(heavy metal pounding)
(air rushing)
- Suspension on gravel bikes is a thing.
Now it's fair to say that these guys, Lauf,
are probably the pioneers.
Certainly they are the most distinctive.
Once you see a Lauf fork, you will definitely remember it.
And they're based right here in Iceland.
And when they found out that we were
over here to do some riding,
they invited us to come and hang out
and they'll hopefully explain a little bit more
about how this works.
They're based right here in downtown Reykjavik,
the capital city of Iceland.
Population at just 128,000 people,
200,000 in the wider capital district,
and that's 2/3 of the entire population of the country.
Now you might get the idea if you can see the amount
of Gortex being worn around here that it
is a little bit chilly, but don't make the mistake,
it is in fact late summer.
And they are just in here.
No, that's the pub, up a bit.
No, that's the tattoo parlor, up a bit more.
There you go.
Look, Lauf, over there.
We caught up with the guys here yesterday evening,
pizza and beers, so they should be expecting us.
Hello, good morning.
- [Gudberg] Look who it is.
- Alright, this is Lauf, come on in.
So we've got Gudberg here.
Hey man, morning, you alright?
And Benedict.
So these guys are the founders of Lauf
and Oleg over there is working on sales, right?
- Yup. - Cool.
And you also have three people out of the office
on gravel bike GT, spot riding?
- [Benedict] Yeah, they're
out there having fun. - Yeah, racing in the US
and Belgium.
- Nice, so six people in total at the moment?
- Yeah, usually only three or four right here.
Yeah, the other people's traveling,
visiting shops and doing races.
(whip cutting through air) - Alright then, a quick tour.
So in here we've got a workshop.
In there we've got a little test lab.
(electronic beep)
(hammer banging)
(electronic beep)
There, of course, clearly workspace.
What I particularly like, guys,
is the fact that there is less workspace
than there is socializing space because we got
a bar over there and we've got a kitchen, and then in here,
I'm just gonna give you a very quick rundown
just to make sure you know exactly what Lauf do.
So the forks, already seen these.
So this is the mountain bike fork,
the TR Boost, that was product number one,
although this is the second iteration of it.
Then, the Carbonara for fat bikes, clearly.
And then, of most relevance to us, I think,
it's the Grit fork.
So this is the gravel bike fork.
And then now the Grit SL,
which is the latest version of a gravel bike fork.
And this, very excitingly,
which is their first complete bike as well.
So this is the True Grit, their own frameset,
and we'll find out a little bit more about that later on.
First though, we wanna know how does that work?
(mellow urban music)
Benedict, can you explain please, firstly,
how the forks work.
The basic principle behind it.
- So, yeah, basically it's all about controlling flex.
Depth flex is pretty easy.
You just use a soft material, basically.
Basically you're gonna have a flexing component.
But to control the movement of the tire,
that was the real challenge.
So that's why we have,
that's why we came up this exact design,
having the springs spaced apart.
So lower stack of springs and upper stack of springs,
this gives it lateral stiffness, that's the whole idea.
- Okay, and so the axle of the wheel is there
and then those are leaf springs, am I right?
- Yeah, those are leaf springs, yeah.
- And so the path of the axle
is literally straight up, straight down?
- Yeah, pretty much straight, yes.
But initially gonna move slightly backwards, slow,
perpendicular to the surface of the springs,
but then it's gonna straighten out a little bit
so it makes it extra sensitive in the beginning
toward small bumps, and then it straightens out.
- [Simon] I mean, do you call each one of those a spring?
- Yeah, springs, 'cause that's what they are.
So a lot of people think they are carbon springs
and we don't bother correcting that. (laughs)
- Okay. (laughs)
- (laughing) It's happening everywhere
in reviews all over the internet.
But if we would use carbon fiber for it,
it would be way too brittle.
It would just snap on a big impact.
So the material we use is a super
high-performance glass fiber.
(hammer banging)
- Okay. - So it's done in the same way
as a carbon fiber in bikes.
You have epoxy and then you have the fibers.
We just have glass fiber instead of carbon fiber.
And, yeah, this fiber can flex maybe twice as far,
or at least twice as far,
as a regular carbon and just won't break.
So these were samples we made back in the days
just to fatigue test springs,
but they also do a good job of explaining
why the fork kinda looks as it does.
So if you just have,
let's say if you make up normalish looking fork,
but you wanna make it really forgiving,
so you'd make it slim in some dimensions
to make it forgiving towards impacts.
And then you basically end up with this system,
so it can flex like this, but it can twist also.
You can feel this, this is yeah, really noodly.
- It is very noodly, yeah.
Okay, so you've just cut one of your springs?
- Yeah, it didn't break.
Yeah, (laughs) it don't break. (laughing)
I'll catch it, no worries.
So here how we arrange them.
This is not the full distances, as you can see,
compared to the fork but still just this short distance
gives you a really stiff feel, so this is what.
