Craig Calfee is an innovative bike builder and the founder of Calfee Design. Calfee was an early adopter of carbon fiber for bike frames in 1987, and brand’s Tetra road bike is said to have been in production longer than any other carbon bike. You might also recognize his work with bamboo bike frames, which he began in 1995.
- How did you get your start building bikes?
- What did people think about the carbon bike frame you debuted at Interbike in 1989? Were there concerns that carbon frames were untested?
- Are you still doing carbon frame production in the US?
- How does carbon frame repair work?
- Your mountain bike, the Cephal, utilizes a system called Quick Tune Steering. What’s the idea behind this feature?
- The Cephal is a hardtail with “leaf spring chain stays.” What are the benefits to having flexible chain stays?
- Were you surprised about your bamboo bike frame prototype?
- From a practical standpoint, is bamboo a good material for building bike frames?
- Why do you offer so many different tandem bikes? What are the challenges associated with building a tandem, particularly a mountain tandem?
- How does your electric pedal assist retrofit service work?
- What kind of work have you done on adaptive bikes?
- What’s next on the horizon for Calfee Design?
Connect with Calfee Design and learn more at calfeedesign.com.
Transcript
Jeff Barber 0:00
Hey everybody, welcome to the Singletracks podcast. My name is Jeff, and today my guest is Craig Calfee. Craig is an innovative bike builder and the founder of Calfee Design. Calfee was an early adopter of carbon fiber for bike frames in 1987 and the brand’s Tetra road bike is said to have been in production longer than any other carbon bike. You might recognize his work with bamboo bike frames as well, which he began in 1995 thanks for joining me, Craig.
Craig Calfee 0:31
Oh, you welcome. Thanks for the intro.
Jeff Barber 0:33
So tell us. How did you get started building bikes?
Craig Calfee 0:37
Well, the story goes that I had a bike accident commuting to work at my job building carbon fiber rowing shells back in the Boston area. And the accident was pretty dramatic, and it destroyed the frame, which was a Schwinn Varsity, okay? And I don’t if you know those frames, they’re, I think they’re made of plumbing pipe. They’re such thick wall steel frames, and it took a quite a bit of energy to bend the frame such that it was unrideable. Anyway. So I thinking about building a carbon fiber bike with a tubing that we made the outriggers from for the rowing shells. We had a braid carbon fiber braiding machine so I could make my own tubes. And I thought, yeah, let’s it’s time to build a bike, you know, try to try this idea out. So I came up with the way to join the carbon tubing with carbon fabric, which results in those gussets you see on our frames. And made some tooling on a on a drill press. It was pretty crude, but I got the job done and and got the bike built up and test rode it, and it was surprisingly stiff for how light it was. And it was very, very satisfying job. Actually, it was fun.
Jeff Barber 1:59
Were you aware of other other folks who were building bike frames out of carbon fiber at that time?
Craig Calfee 2:04
When I started, I heard about the Exxon Graph Tech frame, and then I started looking into it, and heard about some aluminum lugged carbon tube bikes. And then right when I finished my first bike, the Kestrel came out with their bladder molded frame. So I was interestingly, we were also making wing riggers, which is aerodynamic rigor for these rowing shells, and they were a total pain in the butt to make much, much more difficult than the tubular rigors we had been making for years. So I felt like, oh, the Kestrel, that bladder molding stuff is just too difficult. It’s way too labor intensive. No one’s gonna that’s not going anywhere, you know, with the labor content, yeah, so, because ours was a bit easier on the labor side. Anyway, I was wrong, because they just went to where the labor is cheap in China. So that was sort of, you know, how that ended up, and we still maintained our, you know, our, our lower labor content, but higher cost here in the United States. So, but at least we could stay still do custom frames. That was the main feature of our technique.
Jeff Barber 3:28
Yeah, interesting. Well, I’m, you know, I know nothing about rowing or boats. Was that common to build rowing rigs out of carbon fiber like at the time you were doing that? Were a lot of other people doing that as well?
Craig Calfee 3:42
No, it was pretty rare. I think there was one other company doing it. I hadn’t even heard of carbon fiber when I started working there. And the guy behind a guy named Ted Van Dusen, he pioneered the use of carbon fiber in certainly, rowing shells and making those bikes, bike, I mean, those boats as light as possible. So I learned a lot from him, and was a production guy for quite a while there. And then, you know, left that job and started building my own bicycle frames. Yeah,
Jeff Barber 4:17
yeah. I read that your brand carbon frames debuted at inner bike. I think it was 1989 What did people think about the bike at the show? What kind of feedback did you get?
