Craig Calfee designed his carbon mountain bike to be N minus 1

Singletracks Mountain Bike Podcast

Singletracks.com

Wilderness, Sports

4.7 • 574 Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2024

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Craig Calfee is an innovative bike builder and the founder of Calfee Design. Calfee was an early adopter of carbon fiber for bike frames in 1987, and brand's Tetra road bike is said to have been in production longer than any other carbon bike. You might also recognize his work with Bamboo bike frames, which he began in 1995.

How did you get your start building bikes?
What did people think about the carbon bike frame you debuted at Interbike in 1989? Were there concerns that carbon frames were untested?
Are you still doing carbon frame production in the US?
How does carbon frame repair work?
Your mountain bike, the Cephal, utilizes a system called Quick Tune Steering. What's the idea behind this feature?
The Cephal is a hardtail with "leaf spring chain stays." What are the benefits to having flexible chain stays?
Were you surprised about your bamboo bike frame prototype?
From a practical standpoint, is bamboo a good material for building bike frames?
Why do you offer so many different tandem bikes? What are the challenges associated with building a tandem, particularly a mountain tandem?
How does your electric pedal assist retrofit service work?
What kind of work have you done on adaptive bikes?
What's next on the horizon for Calfee Design?

Connect with Calfee Design and learn more at calfeedesign.com.

Visit singletracks.com for a complete transcript of this episode.

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Transcript

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0:29.7	Hey everybody, welcome to the single tracks podcast. My name is Jeff and today my guest is Craig Calfee.
0:36.9	Craig is an innovative bike builder and the founder of Calfi design.
0:41.9	Calfi was an early adopter of carbon fiber for bike frames in 1987, and the brand's
0:48.0	tetra road bike is said to have been in production longer than any other carbon bike.
0:53.4	You might recognize his work with bamboo bike frames as
0:56.5	well, which he began in 1995. Thanks for joining me, Greg. Oh, you're welcome. Thanks for the
1:02.9	intro. So tell us, how did you get started building bikes? Well, the story goes that I had a bike
1:10.8	accident commuting to work at my job building
1:14.7	carbon fiber rowing shells back in the Boston area. And the accident was pretty dramatic,
1:22.7	and it destroyed the frame, which was a Schwinn varsity. And if you know those frames, I think they're made of plumbing pipe.
1:30.8	They're such thick wall, steel frames.
1:33.8	And it took quite a bit of energy to bend the frame such that it was unrideable.
1:40.6	Anyway, so I'd been thinking about building a carbon fiber bike with a tubing that we made the outriggers from for the rowing shells.
1:48.9	We had a carbon fiber braiding machine so I could make my own tubes.
1:53.8	And I thought, yeah, it's time to build a bike, you know, try to try this idea out.
1:59.2	So I came up with the way to join the carbon tubing with
2:03.4	carbon fabric, which results in those gussets you see on our frames, and made some tooling on a
	...

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