Lance Canfield is a mechanical engineer and former professional mountain bike racer who drew his first mountain bike design in 1996. Today, his bike brand, Canfield Bikes, sells mountain bikes and components designed and tested in Poncha Springs, Colorado.
- What were downhill bikes like when you began racing in 1994? What did you want to improve about your bike?
- Your first bike design in 1999, the Big Fat Fatty Fat, had 12 inches of travel front and rear. How did that work?
- You competed on some of your own bikes in Red Bull Rampage, including at the first competition ever in 2001. What was it like? How did it compare to today’s spectacle?
- Why do you think there aren’t many (any?) dedicated freeride bikes on the market today?
- What makes the Canfield Balance Formula (CBF) suspension design different from others on the market?
- Is CBF better suited for certain applications or travel ranges?
- Why are you such a proponent of shorter cranks for mountain biking?
- How has Canfield been affected by industry supply fluctuations over the past few years?
- What’s next for Canfield? Which mountain bike developments or trends have you excited about the future?
Visit canfieldbikes.com to see the bikes and components discussed in this episode.
Support this Podcast
- Review the Singletracks podcast on Apple Podcasts for the chance to win a free hat. Or drop your feedback in the comments below!
- Make a donation to help sustain future episodes.
- Become a Singletracks Pro Supporter.
Automated transcript
Jeff Barber 0:00
Hey everybody, welcome to the Singletracks podcast. My name is Jeff, and today, my guest is Lance Canfield. Lance is a mechanical engineer and former professional mountain bike racer who drew his first mountain bike design in 1996 today, his bike brand, Canfield bikes sells mountain bikes and components designed and tested in poncha Springs, Colorado. Thanks for joining me Lance.
Lance Canfield 0:26
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Jeff Barber 0:28
You first started racing downhill bikes in 1994 what were the bikes like back then?
Lance Canfield 0:36
A lot of the bikes were built kind of like a road bike using road bike tubing, they really under built. They were quite bad, quite bad. Full suspension was fairly new, and so the kinematics were also very bad. You always had some kind of a sacrifice somewhere within the bike, whether it was braking, bump, performance, durability was certainly a huge part. Yeah, lots and lots of broken bikes in the early days of my riding. I had a GT LTS at the time, okay? And I broke that thing three times.
Jeff Barber 1:17
You broke it three times!? So what, did you repair it yourself?
Lance Canfield 1:21
No, I warrantied it. Okay, just a random consumer. And, you know, riding it probably way beyond what the thing was capable of. And, yeah, so it was considered a downhill bike at a whopping three inches of travel, yeah, 80 Mills, 80 mils of travel front and rear. It was amazing.
Jeff Barber 1:42
What was the competition like then? Because, I mean, I assume everybody was riding similar bikes, right? So were the courses as rough? Like, was it? Were people going as fast? Like? What was the competition like on bikes like that?
Lance Canfield 1:59
Riding certainly wasn’t as fast, but the competition was mostly on similar bikes. And then you had a few randoms that were on, you know, Team bikes. You’re on Team Cannondale, Missy Giove shows up with a fulcrum bike, and it was just like, Oh my gosh. What is that?
Jeff Barber 2:18
Were the bikes like a big differentiator? If somebody was on, you know, whatever the latest, newest one was, was that a big advantage?
Lance Canfield 2:27
Those bikes started to come out, probably ’97 or ’98 is when bikes started to jump from three inches, four inches up to all of a sudden, it was eight inches. And so there was a radical change in the market. Yeah, in the late 90s when that happened, and construction changed drastically, all of a sudden, you saw super eights out there. Those things were like, oh, it’s like a motorcycle. This is amazing, right? You know? And Brooklyn machine works was way ahead of their time. They were building burly bikes early, yeah, and those were really cool, and they still are, like, that’s a collector’s item for sure.
Jeff Barber 3:07
Yeah, I bet. Well, so when that shift happened, you know, when people started going from like a three inch travel bike all the way up to an eight inch travel bike, did you and other athletes have to, like, adjust how you rode, or was that like a pretty natural progression, like, as the bikes got better, were you able to adapt pretty easily?
Lance Canfield 3:28
Yeah, I mean, it made riding a lot easier. Obviously, the downhill racetracks prior to that were a lot of fire roads and and they were not really, like a downhill track, like, by today’s standards. Yeah, right. But once those bikes were a lot more travel, all of a sudden, the promoters were building tracks that were, like, borderline rideable for a lot of riders. People would complain, usually, at most every race, like, oh, this part’s too hard. Like, you know, if they’re like, I was in sport class when I started. And, okay, I really wasn’t a very fast rider. That was my goal, was to become a fast rider, right? And so I had to work really hard at it, and focus and learn how to race, like, mentally, to become a fast rider, yeah, and at a certain point I realized my equipment was the biggest limiting factor at that point, yeah. And that’s when I started designing a bike.
Jeff Barber 4:30
Okay, yeah. Well, so you had a background, or you studied mechanical engineering, is that right? That’s right, yeah, yeah, yeah. When you were a student, were you thinking that you were gonna do something with bikes, or did you have, like, kind of a different vision of what your career would look like with that degree?
Lance Canfield 4:49
I wasn’t. I wasn’t thinking about designing bikes at that point in my life. I was riding hardtails and what’s considered free ride today, like doing a lot of urbans. Stuff, just jumping my bike downstairs, off roofs and off roofs. Just doing dumb stuff that kids do. I don’t know many kids that were jumping off roofs at that time, but I was going up in the hills above my house and riding down the steep screw fields and just doing kind of, I thought was super fun stuff. I ruptured a disc in my back. Oh, doing a jump. It was meant to be a step up jump onto a dirt road, flat, okay, I overshot the whole road and landed up into the hillside above there and completely stopped. It was probably a 40 foot Whoa, step up and ruptured the disc in my bag. Had to move back to my mom’s house. And she said, Well, if you’re going to live in my house, you’re going to do something. So I was like, Alright, great. So I went to the local college that I had already had a degree at for auto body repair, and so my previous jobs and life were revolving around hot rods and and doing custom paint, custom stuff, and so that was a very toxic job and a lot of work, and I was actually quite excited about going back to school so that I could do something that didn’t wear me out during the day, so that I could ride at night free time and be able to ride Yeah, so mechanical engineering was my choice, and I was excited about it. I really liked it. I thought it was fun. So yeah, at that point, I was able to get back to writing a little bit. I had back surgery. Rehab lasted about a year, and the self paced course at the college was awesome, because I could rip through stuff, because I kind of had a natural intuition about a lot of things that were related to mechanical engineering that was kind of my strong suit, clipped my calculus and my trigonometry courses in in basically one week. I studied for four days, took both of those tests on Friday, and I was done. It was like, bam. Like, moving on. Cool. That was cool.
