- Welcome back to Berm Peak.
We're not on Berm Peak right now. We're at Cane Creek.
We're gonna do sort of a little factory tour.
But I'm really just trying to gain access to their
torture chamber, where they test bike parts.
They see how they perform,
and they also try to break 'em
to see how they can make 'em stronger.
I have some parts with me that I want to test.
So without further ado, let's get in there.
(upbeat music)
So under this roof, Cane Creek, engineers bike products,
they design them, test them, but they also assemble them
before they go out to end users.
And so there are a lot of tools here
that you can't just buy at, like let's say, Harbor Freight.
(upbeat music)
So they have to actually build and design tools
that are used for doing the jobs here.
For instance, when installing the can on a shock,
you can do it by hand,
but it's, it's really, really difficult.
Roofus does it by hand.
- You ain't a man, if you can't can.
(upbeat music)
- He's a big dude. He's got no problem with it,
but I damn near broke my fingers off. Ooh.
And so they have a can smasher.
The can smasher is made for smashing the can on,
just basically a custom made piece of metal.
That's just one of the many tools that they use here
to just put stuff together.
(upbeat music)
This over here is like a suspension fork service station.
What's funny is my fork service station
is a garbage can and a bike stand.
- Mine was too before I started working at Cane Creek.
- [Seth] They put like a basin over here
and then a couple of little jigs that they made
to hold things in place.
For instance, here's crown and a set of lowers,
fits right in here.
When I'm like trying to turn a bolt on a suspension fork
I kind of like put my arm through it, to hold it straight.
And they have actually designed something.
It looks like at a nylon to just keep it from turning.
They also have this little jig here.
So let's say you were to take a fork and put it down.
It just stays in place with a sink right below it.
So all the fluids can just drain in.
- And this is where removing the seals is a breeze.
If you have a way to like securely clamp your lowers, so.
- [Seth] This is kind of inspirational.
There are a lot of like hacks here.
(lively music)
So as I was showing before,
when they take the seals out of forks here,
they actually just use a wrench.
Like almost any other home mechanic would
but to press the seals back in
they do in a very precise way.
They use this press,
which looks like it was made in the year of the flood.
This is seriously old, but heavy and reliable.
And they put the wiper seals in here
and they press it down and it goes evenly into both lowers.
Now, considering every helm suspension fork
comes out of this facility.
If you have one, seals were actually pressed in
with this exact press.
This press that I'm touching right here.
And so we are all connected
to this press, I guess, through that.
So I've seen Jack, like he's waiting in front
of this office, he's waiting in front of that office.
He's like obsessed with the offices.
What, shouldn't he be like laying a dog bed or like?
- So Jack's a super good salesman.
And what he does is he goes around
office to office begging for treats
and is usually pretty successful with his hit rate.
- [Seth] That makes sense.
(upbeat music)
- This is a no pups allowed area,
but pups are the least of what is not allowed
in this restricted area.
This is where they test everything.
So I brought a fork that I don't really care about.
And so we're gonna kind of ease into it,
go through some of the machines
and then we're gonna see if we can smash it.
(climatic music)
- What does this thing do?
- [Engineer] That is an electromagnetic Dyno.
So it can run dampers up to 160 inches a second.
- [Seth] So this is where you get the data.
So you know what this is doing compared
to like let's say your competitors
or compared to an earlier iteration or everything like that.
- [Engineer] Right?
- Ah, wow. That makes it hot. Damn.
So story time, this was a few years back but Alexander and I
bought two matching Walmart, hard tails.
And we took them on like a real trail,
like multi thousand foot descents
and long story short the fork on mine kind of melted.
On an entry level bike, like $500 or $600 bike.
It's like the equivalent of, let's say a $90 fork.
I have one of those here that I took off a flip bike.
I wanna run it through the machine at a similar rate
that you would see on that trail
and see if it holds up better.
(climatic music)
- [Seth] So predictions, I think it's gonna do fine.
- There's 10 inches a second.
- Okay.
- We'll go up to 50. What do you think?
- Yeah, 50
- Here we go.
Pretty fast.
Pretty standard for a speed. A hundred.
(forks pounding)
- Does it go higher than that?
- All right. Hold on.
(forks pounding)
Smells smoky.
- [Seth] One thing is for sure that it doesn't look so good.