- Yeah, I don't have the biggest muscles,
GCN viewers know this, but still.
That's quite incredible, isn't it?
I guess one of the important things is to note
that there is less travel on a Lauf fork
than on a telescopic fork.
So on the Grit gravel fork, it's what?
32 mils, or what?
- It's like close to 30, so it's like 25, 30.
- [Simon] Okay, and then on the mountain bike forks,
it's what, 60 mil? - Double that, roughly.
Yeah, so they should never go further up than that.
Two reasons.
It would be a huge fork when you need
to have these really long springs and the weight
is gonna approach somewhat telescopic forks.
So just construction wise it wouldn't make a lot of sense,
but also just the function of it because the response
of forks make them better suited at dealing with small hits.
So the high frequency stuff gets ironed out,
but slower and bigger impacts, it won't do much for that.
- [Simon] Can you talk me through
and show me some of the early prototypes?
- Yeah, come over here to our prototyping department.
(Simon laughing) - Cool.
(mellow urban music)
Now if I were to guess,
I'd say that that was probably an early prototype.
I bet this is that?
- Yeah, so this is the first rideable, in a way, prototype.
And this is not light, and think about it,
here we were trying to make the lightest
suspension fork in the world.
(Simon laughing)
(laughing) It doesn't feel like it.
- No, so what you made it out of?
- So this is here aluminum, everything,
but up here we have a kilo of steel.
Yeah, this fork tested just the main concept,
yeah, guiding tire up and down.
But, obviously, we had to work on the weight a bit.
So next logical step was to make it out of carbon.
And that's where-- - So presumably
that's your passion, the composites.
That was proof of concept, but it was always gonna be
about carbon fiber. - Exactly, yeah.
So this is the first carbon fork we made.
So this was made just here in-house, by us,
up in the attic here.
There's more room we could borrow there.
After work we were coming here
and cutting carbon prepreg and laying that into molds,
and then inflating bladders in the parts to cure it.
An oven we also built, I can show you afterwards,
a big oven we made.
- You built an oven.
- Yeah, like a huge oven and we carried it up
to the fifth floor up a small,
like a round staircase, up there.
It was really tricky to get it up, but yeah. (laughs)
So this is a mold for our next iteration
after the one I showed you previously, this one here.
And here we are focusing on how to make the pockets
for the springs properly, attachment pockets.
So we make those with these inserts here.
So these here, pas-sets, are used in the layer process.
So you attach them to the fork
and lay up all around these.
- That looks like quite fine work.
- Yeah, yes it is.
- Does that headset race show a bit
about the weather in Iceland probably?
(Benedict laughing)
Then I start to kinda feel it comes out
in my cyclocross bike at the end of the winter.
- Yeah, maybe it does.
(Simon laughing)
This is normal to me.
- Yeah, exactly.
So bangs look like after two weeks in Iceland, yeah.
- The key thing was to make
something really simple and lightweight,
something to be able to fall
in between rigid forks and telescopic forks,
and part of that is zero maintenance.
So there are no pivots or nothing, so.
As long as we design the springs and make them properly
to make them last forever, which they do.
With our latest forks, they work forever,
and if not, we have a really long warranty on them.
But nothing can fail in this
and you don't have to maintain anything.
It just, yeah, goes and goes.
- Yeah, how do you test the springs?
Can you talk me through some of the tests that you?
- Yeah, we do a lot of tests, we--
- In your
test lab right? - Most importantly
fatigue testing.
Can I show you that?
- Yeah, let's go for it, fine, let's have a look.
(mellow jazz music) (hammer banging)
(Simon laughing)
That's really strong stuff, isn't it?
(hammer banging)
(machine whirring)
- So, yeah, this is the room we do a lot of our testing in.
- I'll tell you what, it looks more
like a torture chamber than anything the most, look.
Dare I ask what?
- This is a torture machine, I mean,
fatigue testing and testing in general.
It's torture of--
- Oh, I see, it's like a running road, that's the bump.
- Yes, we call it the hamster wheel, this one.
And we mount the fork up here with a tire and all,
just like complete test because most of the tests that,
for example, time after winter and with testing testers,
basically official bike component testers,
they focus on just the part itself.
Here we wanted to test it
with the wheel and everything,
just to be completely sure.
And then we just make different bumps here
and make it rotate at different speeds,
and they hit the wheel here.
Yeah, so this is from the length of it I'm gonna guess
that this is probably a gravel fork spring here.
So we flex them to roughly 70%
of where we have the bump stop on the fork.
And we need them to do, require them to do,
100,000 cycles of that without losing 10%
in original stiffness.
A lot of it goes into just quality controlling
what we do here because always
when we make springs with our vendor in Europe,
they make springs and send us sample of it,
and the remainder goes to our fork vendor in Asia.
So we always test what they are producing forks out of.
But this has probably taken us about four years
to really dial in how to make it because it's really tricky.
