That Crocodile Smile: Moots Welds Up 25 Years

A look inside the company that is carving out a niche between the corporate behemoths producing their bikes overseas, and small boutique manufacturers producing only a few dozen frames a year.

By Michael Wendell

It’s a sunny Thursday morning in March, and I’m sitting on the Thunderhead Express lift in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, talking to Brad Bingham. You might not know Brad, but you’ve probably already been impressed by his work. As a welder (and the Production Manager) at Moots Cycles, Brad is directly responsible for what some have called the most gorgeous welds in the bike industry.

The blue skies, fresh spring powder, and clear air are gorgeous, and with snowboards strapped to our feet, we sit and talk bikes. Brad is telling me about the one-off custom snowbike he and the Moots team just completed for Mike Curiak. "I’ll show you pictures when we get back to the shop," he says, "the fork legs and the down tube were designed with valves and fillers to hold camp stove fuel." Like any craftsman, Brad is excited by the opportunity to do something that pushes the limits of his art. Before we come to the top of the lift he’s described the intricate process he needed to go through to create those fork legs and that down tube which allowed them to hold Curiak’s cooking fuel. I’m impressed, and both of us are pretty awed by anyone who would consider riding a bike weighed down with over a gallon of liquid inside the tubes. We hop off the lift, strap up and head down for a few powder runs through the trees before calling it a day and heading back to the shop.

Moots Cycles was born in the early 1980s when founder Kent Eriksen started building steel road frames in the back room of his Steamboat Springs bike shop. The creation of the YBB soft-tail mountain bike, and the switchover to titanium in 1990, is what really put them on the map. Their fifteen employees now produce some of the most amazing and meticulously detailed custom bicycles in the world.

Returning to the shop, Brad shows me pictures of the Curiak bike and takes the opportunity to explain some of the intricacies of high-end titanium welding. Every weld on a Moots frame must take place in an oxygen-free environment. Typically this is achieved by drilling a hole, in the head tube for example, behind where the top tube will be attached. By ventilating each tube to the adjoining tubes, argon can be pumped in, replacing the oxygen inside the tubes. This, combined with the argon flowing out of the welding torch, eliminates the possibility of oxygen contaminating the welds.

Because the downtube of Mike Curiak’s bike needed to hold liquid though, those holes could not be drilled, and each tube on the bike needed to be evacuated separately. Fittings needed to be constructed to pump argon into the tubing through the hole, which would be used to drain or fill the cooking fuel. It was incredibly complex, but the results were a one-off bike on which Mike hopes to once again win the IditaBike Challenge in Alaska.

Brad also introduces me to Sparky. You see, Moots places a reinforcing collar inside the top few inches of each seat tube, and in the past the weld on this collar needed to be done by hand. While the free form welds that follow mitered tubing connections look easy—and perfect—when done by these craftsmen, even they have a hard time making a perfectly straight line around a seat tube. Enter Sparky. Brad built Sparky from scratch a few years ago, specifically to make circumferential welds, and this small white box full of gears, motors and a welding torch makes those welds perfectly.

Working on a customer’s road frame, Brad explains more about the process they use to weld the frames. Each weld receives two passes. The beautiful one you see, and another one you don’t. This first pass is called a fusion weld. In fusion welding no filler is used and the two titanium tubes are literally melted together. Part of that first pass, the tacking, is done on a frame jig by Gordon, another welder on the Moots team. Brad calls across the room and introduces me to him. It turns out that Gordon is a transplanted Jersey-boy like myself, and was even at Rutgers the same time I was. A mechanical engineer, Gordon now spends his time aligning and tacking each Moots frame, and riding.

There’s a definite feeling of camaraderie at Moots; this is a team. Gordon tells me about weekend trips to Moab or Fruita, and the group rides on Thursday nights. During the Colorado winter, those Thursday night rides might become snowshoe hikes down to the hot springs, cross-country or telemark skiing. And of course, work might start a little late if it’s a powder day. And as for riding culture, Moots has that in spades. Even in the dead of winter you’ll find a few commuter bikes parked outside the shop, and it probably has very little to do with the dollar-a-day cycle commuting bonus Moots pays to employees who ride to work—they just like to ride.

As I watch Gordon laboriously align a YBB chainstay in his frame jig, I comment on how it fits perfectly to the bottom bracket shell. Gordon mentions that I should see some of the machines in the bending and mitering room, and he, I, and Petie, one of the shop dogs, wander over there. Once there, I’m introduced to Andy and Paul, who run this end of the process. The room is full of massive lathes, mills and tubing benders, and of course, titanium tubing. Across the back of the room is a wall of the stuff, stacks of twenty-foot lengths at up to fifty bucks a foot.

It’s the machines that have my attention though, they’re immense and old. Paul tells me that the lathe across the room, a heavy grey hulk the size of a pony, is just over a hundred years old. You can see that it’s been upgraded over the years, and chances are it’ll still be working in another hundred years. Like the bikes they’re making, they’re simple, and built to last a long time.