Jeff Barber 7:22
So getting back to those, those 90s bikes, and some of the the first bikes that you designed, I read that your, your first bike in 99 I think the big fatty fat fat —
Lance Canfield 7:34
The big fat fatty fat, yep, okay, named after our mean little dog.
Jeff Barber 7:39
Okay, I might have missed one of the fats there, but I read that the bike had 12 inches of travel front and rear, massive. How did that work?
Lance Canfield 7:51
It worked great. It rides really well. It’s a couple millimeters off of being a DW link. Honestly, it’s incredibly close. As the first attempt at actually building a bike. It was the most complicated thing you could ever imagine, a multi link bike with a pulley wheel with 12 inches of travel. That should be incredibly hard, even by today’s standards, but it rode really well. I had a bunch of criteria that I wanted to hit, like 17 inch chain stays. I wanted the bottom bracket as low as I could possibly make it without being excessively low, which was still a really high bottom bracket a certain wheel base, because I was doing more stunting. And so I wanted a short wheelbase. And so I had all of this criteria, and the top tube ended up being the one thing that got sacrificed in the process, okay? So it ended up being kind of a small bike, really small bike, okay, but for me at the time, it didn’t really matter, because I was an avid BMX or skate park that kind of stuff. Yeah, little tiny bikes were fun. They whipped around easy, so that was good for the time, but to be able to fit 12 inches of travel, I used a pulley wheel and a rearward wheel path. You know, that’s what a lot of brands are doing these days. It’s become cool now, yeah, finally.
Jeff Barber 9:15
Only 25 years later.
Lance Canfield 9:17
It took a while. I’m surprised that people were still resistant for so long, yeah, but it was the original mullet. Is a 24 rear, 26 front. Okay, so the smaller rear wheel helped make 12 inches fit. You know, the rear wheel path kept it from ramming into my seat. So those were the two key things that allowed me to make a 12 inch bike and have it work, right?
Jeff Barber 9:42
I’m not super familiar with downhill bikes, but the bikes today, nobody has 12 inches of travel, right? Like the bikes have kind of settled around what, like, 10 inches at the max,
Lance Canfield 9:56
Eight inches. Eight inches is norma.
Jeff Barber 10:00
What’s changed? Is it like the shocks are better or different, or able to manage that stuff better, or is it just people found they didn’t need 12 inches that that was just just too much travel.
Lance Canfield 10:12
It’s mostly geometry. Okay, so your bottom bracket height ends up so high that the bike doesn’t feel like you’re down in it, your way up on top of it, way too tall feeling. So that’s why they back down to about eight inches as wheels got bigger, arguably, eight inches is even too much. Okay, you’re interesting. You’re seeing seven inch bikes. Very capable. Yeah, you know interesting. 190 is, is is even, you know, some manufacturers are making 190 bikes that are downhill bikes, but eight inches is kind of what everybody settled on because it was a low enough bottom bracket to feel like you’re in the bike, and the geometry was a lot closer. It’s 12 inches is too hard to bunny hop, and when you hit jumps and berms, you’ve got a lot of travel to push down into before the bike firms up to be able to support you correctly coming around the corner or off the lip of a jump. So it required a lot more body English to handle a bike with that much travel. Eight inches is way easier to handle.
Jeff Barber 11:18
Gotcha, yeah, and you, you know, you mentioned that this was, like, a really complex design. It has a lot going on with it. What did you use to design it back then? I mean, nowadays, I’m sure everything is there’s like software that can make this kind of thing a lot easier. What were you doing to design bikes back then?
Lance Canfield 11:38
I did a lot of research. You know, motorcycles were about the closest thing that you could find information on, and I read everything that I could about motorcycle suspension design, but it didn’t really relate to a multi link bike. And the reason why I chose a multi link bike is because you can get really good pedaling, really good bump performance, really good braking, usually pedaling and braking, those two things fight each other. Okay? So you can have good, good pedaling, but really crappy braking on a single pivot, or vice versa.
Jeff Barber 12:11
And with motorcycles, you don’t have to worry about the pedaling part, right? This is what I’ve heard from lots of other bike designers, is that, I mean, you can’t just copy, paste from a motorcycle. You’re you gotta, there’s a lot more to it, right?
Lance Canfield 12:24
Yeah, I mean, you still have to pedal as a Downhill Racer. Pedaling is a big deal, like we’ll talk about that later. But I focused on motorcycles for a bit. Realized that wasn’t really relevant to what I wanted to do, and I felt like Formula One race cars and Baja trucks. Those two were using multi link suspension. So a arm suspension is sideways, but if you turn it backwards, it’s basically a short link multi link type of system. And Baja trucks, the rear suspension on those a trailing link rear suspension. That’s pretty much the pinnacle of suspension and control on rough terrain. And so I focused on those types of systems, and crawl underneath off road race trucks and eyeball what they were doing, try to figure out how they were doing it. And so at a certain point, I just started putting stuff down on paper and using like, okay, at sag, I need my links to be fairly level flat, you know, so that I have 90 degrees when the bump hits it, it’s at 90 degrees it has the most leverage to push that linkage upward, Right, okay, so it was a lot. It was guesswork, 100% guesswork at that point.
Jeff Barber 13:45
So you had a lot of prototypes, I guess that you were working with, like, full blown on a bike, or were you just, like, kind of playing with little desk models and stuff like that to figure it out.
Lance Canfield 13:55
There were no prototypes. This was all designed in AutoCAD.
Jeff Barber 13:59
Okay, that’s still around. I guess that’s still what people use. It’s probably just works a lot better now than it used to.
Lance Canfield 14:05
Well, yeah, SolidWorks is what I use now. Because it’s a 3d modeling program and you can see every clearance interference, you can make things move. It’s, it’s far more intuitive. It’s a way better program. AutoCAD was like, imagine board drafting, like, you have a front view and a side view and a top view. It was literally that. It was very archaic, and it was really incredibly difficult to make any kind of changes to or evaluate anything, and you couldn’t make anything move right, right? Yeah, so by today’s standards, I would never go back to AutoCAD? I absolutely hate that program.