You need to maintain pressure while you're curing it,
but at the same time you need to have exact,
really, really exact, thickness of it.
If it's off by just .1 millimeter you get
a way different stiffness and it just, yeah.
It's unrideable, too soft or too hard.
- Given that you've kind of brought technology to cycling
maybe that hasn't existed in this field before,
has some of this gone on to the frameset as well?
- In one way, obviously,
just because we have our fork we wanted
to make a geometry that was dialed in for the fork,
but that's maybe not a revolutionary thing.
It's just a frame that fits really nicely
onto a fork and works well in gravel.
But then in terms of maybe material experience,
we come from a different angle than other bike makers.
So we have been using this material for a long time
and have been learning lots and lots of things doing that.
- Interesting, can we take a look at the frame?
- Yeah, let's go.
(mellow tropical music)
(hammer banging)
(Simon chuckling)
- My hammering technique leaves a bit to be desired.
(cameraman laughing)
So here it is, the True Grit.
Now this could probably have been out
for just under a year now, is that right?
- [Gudberg] Yeah, a little bit under a year.
- Okay, and so you're motivation for doing it, I guess,
was to build the perfect frame around your forks
'cause I guess when you're adding in them in the suspension
the front of the bike has to lift up slightly
to allow the front wheel to move.
- Yeah, exactly.
When we did the bike we, like we say,
we started with a fork and descend off from that.
And it's a little bit longer than rigid forks
because you have this little bit of suspension,
so this one has about 30 millimeters,
so it adds about 20 millimeters to the axle to crown,
so it's a little bit taller.
Instead of entering gravel from road bikes side of things,
like you say, we entered from mountain bikes side of things
since we're mountain bikers.
So we have a long top tube and shorter stems
and then a slack handle.
- So, actually, if I stuck a 135 little stem
on that and a pair of flat handle bars,
I'd basically be riding.
- Basically. - The mountain bike I had
back in the mid-'90s. - Basically.
Cable running is essentially tubes.
So this frame is kind of a new technology.
The whole front triangle is a one-piece.
Usually you have joints around the head tube,
joints around the seat tube, and bottom bracket,
and then just tubes between.
But this one is a one-piece front triangle
and then the rear triangle,
we're using simple ideas and reliable solutions.
We go for, like for the bottom brackets,
easy internal routing.
- I think I can hear (people cheering)
people cheering in the conversation
when you just mentioned friendly bottom brackets.
When you mentioned beer,
now I'm wondering whether this bike is custom built
for Dan Lloyd because there is a bottle opener
where you would normally have a front derailleur.
So, is that like a standard?
- Yeah, gravel and beer kind of goes together. (laughs)
- Yeah, so it would very go.
If anyone is still not entirely sure
about the benefits of 1x,
if you'd replace your front derailleur
with a beer bottle opener,
then maybe that's gonna convince you.
I haven't unfortunately spent nearly
enough time riding this bike or this fork,
but I can certainly give you my first impressions
because I was super intrigued
to actually try this out for myself.
And in use, it's maybe less about what you feel
from the fork as what you don't feel.
So, I'm looking at the road
and I'm seeing all them things that I would normally expect
to then feel translated through the handlebars,
and they just don't really come to the handlebars.
It's a bit like having a really, really soft tire
from an absorption perspective, but yet,
with none of the squirm, none of the roll,
and none of the actual damage to hitting your rims.
So that probably will be my best synopsis of it.
Clearly, you need to spend loads more time on it,
but there we go.
That's what it feels like to ride in the short term.
There is, however, one bit of this bike
that we can thoroughly road test and, Gudberg,
I believe you're gonna demonstrate for us right now.
The bottle opener.
- Full one.
- Okay. - Alright.
(bottle cap clanking)
- Here you go, mate.
- Nice, thanks very much.
And this is home brew?
- Home brew from Lov-ett.
- Fantastic, ooh, whoa.
(Gudberg and Simon laughing)
Great, well okay.
Right, anyway, cheers Gudberg.
- Sorry! - Did you wear shorts just
to make me look like a complete Southern softie?
- [Gudberg] Kind of a practical joke now
around here for visitors.
- Well, fair play for wearing shorts
'cause it is freezing cold.
(Gudberg laughing)
Okay, well, Gudberg, thank you so much for, what,
lending me your bike, letting me take it for a spin,
and also showing us around the HQ, as Benedict as well.
- Thanks for coming over.
- Hey, that is cool, man. - It was nice messing around.
- We better wrap things up before the snow comes
'cause it certainly feels like it's on its way.
And you can put some trousers on, as well. (laughs)
- Thank you. (laughing)
- Just to start, you start your freezing,
you're utterly, bitterly cold.
Anyway, if you wanna see some more from Iceland
then do make sure you check out the epic ride
that Neil Donoghue and I were able to go on.
And also before leaving,
do make sure you give this a big thumbs up.