Craig Calfee 4:29
Pretty good. It was, you know, before the show, I’d show it to different people, and they would kind of scoff and go, Oh, it’s too light. It’s just going to break. And good luck with your plastic bikes. You know, very derogatory comments by certain types of people so which, you know, I was all right, fine. You know, we’ll we’ll see. But you know, you have to ride the thing to really have an opinion. And most people who had negative opinions about it had. Hadn’t written one yet, right? So the test writers, though they came, they always came back with a big smile on their face saying, Wow, this is amazing. I’m surprised I couldn’t break it because it’s so damn light.
Jeff Barber 5:10
Yeah, that’s cool. And obviously, yeah. I mean, now you’re, you’ve been vindicated all these years later. And it’s interesting though, that people were concerned. I mean, at that time was it? Probably nobody was thinking, you could build a mountain bike out of it, right? I assume mountain bikes are subjected to greater forces, or is that not the case the road bikes?
Craig Calfee 5:32
No, I mean, it’s, it’s an interesting comparison. They’re just different forces, the pro tour riders in the Tour de France, some of the bigger guys in that and the peloton, when they’re sprinting, they put an incredible amount of torque onto the frame. And maybe you get that with mountain biking, with real strong, large athletes at a professional level. But generally in mountain biking, the the better athletes are smaller and and skinnier, as has become the case in road racing, right? However, in road racing, you get different body types that have different purposes in the in the team. For mountain biking, it’s kind of, you know, a light, skinny guy is going to going to win the individual because it’s more of an individual sport. But having said that downhill mountain biking and gravity, anything related to serious downhill stuff with jumps and landing those jumps, that’s a whole different set of stresses put onto the frame.
Jeff Barber 6:38
Yeah, and carbon fiber is up to that. Obviously, a lot of people are racing those kinds of bikes and really pushing them.
Craig Calfee 6:44
Oh yeah, yeah. The main drawback with carbon fiber, especially with mountain bikes, is abrasion. So if you’re if you crash and it’s abrading against rocks, you know, that’s going to damage the carbon pretty, pretty quickly, where metal will just dent and, you know, suffer a little bit cosmetically, but it won’t structurally impinge upon the tube too much.
Jeff Barber 7:08
Yeah. Well, you mentioned earlier about how most of the carbon bike frame production has shifted to Asia. I mean, this happened many, many years ago. Are you still producing your carbon frames here in the US?
Craig Calfee 7:22
Yeah we’ve been making our bikes in the in the United States since the beginning. We looked at making a lower cost version in Taiwan many years ago, and kind of copying what parley did, you know, establish the name in the US, and then have them made in Asia. We’ve looked at that, and we found a good company that could probably do it, but the cost savings and the lack of control just wasn’t worth it. We found that it was just was too much trouble, and the shipping was going to be a problem, and we would have to predict how many frames of each size we would want to have, you know, in stocks or there’s an inventory burden, just from a business case. We just decided not to do that. We could have perhaps grown the business into a larger entity by doing that like, you know, competing at a higher level with track and specialized and all the others. But I felt that, you know, what do I want to do with my life? I’d rather be more directly relating to the customers building interesting custom bikes a shop here that does special projects and get into tandems and develop new suspension systems. And, you know, just have more fun, rather than focus on all the business side, right? And sure enough, you know, in the past few years, we’ve seen the larger businesses struggle with supply chain and then too much inventory, and, you know, it’s just, What a headache, you know, I’m kind of glad we didn’t have to do that.
Jeff Barber 8:56
When building a carbon bike frame, how much of of the cost is materials versus labor? I imagine it’s pretty labor intensive. That’s why people go overseas, because the labor portion is cheaper. But is that? Is that like a huge part of the bike to begin with?
