Spooky Bikes

[suspectdevice]

Mickey, got a history lesson from one of zee german engineers the other night over beers about FTW, Yeti, Schwinn etc. It ruled.

I grew up in a really, really cool time in the bike world and was super lucky for it.
The people around me all knew what they were doing and knew other people who knew what they were doing.
Everything was happening so quickly too. Our DH bikes started the season with 4" of travel and ended them with 7" at the end of the year and I literally watched the progression in bmx frame design happen as noticed the downtubes I was cutting getting bigger.

When I volunteered for Shimano at races I got to bed in hub-roller brakes and play with air shifters and dual rotor disc brakes with under-seat mounted radiators.
I raced 220 people for the Jr. X national XC championships at Mt. Snow. 220fuckingjuniors. XC mtb racing... After the 90's it died. XC mtb racing used to be a profession. Now it's a sad little money pit with a bunch of geeks from shit like XC skiing(I looking at you New England) instead of skateboarding and motocross. No more derelicts. Bummer.
I got to meet all sorts of cool people as a young teenager that had no qualms about telling me I was wrong too.

The contacts I made as a kid and the contacts I've inherited from OG people like FTW and Chris Herting and Steve Boehmke and Zap and Captain Dondo and people who got downsized out of the industry when Taiwan took over and most importantly, the people from the NORBA circuit have been the welfare system that's kept me from being homeless(much) ever since I re-started the company.
I have so many friends who've called in so many favors to keep me from getting punched in the neck or aplogizing for my mistakes that I can't say it enough times;
Thanks adults!

The image below has kept me alive too;

When I first restarted the company I was pretty uncomfortable parlaying on our '90's cache to do lots of promotion and stuff since, except for the bikes that 3D built for me, all of my stuff was being made by Sapa and the whole narrative was a little too shallow.

There were the full page pictures and stories I got in Bike and Dirt and Decline when I first restarted the company and a few more pictures in Decline since then but now that Spooky is me and FTW working full-time under the same roof I feel like I can just relax, be myself and let Spooky ooze back into where I've always wanted it to be, MTB racing.

Over the last 2 weeks we've signed 2 pretty darn good female pro XC racers(a former Olympian!) and a female BMX/gravity pro(Collegiate champion in DS and BMX and #6 nationally in girls pro). One of the XC ladies is a good CX racer, I'd love to add one more mtb/cx double dipper to round it out. Even though we're way too late for decent sponsorship for CX season(and half a year late for XC) I'm holding out hope that I can get them as much support as I can for CX season. We'll never be able to pay their expenses but a title sponsor on the other hand...

Frank is putting in dozens of hours to build these ladies race bikes. We've already built a sizing proto for one of the ladies and fedex'd it to CO so I can get feedback before we go ahead with her steel and aluminum frames. 2 frames, identical geometry. I'm going to find out what feels the best for someone who weighs 100 pounds and I'm going to keep it in mind until the next bike we build for someone who is 5'2". 100 pounds.
I'm working to have custom tubes made for the one that weighs 90 pounds and have worked the previously mentioned connections to put together a full build for her bike. She's my mom's favorite female pro racer ever and FTW used to build her team bikes in her heyday. The entire network has been activated. Gravy is building her wheels and doing the final assembly of her race bike, just like the last bikes she had before she retired. It's a good story and i'm really hoping we can leverage it into a bit more media coverage this year.

It took 5 days from the time I signed the bmx girl until she recieved a new custom 20" race bike. Compared to this time last year when I didn't have anything in stock to sell and hard LOTS of trouble getting custom frames out quickly this spring has been a breath of fresh air. It's still really, really hard though.
BIKE RACING, woohoo!

At the same time I'm working with one of the UK MTB video makers on web edits of people in the UK and US getting sideways on 650b hardtails.
The UK media WILL give us coverage, because the videos are going to be AWESOME.

That's the sort of stuff that I should be doing full-time. The pain in my ass that's been the last 3 years has kept me from doing anything fun on the racing front or meaningful on the marketing and promotions front. I'm glad that I've suffered so much over the years and am riding out the storm because all I really want to do is win races and get loose and gnarly on hardtails. I always wonder what would happen if I aplied for a job doing what I'm doing somewhere that has money
I'm clearly pretty good at what I can do given the budget I have to work with, but I also wonder how well falling on my face time again and reflects the abilities I may or may not have when I'm not under the volcano, overworked and out of my mind.