Jeff Barber 14:43
Yeah, sorry to the AutoCAD people out there.
Lance Canfield 14:46
I’m sure it’s much better today.
Jeff Barber 14:49
I can’t believe they haven’t updated that and put more into it. But yes, SolidWorks seems to be what everybody’s using today for bike stuff. One of the things that I’m really excited to talk to you about is you. You actually competed on some of your own bikes in Red Bull Rampage, actually, at the first four Red Bull Rampage, that’s right, competitions, yeah. What was it like back then? How did you even get involved? Like, what was the first, you know, the call up, like, where they were, like, Hey, we got this thing. Do you want to do it?
Lance Canfield 15:19
Well, I guess, leading up to that, I was riding with Kris Baughman (Krispy), and he was friends with Bender, and so I get a call from crispy, and he’s like, I got this buddy Bender, who I had seen in the down movie. I was like, That means crazy. It was awesome. I’ll go ride with him, yeah, so that I got an invite to go down to his house and and do some free riding for double down the second movie. And I was like, Yeah, I definitely want to do that. That sounds like a right up my alley. Let’s do it. So I go down there. And this was in virgin Utah, and this was at a point where Bender was living in a little shed behind this guy is double wide, and just riding his bike and jumping off cliffs all day and scoping out all sorts of crazy stuff. Wow, he takes us out to this zone, and he’s got a 40 foot drop lined up. So we do a bunch of filming, and we were able to ride these, you know, red rock cliffs and jump off stuff. And it was a great day. We had a ton of fun and got a bunch of great footage. And then at the end of the day, Josh climbs up on this, this Butte, and jumps off a 40 foot cliff. He doesn’t he did it twice, and, yeah, rag dolled a bunch. And it was the biggest thing that I had ever seen in my life. It was the biggest thing at the time that anybody had ever done. Yeah, wow. I was blown away. And so Josh had been talking with Todd Barber, who’s the promoter of Red Bull Rampage. Okay, they were trying to come up with an idea for biking for this event that was similar to, like, a free skiing competition, where people could just start up on the mountain and go wherever they want and come down. And so the zone where Josh had been riding, it’s all BLM, and it’s open riding BLM. So there’s, you don’t have to stay on a trail. You can kind of ride wherever you want. It’s a legal place to do that kind of thing. And so they decided to do the event there some of the stipulations, though, with the BLM was that you couldn’t build, you couldn’t dig out there, okay, and so there was no pre-made jump lines like they’ll like, now today, they’ve got, like, the lower section of the course, is all pre built, right? Kind of big machines. And then up high, you have the opportunity to kind of build your own line and be creative, right? Then it was like, it was all just raw. There was literally no trails, wow, just powder everywhere. So the first year was a lot of camaraderie. It was actually, it was amazing, because everybody was just trying to see if they could ride down the mountain. They weren’t really being super competitive that first year it was, we were all stoked, like watching Wade, jump off a thing, or Richie jump off a thing, and, yeah, it’s like, that was so sick, you know. And we were mostly riding the exact same ridge line. All the entire group was pretty much riding the same lines. The second year, the Canadians had come down in the summer and done a little bit of filming down there, and they had started building other stuff in nearby. And so the second year, all of a sudden, we saw the Canadians doing the Canadian baking line and doing some faster jumps and bigger gaps and and that really stepped it up for all the rest of us. For 2003 the third year, all of a sudden it was competitive at that point, and people were trying to throw tricks. Cedric grass learned how to backflip that year, and he threw a back flip for the first time in a competition. Yeah, that year that was pretty cool. He mostly pulled it off. He kind of landed and put his knee in the ground and popped up and rode out. But he took, he took first in qualifying that year, and I was able to qualify second behind him.
I tended to not do much tricking. I wasn’t really a trick guy. I was more of a go big, like I was known for the guy that went big. I just find the biggest stuff on the mountain that, as an engineer, like geometry, works really well in my brain. So I would find the biggest thing I could find with a good landing and do that.
Jeff Barber 19:41
Biggest, as in, like, the most vertical drop, or, like, what was big to you?
Lance Canfield 19:48
Yeah, the biggest drop. And the if the landing was way out there, then I would go off the cliff, fast, go way out there. The first year, everyone was just jumping off the. Biggest move was probably a 10 foot cliff. Really wasn’t that big by today’s standards, but it was a like the everybody would come off of it kind of slow, and it was just a bomb hole where everyone landed, but out there about 15 feet, it rolled down again. Okay, and so I got the bright idea to hit it super fast and gap out, and I was the first one to jump, like, kind of fast off of the big cliff, so that people were cheering after that one.
Jeff Barber 20:32
Were there big crowds by that point, like, by the third or fourth year?
Lance Canfield 20:37
The first couple years, it was pretty much just friends and family and a handful of locals that would come out, and they heard about this crazy thing. It was like, they’re going to ride bikes out there. I’m going to watch that. Yeah, it’s going to be carnage, yeah. But yeah, by the third year, it started to get pretty crowded on the mountain, and they didn’t really have spectator zones at that point. Okay, so people were underneath the cliffs. They were in the landings, like photographers that didn’t know where the person was going to ride to. Yeah, we’re literally in the line. Wow. It’s like, Get off my line. But they had to stop the competition in 2003 and they’re yelling up, like, like, on the loudspeaker, onto the mountain, like, get off the mountain. Like, get out from underneath the cliffs. Like, calling people out by name, like, you have to move. Yeah, wow. And so yeah, 2004 they had flagged out zones for for for riders or for spectators to watch. So that’s where all of that came from. It was a trial and error process, yeah, for all spectator zones.
Jeff Barber 21:50
Well, it sounds like you were doing a lot of this kind of free ride, jumping kind of stuff on your own, like, well before competing in rampage, would you though, like, like, for the competition, would you get nervous? Like, were you trying to do bigger stuff than you had done before, or was it more just like, This is my thing that I do, and I’m just going to do it, like, in front of people.