Craig Calfee 9:15
The labor content is the highest cost, at least for us, the carbon fiber itself as a raw material isn’t super expensive. Making tubes out of it is, you know, that’s a specialty process that we could do, you know, in house, as other custom carbon frame builders do, it’s just a lot slower, and there’s specialty makers who do a great job of it. So we just buy our tubing. Okay, the titanium bits we use in our bike are pretty expensive, but at the end of the day, the labor content is well over 50% of the cost of the bike. Okay,
Jeff Barber 9:53
gotcha. So I see on your website, you guarantee your frames for 10 years, and. You even promise one free. And I quote, no questions asked. Carbon repair, I’m curious, how does carbon frame repair work? Can any damage be repaired? Are there certain things that could happen to a frame that you couldn’t repair? How does that work?
Craig Calfee 10:17
Just to back up a little bit, our warranty on our new frames is actually 25 years. And the 10-year warranty is for the carbon repair work. Okay, so that’s, yeah, you’re reading off of the war the carbon repair warranty. And, yeah, shifting over to carbon repair, it’s, it’s something we started back in the late 90s on our own frames. We were repairing our own frames for quite a while. And we thought, you know, when people would call us and say, Hey, can you fix my Colnago? I said, Well, we could, but we don’t want to, because we want you to buy a calf fee, and then you’ll have, you know, the ability to have it repaired if you crash it. But the demand, you know, we got those calls, you know, every week, and then, pretty soon, every day. So we said, all right, fine, we’ll, if you can’t beat him, we’ll repair him. Oh, wow. And so we got into the repair business, which is, it’s a little tricky to do. Well, it’s easy to do a poor repair job, you know, if you sort of just, you know, there’s so many specific things you have to know about how how composites work. If you take a metal approach to it, it’s just not going to work. So you have to understand composites better than than most, and really study it to get a feel for it. And there’s quite a few people repairing frames now. And so those folks, if they’re doing it well, they have a geographic advantage over us by, you know, being located in Denver or something. And so someone in Denver might not want to pack their frame up and ship it to us. They’ll just use their local repair guy. So that’s, that’s where it’s at now. And on the other side of that is some of the repair shops don’t do a great job, and we end up redoing their work, which sort of adds to our business, so we stay busy one way or the other. Yeah, you know whether it’s reworking other people’s repair jobs or or doing it the first time.
Jeff Barber 12:18
These repair jobs, though, it sounds like they’re generally very successful, right? Like a repaired carbon frame, is it going to be as strong as a brand new frame? Or are there things you got to watch out for to make sure that it’s done right?
Craig Calfee 12:34
Yeah, it does. It does make the bike as strong at minimum. And sometimes it makes it stronger. And depending on the frame, we’ve seen a couple of problems where our repair was too strong and it created a stress riser right next to the repair zone. So that’s where we the wall thickness was so thin that we couldn’t taper the repair into the original wall thickness, smooth enough so we ended up creating a stress riser. This hasn’t happened in a long time, but back in the day, like there was a certain one of the Orbea models was incredibly thin in the top tube. So you whack your handlebar in the top tube and and it’s instant, you know, crack. So we get a lot of those repairs. Well, it turns out we had to strengthen the whole top tube in order to prevent our own repair from causing a stress riser. So for that particular model, we would have to tell people, oh, you’ve got one of those. So we have to repair is going to cost more because we actually have to add material to your whole top tube, yeah, to bring the design up to up to practicality here, wow. So luckily, most of the companies have figured out they can’t go that thin anymore. So so they have, you know, made their laminates easier to repair.
Jeff Barber 14:01
It sounds like too, because you’ve built carbon frames for very long time, that makes it easier for you to know how to, how to do these repairs, right? Because you’re looking at it from, you know, the holistic system of, like, how the layup was originally done, and then how do you kind of tie into that? I mean, is that? Does that help? Yeah? In terms of carbon repairs, like knowing how to build a bike from scratch?
Craig Calfee 14:26
Just the sheer amount of experience we have with it goes a long way. The cool thing about carbon repairs, and I’m revealing some of the trade secrets we have about it, but I don’t care. Most people who are doing this know you want to sand a long taper into the wall thickness of the of the carbon tubing where it’s been cracked. And when you do that, and if you sand down with a fine enough sandpaper, you can actually read the laminate. It’s it you show this long taper through the wall thickness. Over, say, half an inch or an inch, and you can see the fiber orientation of each layer. So we’ve effectively read the laminate of most of the frames we’ve repaired. We don’t really record much, but we we keep that in mind when we lay up the repair patch itself to copy that laminate Yeah. And it’s, it’s very revealing to see what different companies do to get torsional stiffness or straight bending stiffness. So we’ve been able to learn a lot from other other companies frames by just reading their laminates.