So what does this machine do?
- [Engineer] These machines are for durability testing,
breaking stuff, two pneumatic rams.
Each of 'em can put out about a thousand pounds
at four cycles a second.
So this is the controller.
What we've been experimenting a lot
with lately is actually simulating trails.
Most recently we were ran a shock down Hemlock at Kanuga.
- [Seth] So this is Hemlock Epoch.
(lively music) (machine banging)
So that is like exactly Hemlock Epoch Trail,
as it was on the day that you guys kind of rode it.
- [Engineer] Yeah.
- Now the question is, how do you get
the trail into the computer?
- [Engineer] So we have a data logger.
- [Seth] Okay.
- [Engineer] You can see it right here on this gravel bike.
We are doing it for our stem testing bike.
- [Seth] So just goes on the bottle cage bolts,
logs everything and they come back into work
the next day, like here, here's Hemlock Epoch.
- [Engineer] There you go. Yep.
- [Seth] So you test it in here.
And then once it's safe to ride
the actual engineers are going
out on their bikes and riding them.
- Yep. - That's pretty cool.
(upbeat music)
I mean, I see like rope, weights.
I see exactly how a guillotine is constructed up there.
The only thing that's missing is a big like ax blade.
- You crank this up (crank clicking)
and you pull this rope
and this thing comes down and hits your fork.
- Whoa, this is super heavy.
- Yes. 50 pounds.
So the Helm will drop max height.
It's about five feet above the fork, down on the axle.
About 10 times.
- Let me make my prediction. You make yours.
So again, this is not a bad fork, but it's a cheap fork.
And it's extraordinarily heavy.
Like when you picked it up, you were like
I can't believe how heavy this thing is.
Is just made with tons of heavy metal.
It's gonna be plenty strong.
So my prediction is that this $90 fork
is going to perform similarly to an $1,100 fork
in the drop test. What do you think?
- It's gonna break.
(climatic music) (crank clicking)
- Let's call this a stage one test.
That's from, what did you say? Three feet.
- [Engineer] About two feet. Yeah.
- About two feet. Okay.
(machine scraping)
(weight banging)
(machine scraping)
(weight banging)
- I think it might have bent a little bit
- [Engineer] You know, we can see the permanent deformation.
- It's permanently bent.
- It's down. It goes 410.
- Okay. So, so my prediction's not going so well.
So I say we just go straight to max height.
(climatic music)
- [Engineer] Bombs away.
(machine snapping)
(weight banging)
- [Everyone] Ooohhh.
- [Seth] It survived. You wouldn't die.
If you were on the bike and that happened, you wouldn't die.
But your fork would be way, way, bent.
All right. Yeah. Let's run it again.
Let's see how close to 10 we can get.
- [Engineer] All right.
(weight banging)
- [Seth] Ooh, that is not pretty.
That's the beauty of steel,
Is it doesn't just catastrophically fail,
it bends a little bit.
So you think on the next hit, it might just snap off.
Okay.
(crank clicking) (climatic music)
(weight banging)
- [Seth] Whoo.
- [Engineer] This broke.
(weight banging) (climatic music)
- [Seth] Yeah. You think that's curtains for that fork?
I think we could bend it back and run it. Yeah.
- [Engineer] I think the center tubes posed in half.
- I think you might be right.
You might be right about that.
(metal clanking)
Oooh! Ooh! That doesn't look good at all.
- [Technician] I'd say that's a catastrophic.
- Yeah. I'd say that's it.
You know, what's interesting is that,
oh no, it also failed here.
It failed everywhere, but you know what?
The theoretical rider that would've been on it
hopefully after the first hit, they would know to stop.
- Yeah, you'd think.
- And they would've survived.
So from a rider safety standpoint, not so bad.
But from a not breaking in half standpoint, not so good.
So I was, I was wrong.
I'm a little disappointed.
But yeah, we got to smash some stuff.
(upbeat music)
- [Seth] So I learned a lot today
about testing and developing bike parts.
And while that's probably not all there is to it,
it's probably most of it.
And so thanks everybody at Cane Creek,
for showing us around, taking some time outta your workday.
I hope you guys learned something today.
And if not, I hope you at least found it entertaining.
Thanks for riding with me today.
And I'll see you next time.
(upbeat music)