency of a monocoque
frame, while Softridc's Ivor Allsop, a maverick designer himself, thought it impractical "from a physics standpoint." "People
have worked on monocoque construction
for years," the venerable Allsop said. "I
don't think its the most efficient way to get
a high strength-to-weight ratio."
Other crowd comments overheard:
"An exercise in futility..."
"A totally CNC bike! Look at that suspension..."
"The thing weighs a ton, man..."
"Hit a bump and kiss a grand goodbye..."
"That's the guy who designed it. He's
brilliant; he's weird. Whoa! Check this out:
His son's name is Skooks. So what are v_ ou
girls doing later?"
In the end, Cannondale took more than
a hundred orders for the bike. Resch ex-
pected that number to double in 1994,
though the tinkering had just begun. "We
don't have a proven idea yet," he said. "Is a
trailing link suspension useful on a bike?
I'm not sure. Will it win a race? We'll see.
We have a lot to do before we have a bike
that wins races and sells like popcorn.
"In some ways it's not all that revolutionary," he continued. "It's still a bike-
windsurfing
front of the board, where you don't stand,
means more mass near the back, where
you can control it. As a result, it's easier to
make faster, more fluid turns and to maintain your speed throughout a jibe. The new
design also reduces the board 's resistance
and leaves less up front to catch waves.
Not since the 1984 introduction of the
camber inducer - the plastic hinge that
forces the sail into a more efficient winglike
shape - has an innovation been embraced
by the entire windsurfing industry. This
spring , virtually every manufacturer will
be selling boards in the new silhouette.
Says one , " I can't think of a new board that
we're going to design that's not going to be
a no-nose." -HENRY GODROIJT
geek bike. As radical as it is, there are solutions that it doesn't touch: antilock brakes,
shifters that aren't complicated, all sorts of
human physiology problems like aching
necks and sore butts. AM'e're still making
hikes for racers, who go like hell downhill
and shift by second nature."
For his part, Pong was as brash as ever.
But behind his cocky front was a well of
uncertainty. Had he divined the future of
bicycling? Or was his brainchild just another contraption that would be tossed into the
dustbin of design history?
"WW'hether history will be kind to me or
shove me into a backwater is hard to say,"
he mused. "But I have a powerfully developed sense of optimism that it will he
kind."
re,
:liichae/,licRae is a contributing editor of
Outside. His col%tion ojtravve/ essays,
Continental Drifter, was recently
published by Lyons & Burford
53