Jeff Barber 15:37
That’s, that’s fascinating. So your mountain bike, The Cephal utilizes a system called Quick tune Steering. What’s the idea behind this feature?
Craig Calfee 15:48
Well, the quick tune steering is an option that we offer. It’s can always get it with a fixed head tube. Okay, the quick tune steering is adjustable head angle that allows up to four degrees of head tube angle adjustment, which is a lot, and that combined with our eccentric bottom bracket, which is also an option, it kind of goes together. It allows you to change your mountain bike over to different purpose. For example, you can add different length travel forks, and by adjusting so that changes the whole, you know, front end of your bike right raises the head to, you know, 20 mil, 20 millimeters, or 40 even. And then you want, if you want to adjust your bottom bracket height, you rotate the eccentric up or down to compensate for that change in the front end. And then changing the head angle allows you to change the handling of the bike, or try out more radical geometries that you you’ve never tried before. For example, you know a 67 degree head angle that was unheard of not too long ago. And now you can try it out, or you can buy a bike with that. But before you decide you want that, it’s kind of nice to check it out. And it’s, it’s just been, it’s a bit overly complicated. For most people, you have to be real geometry geek to appreciate it. And so those folks, they love it because they can, they can settle on to one type of riding that they they want to do, or what one type of terrain, you know, if they’re going to a park with a lot of real steep terrain, they’ll adjust their head angle and and play on, you know, play with that. Another thing people have done is some of these long, long expeditions, they’ll do long climbs, up, up, you know, to Tahoe, or, you know, up up a really long climb with a different geometry at the top of the hill, they’ll change the quick tune and flip it over, get two degrees more relaxed, head tube and bomb down the other side. So it’s quite a different geometry from climbing to descending. And it’s real nice to be able to switch that with a five millimeter Allen wrench.
Jeff Barber 18:03
Adjustable geometry, it seems like it’s a trend. Even just in the last year, we’re seeing a lot of the bikes, mountain bikes from the big brands are incorporating more and more. I mean, not just flip chips, but the adjustable headsets and, you know, all kinds of other options. Was this like a feature that your customers were asking for, or is this more something that you just kind of wanted on your own? Thought it would be a good idea like, how do you how’d you come across this concept of a bike that you can adjust the geometry in so many ways.
Craig Calfee 18:38
This guy named Jim Prater introduced us to his design for this. You could call it a flip chip or a flip plate, which was radically more adjustment than any of the other headset. You know, angle changers, you know, the from the headset.
Jeff Barber 18:55
Yeah, four degrees is a lot. Most are like one degree maybe…
Craig Calfee 18:59
Yeah they’re pretty subtle. And so I thought, wow, this is really cool, because I worked up the geometry and wanted to be able to change the fork travel most spikes, it’s, they’re kind of designed around one fork travel. And if you change that too much, you know, it handles significantly different. And isn’t really what you want, you know, it’s just not, I mean, I’m fussy with my geometry, so i i like it just just a certain way, and I can predict how something’s going to handle, because I understand front end handling better than most people. So personally, I did want that. And I thought if we created a cool chart or a cool spreadsheet that someone could go on and decide, well, I want to change up my bike and and have it do different, different types of riding. What? What are the settings I would need to do that? And so we did that, but it turned out to be quite complicated, and most people aren’t, you know, into the geometry so much. So we didn’t sell that many of them with the with the quick tune system. Most people are ordering it with just a fixed head tube.
Jeff Barber 20:07
And did you have to do something different with the head tube? I imagine the head tube needs to be bigger.
Craig Calfee 20:15
Yeah, it’s pretty big. It’s sort of the it’s an esthetic thing where it does look a little bit too big, but we like how strong it is. And the aluminum flip plates, you know, they’re, they’re a little bit elongated, so it’s, it’s large fore and aft, not so much left and right, but it’s a little extended fore and aft.
Jeff Barber 20:37
Well, as a custom bike builder, too, do you see this trend toward bikes being more adjustable? Does that take away from people who maybe would have gone with a custom bike and maybe say, Oh, well, I’ll just get this bike and I’ll, you know, make it a little slacker, or, you know, extend the reach or make it fit me better.