Lance Canfield 22:13
I felt relatively confident in my abilities to be able to ride this stuff, but it was bigger than anything else I had been riding. You know, jumping off roofs was about as close as it got to the size. But all of a sudden, in 2004 like I jumped off a 40 foot cliff five times during the weekend. Wow, the same the the super T drop, like he super T showed me that one in competition in 2003 and I was like, that’s a big drop. Now, yeah, I’m going to do that one for next year. Wow. So I planned for that one, and, yeah, it was definitely a lot bigger than what I’d been doing. I was certainly nervous. I think everyone there is nervous. Like whenever you go to a rampage. You can feel the energy in the canyon. You know, the riders are nervous when they’re dropping in. Like, yeah, we’re not all, we’re not all the superheroes that we’re seeing up there throwing backflips off 40 foot cliffs. Like, like, it was nerve wracking. And I’ve told people a few times that, you know, it was a lot like going to war you. You had a good 5050, chance of coming back home broken? Oh my goodness, yeah, those aren’t good odds. But that was no, that was my track record. I came home broken two out of four years.
Jeff Barber 23:32
Wow. Clearly, everybody there is riding at the limit. And, I mean, that’s obviously, that’s what makes it a spectacle and makes people want to watch it every year. At the time that you were riding, were you just riding, essentially, what was a downhill bike? Or were you building, sort of like more dedicated free ride bikes? Because I know, I know that used to be a thing. Free ride bikes were different from downhill bikes. So what? What were the bikes that you were using to compete on?
Lance Canfield 24:04
At that time, I always competed on bikes that I designed. So the first year I was on a it was our second generation. It was like, after the big fat, fatty fat, we decided 12 was too much, so we knocked down to 10 inches of travel. We called it the Fatty Fat.
Jeff Barber 24:21
So slightly less fat.
Lance Canfield 24:23
Yeah, slightly less fat. But it was a lot of travel. It was a big bike, and it worked really well for free ride. But honestly, designing those bikes, every one of them, was designed to be a race bike, okay, an advantage on a racetrack. That’s what I was trying for. Downhill racing, right? Yes, downhill racing. I never built a bike truly specific for free ride until about 2008 and I built the lucky that was an eight inch travel, traditional wheel path, not a pulley wheel bike. Okay, they’re easier to pop a wheelie on. Now to get the front end up pulling my mic is really difficult to get the front end up on. So coming off of a cliff at slow speeds, some of my worst wrecks at rampage were that like trying to get off of a cliff and the front end just drops away from you and you crash on your head. Yeah. Wow. So traditional wheel path easier to pop a wheelie, easier to compress and pop off of the lip, jump off the lip, more nimble. Okay, better in corners, more agile. But it didn’t save you the same way that a pulley wheel bike will like. If you case a jump on a pulley wheel bike, the wheel just gets out of the way and you just continue forward, and you almost don’t even know that you cased it like I hit the bender sender, which is a about 30 feet down and 70 feet out. I’m sure you’ve seen footage of that one, but the first time I hit it, I knuckled the landing, knuckled the top of the lip. And I didn’t even know that I cased it, because I was on on a pulley wheel bike, yeah, wow. I didn’t even know until I saw the footage, and I was like, Oh, I I case that, like, that could have been really bad on a normal bike.
Jeff Barber 26:04
Yeah, interesting. Are there, like, dedicated freeride bikes anymore, or have the downhill bikes kind of moved more in that direction, where you can pop on them and be a little bit more playful?
Lance Canfield 26:19
I don’t think that there’s a whole lot in the dedicated free ride bike kind of realm these days. Cam zinc spike, his new company, that thing looks like it’s probably a pretty proper free ride bike. Okay, it’s got small wheels, yeah, 29 ers aren’t the best for a free ride bike. They’re big. They’re unwieldy. They don’t spin and flip and do all the little tricks and stuff as well as a small wheel bike, in my opinion, at 27 five is still probably the most relevant in free ride, because it’s small enough to be whippable and jumpable and but it’s big enough that it can still roll over some things if you make mistakes. Yeah, okay, 26 was a little small. It would hang up on things pretty badly.
Jeff Barber 27:05
Interesting. So Canfield bikes use a patented suspension design known as Canfield balance formula, or CBF for short, that you designed along with your brother, Chris. So what makes the design different from others on the market?
Lance Canfield 27:22
Trying to keep it somewhat simple, I guess, the center of curvature, it stays positioned directly on top of the chain ring, okay, never moving. Never moving from there, okay, which is true center of the suspension. That is good because the wheel path and the tension segment of the chain rotate around the exact same spot. It allows the wheel to move freely independently of the chain tension. Okay, even if you’re pedaling, if you’re hitting bumps, if you’re breaking the wheel is always free to move conform to the terrain freely, okay, without the tension that a lot of companies design into their bikes, the chain tension causes the bike to have a little bit more anti squat, a firmness to the pedaling. It creates a bit of a platform, so to speak, which feels great in a parking lot and on smooth train, but as soon as you’re hitting bumps, it causes the bike to feel nervous. Just sure that you’ve probably ridden a bike that feels nervous going downhill but feels very sprightly climbing. Yeah, you know that’s kind of the trade off that all other companies do. The CBF patent allows the center of curvature to be very tightly focused directly on top of the chain ring, so that it never ever moves away throughout all of the travel. So no matter where you are in travel, it’s always going to pedal exactly the same, focusing all of that pedaling energy directly into the chain ring and propelling you forward, not moving your suspension up and down, none of that.
Jeff Barber 29:03
So getting back to that idea of, like the chain tension that a lot of other designs experience a lot of. For some people, what they’re doing is they’re using, like an O chain device, right? Are we talking about the same thing where you can, you can try to mitigate that, but the CBF, it does that by default, right? Like, you don’t need to worry about running an O chain, or, like, having a hub that’s gonna be like, yeah, higher engagement, or any of that stuff, right? Right?
Lance Canfield 29:33
Yes, that’s, that’s exactly it. The O chain is, I guess, a band aid for bikes that have pedal kick. As you compress the bike, the cranks will rotate counterclockwise, right and they’ll knock your feet. And so that’s it’s translating that bump force into your feet and causing the bike to feel nervous and you to like, maybe hit your brake. Because they’re like, you’re like, Ah, I’m getting out of control, right? What just happens where a cvf suspension doesn’t do that, it just openly, freely contours to the ground, and it makes you feel like you have more travel than you really do on shorter travel bikes, especially, but it gives you a lot of confidence on longer travel bikes.
Jeff Barber 30:23
Is CBF better suited for certain types of riding or travel ranges? I mean, looking at the Canfield lineup, I think is the shortest travel bike that you have it on? Is, is that the tilt with like, 130 is it? 130 rear? 141 38 Yep. 138 right? So, yeah. I mean, does Does it suit these longer travel bikes better, or is there, is there like a short travel application as well?
