(upbeat music)
- Now I'm at Bristol Bespoked today
and this is basically the UK's handmade bike show
and I'm joined by someone who I am in complete
and utter awe of because he gets to make the things
that we use on our bikes.
How cool is that?
Mr. Chris King of Chris King Precision Components.
Now we asked you recently actually,
send in your questions for Chris
and the good news is, he's gonna answer some of them.
So, firstly, welcome.
- Thank you.
- And well let's crack on really with the questions
'cause I know you area a very busy man.
- Well.
- So let's get started.
First question from Nate Weldgood,
how did you get started in machining and manufacturing
and then turn into what Chris King is today?
Do you have any advice for a new guy who wants
to make their own components or bikes?
- I used to you know, hang out at a pro bike shop
with all the bike racer guys and we used to go on rides
and this kind of stuff.
And one time I'd taken some rear hub and put some better
bearing in it and took it over to show it off of course
and everybody's like oh wow, you know, that's really cool.
And this one guy's like, it didn't phase him at all.
He just looked and kind of, well whatever, right?
I says, what's up?
He says, well that's cool and everything but you know,
if you really wanted to make something cool,
you should make a better headset.
And I had this idea from having wandered
through the warranty department at this medical place.
So there was this drum full of these parts
and there was tonnes of these bearings in there.
And I remember seeing this and so when the guys said
you should make a better headset, I thought, huh.
And I went and got a couple of those bearings
and cleaned them out, right?
And made some cups, that was the first headset.
To get back to that part of the question
that talks about you know,
how could somebody get started in this?
You either have to have a lot of capital behind you,
and time, or you just have time and tenaciousness
to stick with it long enough
and a perseverance for what your goal is.
Mine was quality. - Yeah.
- To stay with that in an unyielding way
that ultimately builds a brand name.
And in the meantime, you know I scrapped and suffered
and had a great time and learned an incredible amount.
It certainly wasn't about making lots of money.
It was just about being passionate
about wanting to make a good product.
- Sure, now that leads on really,
to the the next question from Daniel Quinnell who asks
how healthy is the bespoke cycle industry
and is the future bright for it?
- Well you know, the cycling industry has been going
through cycles since it's been around, right?
And the bespoke part of that,
I've seen it kind of go up and down over the years.
When I first got into cycling, all of the bespoke-type
frames and so on and so forth that were being produced
were being produced here and in Italy.
- Right.
- So I remember running into this one guy,
he became a designer for Specialized years ago,
he had arranged for Bob Jackson to come over to Santa Cruz
and give some frame building lessons.
- Wow.
- And he, this particular guy took those lessons
and became a custom frame builder
and that's, that's part of what got the whole
custom world going in the states.
That was in the mid, about mid 70s.
So by the early 80s, all these custom builders
were starting to pop up.
So that's people like Eisentraut and Bruce Gordon
and a bunch of the guys on the East Coast
and that's got this whole thing going in the states.
In the meantime, everything that was going on over here
was starting to kind of-- - Yeah.
- Go down.
And I was surprised in more recent years
to find that it had almost died out,
I don't want to say completely
but it had died way down - Yeah, yeah.
- Here, right? - It certainly had, yeah.
- And now we're seeing, you know,
every time I come to the show, there's more and more stuff.
More and more people doing this.
It's started to quiet down in the states a little bit.
Where the epicentre of that is
or where it's really happening or expanding
or whatever is gonna move around.
But the overall is going to be probably kind of
a consistent percentage of the overall bike world.
- Yeah.
So Steve H wants to know, is there many gains to be had
from changing from a normal bottom bracket to a ceramic one?
So in terms of the bearings?
- One race day, if you want the least
amount of drag in your rolling components,
you could actually run those bearings dry.
Or with a slight dry lube or just a drop
of really light oil-- - Yeah.
- And eliminate all that grease drag
that you might normally have in a regular bearing.
Now the bearings that we've been putting in our hubs
and the grease that we've been using is a really low shear
grease so it's pretty good. - Yeah.
- It's better than what you typically get in a shop.
But at the same time, there's still a bunch of that in there
and as the faster you go, the more it wants to resist.
When you make that thing dry,
you definitely get way better performance.