Craig Calfee 20:56
That’s an interesting question. You know, one of the original reasons we did. It was the n minus one bike. You know how everything’s got big, right? And bikes, you know, n plus one always, you can always get another bike. And a lot of our customers have garages full of bikes. And, you know, I was just thinking, do we need all these bikes? You know, collecting dust, and our carbon footprint here of consumption is just, it’s a little over the top. So I thought, what if we could have one bike that does 90% of your riding really well, and, you know, sort of sell off those bikes or, or just, you know, have less stuff, right? You know, is this more about the consumption and wanting one bike that can do it all, kind of the Swiss Army of Swiss Army knife of bikes. But interestingly, when I, when I talk to people about it, friends, I’ve got a couple of friends that that have lots of bikes, and it’s like, I like to have a bike for each day of the week, you know? They, they don’t mind it, you know, yeah, and I’m like, Okay, fine, you know. So that didn’t, you know, appeal to some folks, but others who like some of the some people who like to travel with their bike, and they only want to bring one, maybe two bikes, that it fits really well with that lifestyle.
Jeff Barber 22:19
That makes sense. So the Cephal the mountain bike that we’re talking about, it’s a hardtail, and it has leaf spring chain stays. How significant is the amount of rear travel that you can get out of something like a leaf spring chain stay or a flex stay?
Craig Calfee 22:34
You can get a little bit of travel. I wouldn’t call it travel like because you’re comparing it to rear suspension, it really is not rear suspension. It’s more about high frequency vibration damping, which kind of came from when we built bamboo bikes, we noticed a significant vibration damping quality of the bamboo, and it made the ride quality that much better, and it seemed to have better traction. There was no travel, per se, of the rear wheel. So when we developed a cephal We thought, how can we get that vibration damping quality of bamboo without using bamboo, you know, because a lot of folks just didn’t trust bamboo to be strong enough and for crashing. Yeah, carbon is much stronger. So, yeah, the leaf spring idea came up. And it also came up because we wanted to have minimal chainstay width between the chainring and the tires, so you could stay with, you know, just a boost spacing, and have the bigger tires you can and have the chainrings and plenty of mud clearance. So we were squishing the solid carbon chain stays in the vertical direction to get around the tire and chainrings. And then we thought, okay, we’ll just squish it in the opposite direction to get stiffness laterally, which we got and that flatness, that leaf spring Style section really does flex. When you do a Huck to flat video, you can see the frame actually flexing a lot, right? And it’s, there’s no way you could get away with that with, you know, hollow, hollow stays so it really does help. And the other side benefit is it addresses the concern around scraping the carbon chain stay or seat stay against a rock. These are significantly more damage tolerant than any other swing arm or rear end of a carbon fiber mountain bike. So I mean, I’ve gouged it severely, and then I just keep writing it. You know, if you send us a photo of a gouge like this, we’d say, oh, yeah, you got to get that repaired. Otherwise it’s going to get worse. You know, we’ve seen it time and time again, so, you know, it goes from $100 repair to a $300 repair if you don’t take care of it, right? Mm. Hmm, so on purpose I would gouge it, you know? And then it’s like, Well, I’m just going to keep riding it and see what happens. And it doesn’t get worse. It’s like, you can just keep, keep riding it. So it takes a lot longer for an abrasion or impact to to really make your bike need to have it repaired quickly.
Jeff Barber 25:21
It sounds like it’s, it’s a really durable design in terms of, like, the sort of the limit with the amount of flex you can get there. Is it about material strength or or is it more about the bike handling, where there’s just a certain point where you don’t want it flex anymore because it’s just not going to be efficient, or, you know, you’re not going to have as much control.
Craig Calfee 25:43
You definitely want it to be stiff enough for for powertrain, for power transfer. So that’s really the limit. You can make it more flexible and get a real, real springy rear end, but, you know, you’ll have no damping, really. It’ll be too bouncy. And so, yeah, we it’s really fairly stiff actually, in in the drive train, it’s, you notice it the most on things like washboard. It just feels smoother on washboard. So for a hardtail, it’s ideal.
Jeff Barber 26:17
That would be great for, like, a gravel bike. Are you using that on those sort of all-road bikes as well?
Craig Calfee 26:25
Yeah, yeah, that’s definitely put we’re putting them on our big we call it our big adventure bikes where, you know, taking up to, like a 50 millimeter tire.