You can have a pretty long lifespan in the bike industry though...

The dude who sold me my first bike shorts is the brand director for Rapha USA now ferchrissakes! He started at a bike shop, then repped for Raleigh, then repped for Shimano, then moved inside at Shimano, then moved to biggest desk at Shimano, then moved to the IMBA board and then moved to the (uneeded) marketing position at Chris King.
Those long arcs are so common in the industry, they are the bike industry.

Specialized just hired one of the guys who ran GT's Project'96 Superbike program to build aluminum frames in Morgan Hill for more money than he's seen in a real long time. They offered the job to other aluminum frame builders who ran factories from the '90s too. From talking to those guys they were suprised as hell to hear from Specialized, surprised that anyone remembered them, surprised that their knowledge would become valuable again, and likely suprised as hell to get job offers from the company that's always been the enemy

Paul Turner, the founder of Rockshox is now a full-time employee at X-Fusion too.
Pretty neat. The mtb industry people from the '90s will never die. They will just rack up frequent flier miles and passport stamps.

[suspectdevice]

Awesome Friday night news:
I just accomplished my adolescent life-fantasy.

The budget for the team just got upped-and extended into a three year contract and the day to day operations will be taken care of by a dude with lots of national championships. His brothers are pretty fast too. Things are going so quickly. Proposals are flying left and right, last minute outside-industry money grubbing has already happened in person. I don't have to do anything at all except make sure that these guys have the best bikes. Someone else is taking care of the rest.

Gloryfucking-hallelujah, a Factory Mountainbike Team. A rider good enough that we can sustain other rides solely by the light cast by her diminutive shadow. In the mtb world in the US at the moment a few thousands of dollars worth of cash seems like a mirage, but grinding the organ on non-endemic sponsors will likely work in this case.

So fucking stoked. All I've ever wanted to do is go racing. Who cares how shitty my life is if we're building sick factory race bikes and winning races and getting good PR. I need that.

I solidly stand behind my belief that bike racing can sell bicycles and build a brand. It's been done before and I'm gonna do it again and it's going to be fucking awesome and we're going to win a shit ton of championships and give unknown riders a boost. I'll still live in a dingy apt and dodge my college loans but we're gonna sell a lot more bicycles in 2013, that's for sure.

In all honesty ever since I was 11 years old my central goal in life(that goal replaced astronaut, fwiw) has been to win as many MTB national championship medals in any way I can. I never won one myself(I'm going to though, this year, in dual slalom. bitches) but I've helped a lot of other people achieve that goal with bikes or coaching or love and the small bit of exposure and momentum this might give us will generate demand for more awesome bikes that I can give to deserving racers... and they're going to win and everyone is going to see that riding domestically made tig-welded aluminum bikes designed by a passionate lunatic and fabricated by some hillbilly in Vermont is the best way to win races week in, week out, season after season.

The depth of my happiness right now is hard to convey if you can't see my fingers quivering as I type.

[the bottle ride]

Mickey- I am curious, since you mentioned going to nationals, are you a tubeless guy? Is tubeless good for DH racing or SL?

(you are like the google of mtb stuff- it was worth a shot to hear your thoughts)

[suspectdevice]

Mickey- I am curious, since you mentioned going to nationals, are you a tubeless guy? Is tubeless good for DH racing or SL?

(you are like the google of mtb stuff- it was worth a shot to hear your thoughts)

Tubeless tires are only suitable for recreational riding or recreational XC racing. Even then for racing the light stuff on an elite level you need to glue the beads to the rims to keep them from burping. That is a fact, at least in my circle of friends. Many people will disagree with me. My peer group tends to make more stuff fail than other people. Even the XC racers. Many, many people will disagree with me, but it's 100% my experience.

I don't think that tubeless technology will get to the point where it is suitable for extremely aggressive riding and still be competitive on weight. Tubes for gravity racers and tubulars for XC are going to be it, although Maxxis and Enve had some tubular DH setups in the pits at Sea Otter.

The demands of professional racing are just too great to risk the benefits of tubeless(really nice benefits) for reliability. Yes, every XC racer that isn't on tubulars is on tubeless, they have no choice. Race bikes are fragile.