The thing that we've also found,
at least in our bearing technology,
by going to a ceramic ball, you actually wind up
with a bearing that, our bearings become
even more durable with those balls.
- Right.
- Where you have people using our components
in bad weather conditions and dirty weather conditions,
all that kind of stuff, the ceramic bearings
are probably gonna be superior.
- What makes a stiff wheel?
Stiff rims or stiff hubs?
- Well it's all of it. - Yeah.
- Obviously.
I think largely, you know, each component
that goes into the wheel build is going to either
contribute or not contribute to the overall stiffness of it.
And then how do you actually lace that thing together?
How tight, how much do you tension the spokes?
You know, my hoop is pretty damn important
because most of the time,
I'm sitting on the hoop unsupported.
- Yeah.
- So the rest of the hoop has to add to that.
How that hoop is then supported from the hub out
becomes very critical because if I don't support
the top properly, and the two the sides properly,
they can do this or that, then that bottom's
gonna be able to move around a lot or whatever, right?
So you can see that the whole thing is pretty critical.
- Yeah.
- Types of spokes, spoke tension, cross patterns,
so you know, it depends on what you're
looking for out of that stuff, right?
If you're looking for durability of the wheel
and say a downhill application or something like that,
well chances are you want something
that's a little more symmetrical.
But if you're looking for really like sprint performance,
you probably want that dish in the back,
to a certain degree. - Yeah.
- I mean, you're fighting between how well it hooks up
and delivers power to the ground
to how well it stays, you know, laterally stable, right?
- Sure.
- There's a kind of cross of those two things, right?
- Got a question from Ellen, Alan sorry, Zarczynski.
Now I'm presuming he's got one of your old hubs,
he says, is there a way to change his old mountain bike
disc rear hub to fit modern road bike?
Now it doesn't leave any standards
or anything like that, but I'm guessing
that there's probably some axles and kits.
- We do some axle kits for conversions
and depending on the road bike, you know,
you could have a bike built with a slightly wider spacing
because the old mountain stuff was 135
and your typical road's 130, it's not very far.
A lot of the cross stuff that I've seen go by
in more recent years has been built to 135.
We certainly, you know, you could certainly do that.
- Yeah.
- Whether you get, the big issue with using
a fixed mount disc rotor type of hub,
which is what we make now, then becomes where does it put
the disc? - Sure.
- You can get, there's an axle arrangement
that we probably sell - Yeah, it will fit but--
- Where you can get it in, you're just a standard road bike
at a 130 spacing but whether or not you're gonna get that
disc at 15 millimetres away from the dropout face,
that's another story. - Yeah.
- Now, if you have a calliper or a way of mounting
that calliper that can make up for that difference,
you're off and running. - Fill your boots.
- I've got one then, Ben Vinson, how did 72 points
of engagement come to be a standard for your rear hub?
Now it's not a standard across, is it?
- The idea of making this, the type of ratchet
that we have now-- - Yeah.
- That idea goes back to high school.
And we were still using screw on free wheels
at that point, right? - Yeah.
- So it was gonna be in that kind of a thing.
The idea of using a helix with it came later.
That was in the very early 90s when it dawned on me
that I could make that thing move on a helix
and it would have a clamping effect.
I was trying to at that point, simulate the rapid
engagement that you would get from a roller clutch.
- Yeah.
- 'Cause that was theoretically, practically speaking
it wasn't zero but it was a very small
amount of movement, right?
So the initial prototype for all made it 90 teeth.
- Wow.
- 90 teeth is about four degrees of movement
between engagements. - Yeah.
- When you calculated through your typical low gear
on a mountain bike, back to your crank,
back to your pedal, you get about somewhere between
3.5 to four degrees of actual motion
before you're actually delivering
power to the ground, right? - Yeah.
- So four degrees was my target at the time.
- Yeah.
- That was 90 teeth.
When we went to 72, I think it moved up to about
12 millimetres but it was still,
compared to the typical 18 or 20
engagement systems that were out there,
I think Shimano at the time was 16,
that was like two or three inches.
- Right.
- When you try to dice your way up some little climb
or something like that and you have to reset your pedals
to get through some tight spot--
- Yeah.
- There's a huge difference
in how that feels. - Yeah, yeah.