Jeff Barber 26:34
Yeah. Cool. So you, you spoke about your bamboo bikes, and I read that your your first bamboo bike was basically a publicity stunt, but it turned out people were actually really stoked about it and wanted to buy one. Were you surprised about that at all?
Craig Calfee 26:50
A little bit. Actually, I did do it just sort of to get attention at Interbike back in 1995 and that certainly worked. We got a quarter page in Bicycling magazine, which at that time was really expensive to get that, yeah, but the feedback from people coming up and checking out the bike was very positive, and it tapped a nerve, you know. People were like, This is a great idea, you know, can I buy one? You know, when are you going to make them? And I said, Well, it’s just a prototype. I mean, we don’t really know if it works. And it was really, we’re kind of pushing people off. And didn’t, didn’t talk about it as a real product for about five years.
Craig Calfee 27:35
It’s like, Oh, welcome to our booth. You know, look away from the bamboo now look at their carbon. Yeah, but, but it actually was fun, because the ride quality was actually amazing. That very first one was a little too flexy because I didn’t have access to larger diameter bamboo. But once I got some I built a second bike, and that bike performed really well. I was really impressed with it. And after that one, I just kept going and built some for friends, and finally, built one for a dealer of ours. Back when we had dealers, he wanted a anniversary gift for his wife, who’s Japanese, and he said, Look, I want you to build a custom frame for her. So I said, Okay, graves, we built a bamboo frame, you know, very nice, beautiful bike. And I trusted him to understand the idiosyncrasies of bamboo. So he was cool with it. And so this, he tells me that when he gave the when he showed the bike to his wife. She looked at it and frowned, and said, what another bike? I already have a custom Serota. Why do I need another bike? And he thought, Okay, well, you haven’t been showing up on the Saturday ride, and you know, you kind of let that bike collect dust. I want you to try this bike out. And she’s like, well, all right, you know. And so she takes it out on the Saturday ride, and everybody’s giving her just 110% attention. Just, yeah, she’s suddenly the focus of the whole ride, and everyone loves what she’s doing. And so now she’s at the at the Saturday ride every week, without fail, enjoying the, you know, the attention. And so my my buddy said, Yeah, we achieved our goal, but it took a while for her to appreciate it.
Jeff Barber 29:33
Well, I mean, obviously it is like such a statement piece. And I think I’m sure initially people were drawn just because it was so different. And, you know, I mean, it’s almost as a piece of art, you know, those, those first ones, especially that you built, obviously, were bespoke. And, you know, yeah, just a super interesting concept from a practical standpoint, is bamboo a good material for building bike frames. You said, the. Quality is good, but, but what about other stuff? Are there? Are there challenges to using it?
Craig Calfee 30:05
The only real challenge is to get the stiffness to compare with a good carbon fiber bike. It needs to weigh a little bit more than you’d expect. A lot of folks are thinking, Oh, it’s heavier than I expected. And they think bamboo. They think lightweight. So you have to set the expectation to be, well, it weighs about as much as a steel frame, okay? And it has the same stiffness of a steel frame and a good carbon frame, but it happens to be made of bamboo. So a lot of folks are focused on the performance, and they lift up the bike and they, you know, they’re the what do you call the sales the sales floor hurdle is, well, it’s not as light as I expected. It’s like, well, take it for a spin. And so they take it out, and they come back and it’s like, wow, this is super smooth. Like, they just can’t believe how smooth it is. And the folks who really appreciate it are the ultra distance folks who run, you know, centuries or, you know, 100 mile plus rides. They really appreciate it because they feel less abused by the bike over over the, you know, 100 miles or so, it’s a very noticeable difference.
Jeff Barber 31:21
What about building one? Is the labor to put one together, similar to like a carbon bike or other ones that you build?
Craig Calfee 31:28
It’s similar, in fact, probably a little bit more labor intensive, especially if we use hemp fiber in the process of working with the hemp fiber, it has a little bit more porosity, or the we have to put it on fairly thick so the epoxy can sometimes out gas a little too much, and we have to fill in these tiny little bubbles to make it super smooth. So it’s it takes a little more finish time on the joint areas. Yeah. Fascinating. And selecting the bamboo is kind of a pain in the butt, you know, you have to, you know, it’s nice to match up all the bamboo nicely with nice coloring and get the nodes in the right location. So you need access to a huge amount of bamboo of the right wall thickness and diameters, which is a benefit, because you can can customize it to the rider. Okay? So a really light rider can have a fairly light frame, and a heavy rider can have a plenty stiff, heavy duty frame with carbon fiber. Of course, you can do that. However, you’re not going to stock that much variety of tubing, you know, in general, yeah. I mean, we do stock a lot of tubing, and so we do a level of that. But with bamboo, it’s effectively infinite.