Lance Canfield 30:53
CBF works on any travel bike, any anything from long to short. Long travel bikes are the hardest ones to design that will pedal Well, that’s always been the hardest design wise to do. Yeah, and as you go shorter in travel, it becomes much easier to design. So cvf has been flushed out in the long travel modes to get it to where it’s at, and then the trickle down is that with shorter travel bikes, you feel like you have a little bit more travel than you really do on those shorter bikes.
Jeff Barber 31:34
So why is that? That you that you feel that…
Lance Canfield 31:37
It’s because the suspension is open to move freely, without regard to the pedaling or the braking. Okay, so it feels like you have more travel if, if your chain tension like if it gets tight as your wheel goes through the travel, that’s going to kick your pedals, and that’s going to make you feel like you’re running through your travel quicker than you really are, where ours is just open and smooth. It relies on the progression rate to resist bottom out right, and progression rate to create support at the sag point. It doesn’t require the chain tension to help create support for the rider.
Jeff Barber 32:24
Okay, yeah, and in addition to Canfield, there’s other bikes that use CBF suspension. I have not tested it on one of your bikes, but I have ridden a bike with CBF from revel the rascal. And I mean, it feels great, as it was one of my favorite bikes that I tested this year. And I’m wondering, does it work well for more like recreational riders like myself, or is there also an advantage for racers like what? How would you kind of subjectively describe, sort of like the ride feel and the performance of CBF. Is it designed more for like feeling good, or is it designed more for going fast and winning races?
Lance Canfield 33:09
Well, it does both. So it does work really, really well for anyone from a beginner all the way to a pro level rider, because of the confidence that it inspires the smoothness and the control that it it creates. One of my design goals every bike that we build is to have the bike feel very intuitive. Jump on the bike. It doesn’t feel like you need to do anything radical to set it up. It just works really well. Why does it? Yeah, it breaks, breaks smoothly. It pedals efficiently. It, you know, resists bottom out the right amount. It supports you so you don’t feel like you’re sagging too much or too little. If you get on a bike and you’re immediately comfortable with the bike, that creates a lot of confidence.
Jeff Barber 33:56
Yeah, it feels like you’re cheating. That’s exactly how I would describe my experiences. It’s intuitive. I didn’t feel like I had to know how to tune the suspension and set everything up. I mean, like you said, you get on it and it feels right and but that makes me wonder if, if I was a pro, would I be like, this is, like, dumbing it down, or like this. You know, bikes that have, like, a racy suspension design, a lot of those they they don’t feel fun to ride, right? I mean, they’re like, all business, and there’s definitely, like, a different ride feel to it. So yeah, how do you get, like, both of those characteristics out of a single design?
Lance Canfield 34:39
Well, you talk about a pro level racer and dumbing it down? Well, that’s that’s just an advantage on the racetrack. That’s what it’s giving you. It’s giving you confidence on the racetrack. It’s giving you a smooth suspension travel feel that gives you more traction. It it. The corners, under braking, everywhere, like it gives you more confidence. And why would you not do that? Right? You have a certain way that you like to set your bike up. You can still do those things, like a lot of really fast riders run their suspension really stiff, and CBF allows you to still do that, and it still pedals exactly the same. You can have your bike run too much sag, and it’ll still pedal, great. You can have very little sag. It’ll still pedal great. It, it stays perfectly focused on that top of the chain ring position, yeah, all the time, no matter where you are in travel. So it it allows you to tweak the characteristics of the bike performance to the way that you like to ride, but it doesn’t force you to do one certain thing. You don’t have to set up your sag exactly at 30% you can have more. You can have less. You can do whatever you want to do with setup, and it’ll still ride incredibly well and very intuitively.
Jeff Barber 36:06
Best of both worlds, I guess. And, and again, like I can vouch for that description of it, where it doesn’t seem to hinge so much on all those variables, at least getting that ride, feel that, that people want and and also, I guess what you’re saying too, is that, like, if it feels good, it’s gonna make you a faster rider. It’s gonna, you know, perform better, because what you’re feeling is what’s actually happening.
Lance Canfield 36:33
Exactly, yeah, racing is mostly mental. It’s it’s not, at least downhill racing is mostly mental. In my mind. It’s knowing the track well enough to be able to go 100% all the way down the track, because you know every single rock on the track, every route, you know where everything is, and exactly where to go and where to put your tires, and the pressure that you need to put on the tires so that you get grip, but don’t slide out, you know, and all of those things are mental, knowing the track, knowing your bike is set up correctly, knowing that every little detail has been accounted for before you hit the track. And physical attributes certainly play a part. Being able to pedal hard in the right spots, but knowing where you have to pedal hard is more important than being able to actually pedal hard.
Jeff Barber 37:29
I guess when you when you feel good, you ride good. And those are words to live by. So Canfield has been a proponent of shorter cranks and crank arms, specifically for a while now. Why is that like? How did you first kind of come to that realization?
Lance Canfield 37:49
In the beginning, you know, my brother came off the racetrack and he had pedal striked and sent himself over the bars, and he was so mad. He was just like, I hate this. It sucks. Like, hit my pedals and then I fly over the bars I was doing so well, you know, it’s frustrating when you have these mistakes on the track. And it was like, we can design something that’s going to help with that. You know, that’s where our cramp on ultimate pedals came from.
Jeff Barber 38:18
Oh, okay, so you started with the pedals. Do a thinner pedal.
Lance Canfield 38:23
Yeah, a thin pedal allowed us to not snag the pedal on stuff as well, and it gave you a lot more balance, like you’re closer to the spindle height, then you probably have seen the new set of pedals that came out that have like a hang down to them, yeah, yeah, put your body weight below the spindle, yeah, center, which creates a lot of stability. And that’s the goal with those super thin pedals, is to get more stability out of the pedals. But pedal strikes become less and less the thinner the pedals are. Our pedals have a six millimeter thick leading edge, okay, so nearly impossible to snag on anything.
Jeff Barber 39:03
What are we talking? How much additional clearance did that give you over, like, the the normal pedals, or the pedals that you guys were running before that?
Lance Canfield 39:13
It’s a few millimeters like, yeah, the old ones were, like, 17 to 19 millimeters thick, okay, and ours are, ours were 11, okay, which is the thinnest that you can make with a full length spindle and solid construction, like downhill, worthy construction on a pedal.
