NAHBS 2019

The bike built for the North American Handmade Bicycle Show in 2019 by the Cal Poly Bike Builders is one of the most ambitious projects the club has ever taken on. While much of the club is centered around helping students build their own personal bikes, once a year, the club would come together to design one incredibly monumental bike. In 2019, I was proud to call myself the Manufacturing Lead of this bike. 

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The North American Handmade Bicycle Show (NAHBS) is a global expo wherein bike companies from all over the world come to show off their most impressive bikes. Seeing as we were the only collegiate bike building club in the entire world, we were a bit of a standout when compared to everyone else. After NAHBS in 2018, we decided we would go all out and make something never before seen at NAHBS--a full suspension downhill mountain bike: the most difficult project ever conceived of in the club. Better yet, we wanted to make it with predominantly student made componentry.

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Over the course of a year, the frame, the linkages, the frame building fixture, the fork, the pedals, the hydraulic brake levers, the stem, the stem cap, the brake rotors, and even the bell were all designed by students. As the manufacturing lead, it was my responsibility to oversee and organize the manufacturing of the project as a whole--maintaining schedules and work delegation.

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While we didn't have time to make absolutely every component, the bike turned out so unbelievably cool. In the past, several of the NAHBS projects had been fun for a lot of students, but didn't fully include everybody's hard work and labor in the final product. For instance, if a student had been working on a molded carbon fiber part, but the part ended up having to be scrapped, that student may not feel they helped with the final bike. But with NAHBS 2019, it was different. Everybody that wanted to help out with the project would be putting in hard work and labor into something that would be seen at an international expo.

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As we started to assemble the final product, we really started to recognize the masterpiece we had created after thousands of hours of work. As we rolled into NAHBS for setup, professionals at real bike companies would stop their conversations and turn their heads to see the creation made by these students.

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At an expo full of fine Italian-made road bike companies with decades of bike building legacy, we stood out as the college kids with a steel Downhill mountain bike. So much so that several bike publications wrote articles about us:

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https://www.pinkbike.com/news/cal-poly-bike-builders-rock-the-2019-nahbs.html

https://element.ly/2019/03/cal-poly-dave/

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I feel so unbelievably lucky that we were able to have access to such useful tools to make something we could regularly only dream of. This project is one of the most ambitious that I have ever been a part of and it made me so happy to be able to have a part in leading these students into glory. 

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I want to add an additional note to say thank you to Shaw Hughes, who initially conceived of the bike and led the design of the entire frame.