Jeff Barber 32:48
Do you have a supplier, or do you just go out somewhere and harvest it yourself?
Craig Calfee 32:54
Well, we have, we’ve got different suppliers we’ve used over the years. Our current favorite is the one we started with. It’s a Japanese supplier of really fine bamboo out of Kyoto, Japan. Oh, wow. It’s a family business where they select bamboo just for craftspeople to make things with. And we went to visit them right after covid, or right before covid hit, we almost got stuck in Japan, actually, wow. And we brought back several duffel bags full of incredibly high quality bamboo, so I actually need to restock her. So I got a trip to Japan in the works here to actually go pick it myself. And that was the problem. Is we do have a local bamboo nursery here, but they focus mainly on plants. So we really like this, this company in Japan that that makes all kinds of they grow all kinds. They harvest bamboo from different growers, and they even do the square bamboo, which is really fun.
Jeff Barber 33:57
I assume when you’re getting it, it’s already been, like, cured. Or this isn’t like, green bamboo that you’re getting, it’s, it’s like, ready to build with.
Craig Calfee 34:09
Yeah, it’s dried and cured. It’s even been treated for against insects, which is a specific bamboo beetle. So, yeah, it’s, it’s great stuff to work with.
Jeff Barber 34:21
Another thing that you do is you make tandem bikes, and you offer a lot of different tandem bikes, a huge variety. So why are you excited about tandem bikes?
Craig Calfee 34:36
Well, it’s because we can, you know, it’s, we’re not restricted by tooling. We can literally build any type of bike you can imagine. We’ve, we’ve done, you know, I think every type of bike you can imagine, tall bikes, and you know triplets, and you know viewpoint style, tandem. Times, you name it, we’ve built it. So, yeah, it’s because we can. It’s, it’s a niche market, and it’s nice to not have a whole lot of competition. You know, where the single bikes were competing, competing against enormous companies with huge resource and it makes it tough for the little guy, where you get into a niche like tandems, and you do well with it, then you become a real player in it, and it, it sustains the business rather nicely.
Jeff Barber 35:29
I’m curious about the challenges associated with building a tandem bike, especially a mountain tandem. I’ve never ridden one myself, but they look they look like fun for one, but they also look like, yeah, they could be really tricky to build. So what? What are some of the challenges in building one compared to, like a normal bike?
Craig Calfee 35:52
There’s quite a few challenges with a mountain tandem. One, of course, is the structural integrity. You know, they have to withstand jumps and handle, you know, yeah, you know, 500 pounds of meat coming down the mountain, yeah? So it’s, it’s like building a bike for a super large person and but the wheel base is really long too, so, but the beauty of carbon fiber is the strength, really, is there, and then it comes down to stiffness. And luckily, you know, we have access to to the best carbon tubing, so we can roll, wrap, whatever we want for for the tubing. And our tandem tube set is, is really it’s proven to be the ideal combination of stiffness and weight and durability. So it’s not super thin wall, so it’s pretty tough. Some of the geometric challenges are getting the bottom bracket height correct for the use case that it’ll be involved with. Some folks want a really high bottom bracket to clear obstacles, you know. And when you’re on a long wheelbase tandem, it’s your chain that connects the two riders, is what hits first. So you really want to be careful to get that bottom bracket up quite high, yet at the same time, you need your standover height even lower than a normal bike, particularly when you’re in sketchy terrain, and you need to put a foot down on the downhill side of the bike. You know, it’s, it’s, and you’ve got someone else to support, you know, you’re, you’re dealing with a lot of factors that just make it the geometry really care, something you have to carefully consider.
Jeff Barber 37:38
I saw at some point you did a full suspension tandem bike. Is that right?
Craig Calfee 37:45
Yeah we’ve done full suspension tandems. It became an issue of availability of the rear the swing arms and seat stays. So right now we don’t have one, because we we need to actually develop a tandem specific rear suspension. We’ve tried to use rear ends from single mountain bikes, and they work generally, generally, you can do it. But for the more extreme riders, they end up cracking the certain components. So except for the more extreme scenarios, it’s pretty, pretty. It’s not hard to build them. They work great. And people who have them, they love them, but they don’t jump them too much, and they’re not a heavy team. And we need one that you can jump and you can be a heavy team for us to keep going with it. So right now, we don’t, we don’t offer the full suspension tandem, but we’re thinking, we’ll develop that at some point.