Jeff Barber 39:32
So we’re talking like on either side, then you’re talking like maybe three millimeters. But I guess I mean, that probably makes a huge difference when you’re riding at the limit like that.
Lance Canfield 39:44
It makes a huge difference. Millimeters make all the difference in the world when you’re talking about a bike. And that’s a lot of the design changes that have increased the comfort level and the safety level of bikes in the last 10. Years come from like three to six millimeters kind of differences. Yeah, yeah. Cranks were another addition to that. They provided a lot more clearance, like five millimeters per size, shorter, right, right? So if 160 fives is all you can get all of a sudden, at 160 makes a huge difference. I run 150 fives on my downhill bike, and, like, at six feet tall, like, that’s pretty ideal for me. Wow, I could easily run, yeah, it’s short, but for downhill bike, it’s amazing. And, yeah, the crank length is one of the things that dictates your rollout gear, like, how much one rotation on the cranks is, how far you go on the pavement, right? Yeah. So front chain ring, rear chain ring, the crank length and the wheel size. Your crank length dictates that as well. Okay, so if you go 10 millimeters shorter on your crank length, you can go two teeth smaller on your front chain ring. Okay, gotcha so more clearance on your chain ring, more clearance on your cranks, and you still have the exact same rollout.
Jeff Barber 41:09
So what size chain ring were you / are you running on your downhill bike?
Lance Canfield 41:14
I still run a 34. I still run a pretty tall gear, because I still like to go really fast. And trails are getting more buffed out and faster. So it’s still a reasonable gear, 34 but we used to run, you know, 36, 38.
Jeff Barber 41:30
So you are thinking about the rollout, sort of that initial peddling with the shorter cranks. What about? Because you were also saying during the race, like peddling can make a huge difference, like, you know, flatter sections or transition sections. So yes, does Are there any disadvantages then to those shorter cranks, or is it all kind of just taken care of, as long as you’ve got the right gearing?
Lance Canfield 41:56
The one disadvantage that you could argue is that a longer crank gives you more leverage. So if you come to a complete stop in a corner or close to a complete stop and you need to just stomp those pedals and get going again as fast as possible, that’s where a longer crank is going to help you. Imagine a start of a BMX race, right if you need to win the race straight out of the gate, then a longer crank may help you everywhere else. The shorter crank, in my opinion, is far better. It allows you to pedal through rocky spots where other people are not able to because their feet are going to be smacking rocks. You know, it’s way safer to be able to not snag your pedals and fly over the bars land on your head, right? So it it keeps your heart rate lower by being able to spin a smaller circle. Okay? You can imagine taking, like, really big steps up, like a boot pack, to climb up to the top of a ski run or something in the back country, right? You never find a boot pack that has big, wide space steps that they’re always little, tiny steps, right, right? Yeah, it’s your heart rate low, and it’s just easier. It’s easier to make a small step than it is a big step. And one of the reasons why it’s easier is because your muscles fire stronger in that smaller area when you start reaching outside of, like it’s your legs happy zone, like making those big steps you don’t have near the power, it drops off really quickly. So yeah, it allows you to put down a more powerful pedal stroke. Some people find that they can run the exact same chain ring size with the shorter cranks, because they’re able to put their power down more efficiently.
Jeff Barber 43:53
Well, I think a lot of riders are finding that they really benefit from shorter cranks, especially if they are not six feet tall like you. But it sounds like even tall riders can have an advantage to these shorter cranks. I mean, like on a trail bike, what would you choose to run like, as far as a crank length?
Lance Canfield 44:15
I run 160 fives on mine at six feet.
Jeff Barber 44:19
Okay, that’s a little shorter.
Lance Canfield 44:21
Yeah, just a little bit shorter than what traditionally like 171 75 are what you normally find on most trail bikes, straight from OEM, right? Yeah, which, in my opinion, 170s are. They’re not great for anybody that’s, you know, under six feet like that. That’s just a huge handicap. Honestly, I don’t know why that hasn’t changed already.
Jeff Barber 44:46
Yeah, well, also, so then, does that allow you to adjust the geometry of your bikes? Like, are you taking into account the shorter crank lengths and maybe going with like, a lower bottom bracket? Is there an. Advantage to that or bottom brackets already kind of in a good place.
Lance Canfield 45:04
You can go lower on the bottom bracket design wise. But I haven’t done that specifically, just because some people, they still want to run those longer cranks. They they have it in their head that they have to have that longer crank. They’ll leverage. Leverage is everything, right? So I don’t want to tell anybody you have to run short cranks, yeah, even though there’s so many advantages, it’s really hard to argue.
Jeff Barber 45:30
Yeah, you’re making a good case.
Lance Canfield 45:32
Studies, even in road biking, where short cranks are way more efficient and they can put down power way better, even on the climbing stages, short cranks are better interesting. There’s plenty of studies out there to squirrel on on that.
Jeff Barber 45:50
You’ve got me convinced now too. Because, I mean, I’m, I’m six foot three, and, yeah, I’ve never really felt the need or anything to even try anything shorter. You know, the stock stuff tends to feel fine to me, but it sounds like there are a lot of advantages for everybody.
Lance Canfield 46:10
So you’re really the exception to the rule.
Jeff Barber 46:12
Oh, so I shouldn’t be on 165?
Lance Canfield 46:14
No, I would try it. I mean, there’s a lot of benefits to it.
Jeff Barber 46:20
Okay, well, I was gonna say I don’t know if you know which cranks are on the test spike that I’ve got in, but I’ve got the the yellow screamy in for tests right now, hardtail, they came with some Canfield cranks. I guess I’ll have to measure them and see which size they are.
Lance Canfield 46:36
They’re written on the backside of the arm, so okay, right near the pedal, you can see what size they are, and they’re easy to swap out. So we could send you a couple different sizes, and you can quite quickly just swap them out and try different crank lengths, and you can get your own feel for what length you like and where that tipping point is of like, Okay, those are too short, yeah, you know. But typically people only take a ride before they’re they get past like, Oh, this feels a little different. And then it’s like, oh, this just feels normal, right? And then, and then, when you switch back to a long crank, then the long cranks feel really awkward. That’s usually how it goes,
Jeff Barber 47:19
I bet, right? When you start, you know, having more pedal strikes and all that stuff like, you just get used to, like, a certain, certain setup. And then it can be tough to go back.