- So having something that was really quick
was really important.
- Yeah, snappy engagement.
- Snappy engagement.
- Now right, so I'm gonna stay with a rear hub
and this is something I get asked so many times
regarding free hubs.
Now they want to know, is there any relationship
between sound and the efficiency of the hubs?
So is a silent hub more efficient than the loud one?
'Cause obviously your hubs, they've got that buzz sound,
the angry bee, some people call it.
(Chris laughing)
- And that's just a funny thing,
I mean having started that project with a roller clutch,
those were perfectly silent. - Yeah.
- And my goal was to have the ratchet be silent also.
So we had started on a grease project to have
an acoustical quality to it that would keep
the bubs sort of quiet. - Right.
- We got about half way through that grease project,
we got all the lubricity part of it done
and so on and so forth and we were about to move
to the acoustical side of that and we just started
getting this feedback that everybody loved that sound.
(Interviewer laughing)
Oh, 'cause I tell people, oh you know our next step
is to make the thing silent.
- Yeah.
- Whoa, you're not gonna make 'em silent, are you?
No we like that noise.
I mean are you kidding me, c'mon, really?
The angry bee, right? - Yeah.
- If you look at the roller clutch,
someone might say well here's something
that's perfectly silent, right?
Roller clutches use kind of a wedging system
for wedging the roller into a tight space--
- Yeah.
- Thus jamming it up, creating this friction
between the roller clutch itself
and the shaft that's spinning in it.
In order for it to be engageable in the first place,
those rollers always have to drag on the shaft
that they're trying to lock up.
- Yeah.
- So, even though it may be perfectly silent,
there's some kind of drag involved
in ultimately getting it to engage.
- Yeah.
- The new Shimano hub that's supposed to coming out
that's silent is gonna have a similar issue to that.
There's gonna be some kind of drag involved
that's gonna be there to have the mechanism
cause the engagement to happen once you start peddling.
- Yeah.
- So, now the argument becomes,
is that drag more or less than the amount of energy
that's going into that clacking noise?
- John Leach, he's curious, have you ever experimented
with other materials in your product range?
Magnesium, titanium, that kind of thing?
- Of course. - Yeah.
- And you know, sometimes...
you get a bright idea, it's like,
ah wouldn't it be cool to make this out of this
or that and you get down that road and it's like,
oh you know, it's strong enough,
it's well it's kind of hard to machine
but we can still do that, you get down,
and sometimes you just don't see a problem
that really is gonna come along with that.
- Yeah.
- When we first produced the R45,
they came with titanium dry rings.
- Yeah.
- So we thought, well, we can make the thing
a little lighter, we can machine titanium,
it's not that big of a deal.
I mean, it does take a little longer
and the material is more expensive, by a long shot,
But we thought that that would be kind of cool
and roadies tend to like that high-techy stuff
and all that stuff.
- Stuart Dryer, he says, if you were King of the World,
well he's the king of the bike industry, isn't he?
Chris King, after all.
What bottom bracket standard would prevail?
- Well. - It's a tough one, this.
- I'll just, you know, I'd say T47.
- Of course (laughing).
- And I think we came up with something
that's absolutely workable, right?
The one millimetre pitch, some people say,
oh it's too fine...
Yeah, maybe it should have been a little coarser
but we didn't have the ability to go deeper on the thread
because of the tubes available and stuff.
And I wanted something that, quite honestly,
you could run the taps into a press fit bottom bracket
and turn it into a threaded bottom bracket.
- Yeah.
- [Chris] So we wound up getting all of that in T47.
- [Interviewer] Neat solution, really.
- [Chris] It's genius.
And to think, I mean we've been using
threaded bottom brackets for how long now?
- [Interviewer] Oh, donkey's years, I don't know.
- Decades and decades.
- I still use one with my bikes, so you know.
- In terms of what's out there right now,
I think T47's kind of the answer.
- Alright.
- And I'm, you know I'm not trying to sell bottom brackets
(interviewer laughing)
but I have one on my bike.
- Well you've designed it, so why not talk about it?
- It wasn't, it was a,
It was a group effort-- - You were involved, yeah.
- To do that, so.
- A massive thanks to Chris for his time here.
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