Jeff Barber 38:43
Clearly, you and your company, I mean, you’re in all kinds of things, and you know, you’re the you’re the guy to go to if somebody has a crazy idea that they want to do that involves bikes, you’re the guy. So one of the other services I saw that you offer is your electric pedal assist retro fit service. How does that work? Is that? Is that what I think it is, where you can basically turn any bike into an electric bike?
Craig Calfee 39:12
We’ve been doing that for a while now. It’s, it’s, we call it electro fit, and it’s basically using hub motors and a system with a bag to hold batteries, or you can mount the battery directly on the frame for the big batteries, it kind of got, we kind of got started with it as a travel bike option. We’re using these LIGO batteries from grin that you’re allowed to bring on the airplane, and with a lot of our coupler bikes, which are designed to break down into suitcases for traveling, people wanted an E bike that would do that, so we came up with the electrofit system. And, you know, we can pretty much convert any bike into an E bike, albeit using a hub motor and. Motors are actually really great, except for steep terrain, such as you might find in mountain biking. So mountain bikes, the mid drive motor is dominant because it works very well with those steep, slow RPMs that a hub motor would would overheat too quickly, right? So most of our electrofits are for road bikes and gravel bikes.
Jeff Barber 40:25
One other thing that I see you’ve done, you know, as a frame builder, you’re able to customize bikes for riders of all sizes and abilities. And you’ve also done some some work on adaptive bikes. What are some of the things that you’ve done with those bikes? What kinds of adaptations have you made to help folks get on bikes?
Craig Calfee 40:45
Yeah, we’ve done a number of special bikes, from special handlebars for people with with arms that are, let’s just say, very asymmetrical. Folks who can’t swing a leg over a bike, they have to step through so step through frames. We’ve even done a tandem for a guy who would compete in the Iron Man, where he took his son with him, who has cerebral palsy, and he takes him as a passenger on the bike. So he would ride in the front, similar to the viewpoint style tandem. And that was not only a special frame, but it was a special seat we made to fit his body. Oh, cool. And that was a carbon fiber seat to make it as light as possible and as comfortable as possible. So, yeah, whatever is needed, we literally are customizing it to people’s limbs? Yeah, and, you know, it’s, it’s whatever’s needed. It’s, it requires a visit. We can’t really do that remotely, so people fly out and and bring their existing bike that they’re struggling with, and we make it better.
Jeff Barber 41:57
Are these all two-wheel bikes. Or are you ever doing, like tricycles or quads or anything like that?
Craig Calfee 42:05
Yeah, we’ve done some trikes. In fact, we have one project right now for a tadpole upright trike for a guy with he’s got some kind of injury that makes his balance not suitable for a bicycle, so he uses a tadpole style trike and competes in high level competitions with it cool. So he’s currently got a titanium one, and now he wants a carbon fiber one. Yeah, wow,
Jeff Barber 42:31
That’s awesome. So tell us what’s next on the horizon for Calfee design?
Craig Calfee 42:35
Well, we’re basically kind of streamlining our operations, and the future is mainly about streamlining our operations and coming up with suspension mountain bike that we like. We’ve been working on that for a few years now. The market is really slow right now, so we’re kind of holding back, but as the market picks up, which we think will happen after the election. You know, this sense of uncertainty in the future is right, is really preventing people from from buying new stuff. But we have some ideas for a full suspension mountain bike that we want to try and, you know, reinvigorate the Cephal that way. So that’s in the cards for for the for the next year. But, yeah, keep, keep going on what we do best is a lot of custom frames.
Jeff Barber 43:28
I’m really looking forward to seeing what you’re doing with full suspension mountain bikes. I’m sure it’s going to be different and unique, and something probably nobody’s ever thought of before, which is exciting. So yeah, always great to keep up with with what Calfee designs is up to. Thanks so much for joining us.
Craig Calfee 43:48
You’re very welcome. It was a pleasure talking with you.
Jeff Barber 43:51
Well, you can find out more about Calfee Design at their website, calfeedesign.com.
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