Lance Canfield 47:32
One of the biggest things about short cranks that we’re finding is that it really benefits older riders. We’re having a, there’s a huge segment of older riders that are ripping still like and they’re, you know, they’re fighting all the age problems of achy everything, right, right, their knees and their hips and their ankles all hurt after a ride. Short cranks help with that so drastically. Okay, yeah, we’re finding that is a big reason why a lot of people are switching to shorter cranks. Yeah, whether they’re short or they’re achy, those are the two biggest reasons people really love our cranks and are switching over, besides the obvious of pedal strikes.
Jeff Barber 48:17
Gotcha cool. One of the things I wanted to ask you about, as a smaller brand, how has Canfield been affected by the industry supply fluctuations over the past few years?
Lance Canfield 48:30
That’s an interesting question. There’s, I think, every bike company, every component company, everyone has been affected in one way or another. We saw this rise in in people buying bikes. In the beginning of COVID The first year was like, you couldn’t keep anything in stock. You sell things as fast as you could sell it. It was amazing. It was like the opposite of what I expected
Jeff Barber 48:58
The first couple weeks, we were like, oh, shoot, like, nobody’s gonna buy anything, and the world is doomed.
Lance Canfield 49:04
Yeah, those first couple weeks were really scary. We had just purchased a property, a new warehouse, we had just moved the company. I had just invested every penny I had into production. And then, and then COVID hit, and I was quite nervous there for the first beginning of it. And those first couple of weeks, you know, we had a lot of conversations on, what are we going to do, you know? And ultimately we just decided, like, well, we’re we’re invested, like, either we succeed or we just, like, quit. And like, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to quit. Yeah. Like, so we charged full steam ahead, and all of a sudden, sales just started to flip the opposite direction of what we thought was going to happen. We were selling everything we could, yeah. And then it got to a point where everybody was out of stock of everything, and we were just scram. Willing to try to find parts, because we were kind of operating in a just in time type of ordering situation. It’s like, oh, we can call Fox and just get a fork, you know, right? Fox didn’t have forks, yeah, and we couldn’t find a 12 speed chain to save our lives, and wheels were, like, completely unavailable. So we started going all sorts of different directions. At one point, we ordered custom Hadley hubs, and we had some spank downhill rims. And so we had a local place in Colorado lace up downhill wheels for us so that we had wheels to be able to put on our downhill bikes to complete a build. At a certain point, we sold bikes that didn’t have a drive train. It’s like, it’s a complete bike minus drive train. If you can find the drive train, put on your bike, buy it up. Yeah, we went all sorts of different directions to to be able to get the parts that we needed, to continue to sell bikes and lead times, all of a sudden, went crazy. Yeah, it wasn’t a three month lead time anymore. It was a if you were lucky, if you had a one year lead time. And a lot of companies were giving us two years and even up to three years of lead time to be able to get product. Wow. And so everyone in the industry started ordering tons, like huge orders, because they were like, well, I’ve got a two year lead time. I need two years worth of product in this order, right?
Jeff Barber 51:27
And based on the current demand, which was, like, much higher than it had been previous years, right?
Lance Canfield 51:34
Mm hmm, yeah, much higher. And so, yeah, this high demand and then these long lead times led to over ordering, and then the demand all of a sudden just dropped. Yeah. One day it was just like, hey, the demand’s gone. Uh oh.
Jeff Barber 51:51
It wasn’t gradual at all for you. I mean, it was like, almost just like a light switch got turned off?
Lance Canfield 51:56
It was kind of like that, yeah, within about a month, we saw, like a big change. It was like, oh, what’s going on. And then it just continued from there. And so people started to receive these orders, these large orders that they had placed. A lot of the big companies, the big three, you know, had massive orders in that were interfering with the little guys being able to place orders and get product in a timely fashion. Yeah, and the warehouse is filled up, but the demand had dried up, right? And so we’re still seeing results of that, where these big companies still have massive amounts of inventory and they’re still blowing out stuff where we made smart decisions on how much we ordered. We we’d never really had too many things that were in Overstock, too much of anything we we had the right amount, we had the amount that we needed to sustain our company for the next year and grow and do what we needed to do. But these big companies had so much overstock that they discounted everything to the point where, you know, the consumer, at a certain point is just going to buy the cheap thing, because so cheap. How can I not buy that? And then they have a new bike, and it may not be the best bike, but it’s a new bike, and they have it, and they’re not going to buy a bike, a boutique bike, at that point, you know.
Jeff Barber 53:25
Right, especially when you’re comparing prices and, you know, yeah, you’re like, Well, I can get this one a lot, a lot cheaper.
Lance Canfield 53:31
So we had us, and pretty much every other company on the planet, no matter how big or small they had to try to compete with those low prices. So everyone is on sale, like just bottom basement. And it’s, it’s not like we were making great margins in the first place, right? It’s like we were making margins that allowed us to pay our staff Well, and, you know, pay our bills and grow the company a little bit and plan for next year and have money in the bank to be able to pay for production. Because, you know, small companies, we don’t have credit with these manufacturers where we pay for the product up front, yeah, so, you know, that was that’s really difficult for us to compete in a marketplace when, yeah, they’re just blowing out all this overstock. And it, it’s, it’s not because we made a bad decision, it’s because these gigantic corporations still have massive Overstock, and they’re continuing to just blow it out at bargain.
Jeff Barber 54:37
Do you have a sense for like, how much they still have, like, like, how much longer do you think this is going to go on before for we finally kind of clear everything out, and stuff starts getting back to normal?
Lance Canfield 54:50
Well, Bicycle Retailer, in their latest magazine had a graph on that, and there’s still a decent amount of overstock. Like, I. Pretty good amount. You can see it ever so slightly coming down. Yeah, and you can see the sales look like they they’re fairly flat. But the amount of of inventory versus the amount of sales is still, is still way off. You know, we’re hoping that through this next season, 2025 hopefully that will they’ll work through that overstock of inventory, and we’ll get back to normal, hopefully for 2026 being optimistic, I hope that that’s the case. I think it will be. But you know, the time will tell. Can’t really predict the future, just make your best guesses and plan accordingly. And I think a lot of companies have just gone on just life support. It’s like minimal staff try to eliminate expenses wherever they can, do whatever they can to basically wait out the storm and wait until things get back to normal, so that we can try to, you know, start growing again, and that growth benefits the customer as much as it benefits us, because we can develop new products like it’s, yeah, difficult to spend a lot of resources on developing things when There’s not a lot of spare resources,
Jeff Barber 56:21
You definitely have to be an optimist, it sounds like in the bike industry, and at times that gets the industry into trouble when you’re overly optimistic. But yeah, good to hear that there is still that hope and that, you know, it’s going to get better, and we’re always looking forward to the next thing. So speaking of the next thing, yeah, we’re not going, yeah. What’s next for Canfield? Then what? What mountain bike developments or trends or future products? What’s got you excited right now?