Now see, there are some DH and 4x pros that experiment with tubeless, like Gee Atherton exploding his tires off the rims a few times in World Cups in 2010 and Jared Graves losing a World Championship to burping his rear tire casing a jump in 4x. Clearly there is room for improvement in the current technology....

[nahtnoj]

Mickey,

I want a new mountain bike. Everyone looks at me funny when I say I'm not really into 29ers due to their general lack of maneuverability. 26 inch hardtails are virtually dead, at least with a parts spec that I'd want. What makes 650B worth considering?

[suspectdevice]

Mickey,
What makes 650B worth considering?

It's the most fun.
It's pretty much that simple.

[suspectdevice]

Circa '98

I'm standing on top of the trailer at Mt Snow with Adam, our marketing guy, throwing shit into a crowd of groms(adults too, but fuck adults).
That crowd goes all the way back to the IronHorse trailer, btw.

SO many people who haven't raced mtb's or even though about them for more than a decade still have tons of love for the brand. Some of you may have been stopped on the street and chatted up if you were wearing a Spooky t-shirt. I know I been stopped a few times over the last few years.

I've been scheming to put on a mtb event/normal people get drunk and listen to music event ever since Mt. Snow got new owners a few years ago.

Those people in that crowd loved this brand, what we made and what we stood for then- and if we can reconnect with them they'll love us again, and buy some goddamned t's. Hopefully. I certainly don't have the time or resources to put on an event. MTB racing and abject partying is just so much better than CX.
Is it too early to talk about the decline of CX because of the fun being squeezed right out of it?

[shirk]

Mickey do you guys ever consider doing a steel single pivot fs?

I know you had worked on a complex new fs DH (I think it was dh) frame but in the end it's just too expensive to get it done.

What about doing something like the Xprezzo single pivots. I got a Xprezzo Super-D back in the new year and finally getting enough rides in on it to have it dialed and the thing rocks. Prior to this I've been riding FSR's and a linkage driven single pivot (original Transition Covert).

I think some rad handmade steel aggressive bikes could do well. Could also follow a bit of the Chromag model and have some of them handmade and some overseas to hit the lower price point. So much of the handmade market is currently XC/light trail. Not much going on in the AM/heavy trail / DH market.

[suspectdevice]

FACT:
In 1992 FTW-built Yeti frames won more NORBA, Grundig cup,and World Cup events than all other brands combined.
One dude, the dude who makes our bikes and puts up with my bullshit, built more race-winning frames in one year than every other person who picked up a torch the bike building world did, combined.

Here's a link to his Mountain Bike Hall of Fame bio.

Pretty cool if you ask me.

[suspectdevice]

This guy was my coach from the ages 15-18;

[kentinmania]

What was his top speed?

16" wheels at >100km/h must require some skills no?

[datas_brother]

What was his top speed?

16" wheels at >100km/h must require some skills no?

it was 245 km/h. Fred Roppelberg bettered that mark to 268.8 km/h in 1995 at age 49! His record hasn't been broken yet. I read that his bike needed to be towed to 150 km/h before he could turn the peddles due to the gearing.

[sonny]

mickey, for the uninitiated (moi) tell us the story of the project x
every time i see one i can't help but think worlds were moved to build such a beast

[suspectdevice]

Sonny,
You've prompted me to explore the subject thoroughly.
I'll publish an essay.


RIGHT NOW:
Half the Fury of The Sun
[IMG]http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8465/8119803924_3138f3f848_b.jpg/IMG]

[Freddy Salgado]

Your coach = cojones the size of king kong's!

This guy was my coach from the ages 15-18;

[fvracer72]

Mickey,

Are you still offering the hacovstaff in raw aluminum?

[suspectdevice]

Mickey,

Are you still offering the hacovstaff in raw aluminum?

Yes.
I have one medium(55ett) and 2 XL(59mm) left.

[suspectdevice]

Edit:

Yes.
I have one medium(55ett) and 2 XL(59cm) left.

[fvracer72]

I dunno, I usually ride a 56/57....I'll have to spend some time with a tape measure this week. When is the next batch with a Large due?

[dhoff]

Little trivia:
The Photographer, Bruce Martin is coaching athletes and people with illness on nutrition. I have this photo on my wall along with another of Bernard Hinault and a series from the first Race Across America. He traveled with the european Tour in the 1970's for a few years and was on assignment living with Hinault for two weeks for Sports Illustrated.

This guy was my coach from the ages 15-18;