Andy is in the process of cutting and mitering chainstay tubes for VaMoots road bikes, and I find the whole process a little hard to follow. With specifically angled miters at each end of the tube, multiple bends at various angles, and a slight reshaping to flatten the tubes near the bottom bracket, I’m having a hard time comprehending how they can keep track of every angle and cut when I can’t even figure out which side of that tube is up.

It’s not all handwork though, and not all of the machines are a hundred years old. After my visit to the bending and mitering room I’m introduced to Butch. Butch is milling stem faceplates on one of the multi-axis CNC machines in the back of the shop. He used to be a welder and now splits his time between the CNC machines and his new role as chief titanium buyer. Unfortunately titanium prices have risen dramatically in the last few years: doubling, tripling, or quadrupling in some cases. And like any commodity, prices fluctuate. Butch tries to keep ahead of the curve by estimating what Moots will need in the next year and pre-purchasing as much titanium as possible when prices are low. It’s not easy.

Additionally, just as they recycle bottles and glass, everyone at Moots is involved in making sure that titanium waste is kept to a minimum. Drops, as the small cut off bits are called, are used to produce smaller items whenever possible, stem spacers or seatpost tops. Butch estimates that each twenty-foot length of tubing generates only a few inches of waste. Even that waste isn’t thrown out. Drops and titanium shavings from the CNC machine are kept together and every month or so everything is loaded into the Moots van and driven to a recycler in Denver.

As my time in Steamboat Springs came to an end and I pointed the Westy east for the drive home, I realized how impressive it is that a company like this can exist. When it seems like the bike industry is polarizing between corporate behemoths producing their bikes in Taiwan or China, and small boutique manufacturers producing only a few dozen frames a year, Moots has managed to stay somewhere in the middle, at least for now. Watching the industry, I have to wonder if they’ll be able to sustain themselves here in this small town and continue producing everything in house, or if growth will force them to outsource production and, sad as that may be, sacrifice quality. For now they seem to have found a wonderful harmony, a blend of the right size and the right people. As riders, I think we should all hope that they can continue to do this for a long time to come.

SIDEBAR

Kent Eriksen: Back to His Roots

Moots Cycle was founded by Kent Eriksen back in 1981. Kent, then owner of the Sore Saddle Cyclery, started building steel frames in the shop’s back room. One thing led to another, and in 1987 the Moots YBB softtail was born, putting Moots on the mountain biking map for all time.

In the late ’90s Kent sold Moots to his friend and fellow cyclist Chris Miller and stayed on for the next five years helping to make the company what it is today. Eventually though, as Moots grew and more hands were involved in the bike building process, Kent yearned for the hands-on control and customer contact he’d had in the early years of the company. In 2004, Kent left Moots and began the process again, which has led to his new company Kent Eriksen Cycles. Kent, now in his fifties, says it’s a return to his youth in some ways, especially since he’s back in the same building he started Moots in, building bikes himself, with two employees: a welder, Chris Moore, and Kent’s wife Katy.

I had a chance to talk to Kent about his new company, where he’s going, and about all his years building Moots…

Dirt Rag: How long have you been in business?

Kent Eriksen: Kent Eriksen started up in February of 2006. It took about 18 months after leaving Moots to get everything together. I had planned to start up in six months, but I really wanted to do it right. In the end I’m happy that we took the extra time. We have horizontal mills, CNC machines, hydraulic benders and a great bead blaster—all the tools to do the job right, at a really high level of quality. I’m hoping that by being small, we can maintain a level of quality that a bigger shop with too many hands just couldn’t achieve.

DR: Chris Moore is your welder now. Was he at Moots with you?

KE: Yes. Chris was probably doing most of the frame welding at Moots for the last few years. Brad’s the lead welder over there, but he’s also been doing the production management and CAD stuff too. It wasn’t really planned that Chris would leave with me, it just kind of happened.

DR: You seem very positive on the rise of the 29er in mountain biking.

KE: Yes. The new company’s only built a few mountain bikes so far, and they’ve all been 29ers. We built a 29er using a Ventana rear end for 4" of rear travel. Up front we used the Maverick DUC32 fork for 5" of travel. The 29er singlespeed with the Bushnell eccentric bottom bracket works really slick. I’m not really a fan of the sliding dropouts. There seems like there’s always going to be some kind of alignment issue there. The other thing we’re really looking at is tire clearance. We’ve got some really slick jigs and tooling built to bend the stays just so. We’ve got a 2.3" tire in there with room for more, we could probably fit a 2.5" once somebody starts making one.

DR: So where would you like to see Kent Eriksen Cycles in a few years?

KE: I hope to do about 130 frames this year, and maybe 200 next year. We’re doing jerseys, working on the website, we’ll be bringing in a few select dealers. Right now we’re still trying to settle in.

DR: How are you selling frames now? How much do they cost?

KE: Well, our custom frames start at around $2800 and go up to maybe $3100 or so. We’ve only sold 30 frames, and I think that once the new website comes on, things might pick up. Still, we can’t work beyond capacity because the whole point is to maintain this very high level of quality, on fully custom stuff, that the bigger builders just can’t provide. Kent Eriksen is on the web at www.kenteriksen.com.