Lance Canfield 56:53
Well, the thing that has me the most excited is that our customers and people just voted the tilt. That’s right, of the year? Yeah, that definitely Stokes the fire under me.
Jeff Barber 57:04
Yeah. And a lot of people are probably surprised, right again, because Camfield is like a smaller brand, and I would, I would have been surprised, and would have been kind of skeptical, like, I don’t know if that’s right, you know, maybe you know something was going on with the voting, but I can say that, like our previous Features Editor, Matt Miller tested, at least, he tested the Tilt, I believe, and maybe another Canfield bike. And then another of our contributors, Chris Scheiffer, tested one, and both of them just, they love the Canfield Tilt. They love CBF suspension, and so, yeah, that’s, I think it’s a recognition of that, that this is actually different, and it’s something that’s yeah, that a lot of people maybe should take a look at.
Lance Canfield 57:49
Yeah, those guys did love the bike. You know, we were super grateful that they wrote such raving review about it in their in their reviews, you know, Matt ended up actually buying lithium, right? Yeah, afterwards enough to actually buy his personal bike from us, yeah. So that was I, I love it when I hear stories like that, you know, just like you really did like it, I’m so happy I did my job, right?
Jeff Barber 58:18
Yeah, yeah, that’s cool. And so yeah, what about feature products? Or are there, are there trends or things that you’re seeing in the industry that have you excited about coming up with new stuff?
Lance Canfield 58:30
The trend of changing standards does not ever have me thrilled, so I’m excited that we have some pretty good standards that are already on the board, and hopefully things are kind of settling out to no more use those standards, and then, you know, develop, develop new bikes, and I’m excited about, hopefully not having standards come out from left field like we’ve seen in the last 10 years.
Jeff Barber 58:58
Yeah, do you think that’ll change? Like, do you think that these component, companies and different have they gotten the message, or do they not care? And that’s just what they do.
Lance Canfield 59:08
I think there’s a lot of good standards on the table right now, and there’s a lot to there’s still multiple standards in many ways. You know, yeah, chain line spacing and wheel hub standards and yeah, but you know, head tubes are mostly 4456 so it makes it a lot easier for us to just do 4456 on all of our bikes, and that way we have one headset that fits everything. Yeah, it’s easier from an inventory standpoint and sales standpoint. On our side, I like boost spacing, it works quite well, and the chain ring offsets to accommodate super boost. And, you know, I think super boost plus was, like, it’s a millimeter and a half difference really mean, okay, that one doesn’t really make. Make a ton of sense to me, but super boost is reasonable because it does give you a wider spoke flange spacing, a tougher wheel, considerably tougher. Just read a or watched a YouTube video on how much stronger a 157 wheel is, and I was quite shocked at how much stronger it was surprised, excited about that, potentially exploring that a little bit more. As far as products that we’re doing, we have a titanium version of the Nimble nine coming out, okay, so a tried and true geometry that is awesome, really fun bike, and shaves about a pound and a half off of our steel bike, which is pretty considerable. We have a lot of customers that they’re on nimble dines as their everyday bike, and they absolutely love them. So I’m excited to release the titanium bike. It’s gorgeous. I’ve got some samples, and I’ve been riding it down here in Sedona and doing photos. And yeah, it’s it’s everything that we had hoped for. The tilt and lithium have been in their cycle for about four years now, which is a little bit long, but that is part of the COVID problems, is why it’s continued for the four years. However, we do have new stuff coming on on that front, some new design changes and some things, I think that a lot of people are going to be really excited about a couple of great features that are big improvements on adjustability from what it was. I’ve always been a designer that designs things fairly simply, in the regard that I don’t want to give people a lot of adjustments that allow them to make an adjustment that will allow them to make it feel bad, right?
Jeff Barber 1:01:55
Okay, yeah, limited adjustments, only the pre-approved ones.
Lance Canfield 1:01:59
Yes. And so I’ve given a few pre approved adjustments to the new bike. Of course, everyone’s on udH these days, so that that had to happen, so a few things like that. But that will be launched here about a month or so from now. We’ll be okay. We’ll be launching that, so you’ll be able to see all the details on that. And I think those changes, in addition to bike of the year thing, I think that, hopefully that will point a lot of people to us and and help us survive through this next year, and get, you know, even more things out on the market.
Jeff Barber 1:02:39
Yeah, yeah, that’s great. Well, yeah, we’re excited to see what you come up with next. You know, you’ve had such a long career in the bike industry, and, you know, starting out as a racer, and, you know, designing bikes and building this brand. And so, yeah, it’s been really great to talk to you hear your story. And yeah, we can’t wait to see what’s next.
Lance Canfield 1:03:00
I appreciate it, Jeff. Thank you so much. And, yeah, just real quickly, I’d like to thank all of our customers and the people that are listening to this podcast, and just can feel curious, and you know, like you, Jeff, like short crank curious and trying to see all these like, hopefully you’re seeing the things that we’ve done in the past and the innovations that we have stimulated, whether it’s 20 Niners that were actually fun to ride, 2013 the first hardtails on the market that were fun and awesome to ride. They didn’t drive like a bus. Thin pedals, short cranks, you know, CBF, suspension, focusing things in so that the rider experience is better and more intuitive and just gives you an advantage that you can be proud of to see that head head to badge with a skull.
Jeff Barber 1:03:56
Well, you can find out more about some of the bikes and products we talked about at canefield bikes DotCom. We’ll have that link for you in the show notes. That’s all we’ve got this time. We’ll talk to you again next time you.
Never Miss an Episode
- Listen on Spotify
- Listen on Apple Podcasts
- Listen on Google Podcasts
- Listen on Stitcher
- Listen on Overcast
- Get the RSS Feed
- View all Podcast Episodes
3 Comments
1 hour ago
3 hours ago
0 minutes ago