With one of North America's most enviable locales for mountain biking right outside of its backdoor, Cane Creek would certainly seem like an ideal place to work. As it turns out, in 2014 Outside Magazine featured Cane Creek in it's annual "Best Places to Work" issue, confirming what the forty-seven employees already knew. Cane Creek is currently updating and expanding its manufacturing space in Fletcher, North Carolina, and appears to have some pretty exciting developments looming on the not too distant horizon, so we figured now would be a good time to pay our pals in Pisgah a visit to tour the facilities, and speak with some of the folks directly involved with the forward progress of the high-end manufacturer. Echo Lake is a small body of water, a dozen or so miles southeast of Asheville in North Carolina. From this lake flows Cane Creek, working its way down from the foothills of the Smoky Mountains and eventually into the French Broad River. From there the journey continues as the French Broad spills into the Tennessee River before that, in turn, washes into the Ohio River. This is the Mississippi's largest tributary, and the final junction before eventually spilling out into the Gulf of Mexico. But back up in the mountains, only fifteen miles into this scenic and winding journey, the bubbling waters of the Cane Creek flow right past Cane Creek Cycling Components.
For twenty-five years now Cane Creek has been building a strong reputation as a developer of high-end cycling components. In 1992, they introduced the threadless headset, a facet of the company that still holds a great deal of value today. Over time they've dabbled and produced forerunners to some of today's modern technologies, from the Speed Check disc brake back in 1993, to one of the first air-sprung and damped rear shocks on the market in 1996, to the Thudbuster suspension seat post that was first shown a few years later.
And then there's the Cloud 9, an ultralight air-sprung and air-damped rear shock with speed sensitive valving that was released almost fifteen years ago.
Recent times have seen the introduction of their angle-adjusting headsets, and more notably their Double Barrel shocks. From the DBcoil to the DBair, and the most recent shock, the DBinline, this particular product has famously given riders a viable alternative to the larger suspension manufacturers in Fox and RockShox; bringing the first air-sprung rear shock featuring twin tube technology (hence the Double Barrel moniker) and four-way independent adjustability to bicycle suspension.
Jack Hedden: Quality Assurance
What are your primary goals moving forward as the new quality assurance guy at Cane Creek?My main concern is developing a robust incoming inspection process, documenting procedures, and putting in place a quality system; a very ISO-esque system. To the level of what you’d find in airline manufacturing. I don’t see the need just yet for us to have to get ISO certified, but I’d like to have a system where if we decided to, we could call them in for an audit, and we’d pass with flying colors.
Any manufacturer can do it, but you have to make sure it’s a value add. Do our customers want it? Especially our OEM customers; that’s what would drive a decision like that.
What were you doing before you came to Cane Creek?Medical device manufacturing, FDA regulations and things along those lines. I’ve been in quality control for about eighteen years. I’m just working on standardizing and leaning up the process here. Not from a people standpoint, but getting people to work more efficiently.
What would you say is the most crucial aspect of your position?Creating a quality culture here. I want people to start thinking in a quality mindset. I want them to think about how they’re doing their job, and make sure they’re able to do it the same way every time.
What does quality assurance mean to Cane Creek?It’s about building high-quality products that are built right the first time, using risk and quality procedures throughout the entire process: from design to testing, to the final packaging. We want to meet the customer’s requirements. If you buy a shock from us, we want you to know that what you’re getting is meeting what you’re expecting. It’ll work right the first time and every time after that. It’s going to meet or exceed your expectations. You should expect every headset and shock that you buy will be the same every time. It gives you a really good basis to build from and improve. If you don’t standardize, then you don’t know what your baseline is. How do you grow or improve if you don’t have that in place?
Can you detail the quality assurance process?There are two major contributing factors as you get into this. You have the supplier of raw materials and the incoming inspection, and doing that against current specs and drawings. Where I come in is determining whether or not they meet those current specs. I communicate to the internal suppliers to let them know that something isn’t up to spec. I use an NCMR, or Non-Conforming Material Report, for defective products internally. From there it’s about identifying the problem, quarantining it, making sure there aren’t any additional products that have been affected by this, and going into the root-cause analysis of the problem. How are we going to correct it?
We escalate that to our PACA process, or Preventive Action Corrective Action. This is standard in other manufacturing industries, and it’s something I want to bring to the mountain bike industry. It’s one of my biggest challenges; trying to fit a very rigid and strict process into a very laid back environment. So far, so good, though. We’ve made great strides here, and everyone’s been really accepting of it.
Jim Morrison: Director of Engineering
How long have you been at Cane Creek?I’ve been here since 2007, so about eight years.
Did you come on board as an engineer initially?When I started, we had a director of engineering and no other engineers, so I was the first additional hire in that department. I was a design engineer.
In your time at Cane Creek, what kind of changes have you seen in the design and engineering processes here?There have been a lot of changes. We were a smaller company then, with a very diverse product line. We had road wheels, mountain wheels, track wheels, the Thudbuster, bar ends, headsets, the DBcoil, we were still making our air shocks; so there was this broad product line with a very small engineering department. We handled everything from product development to manufacturing fixtures, to instructions for Thudbuster elastomers. We had two people handling a lot of different things, so it wasn’t very conducive to vast product development. But it was really beneficial for me because I got to do a whole lot of things in a very short amount of time. I came here right out of college, so it was kind of a baptism by fire. During that time, we did a lot of soul-searching as well.
Our headset patent ran out a few years ago, and while we were prepping for that to happen, we asked ourselves what we really wanted to be. Did we want to be a wheel company? We were able to take our experience working in all of these different areas and say, “
alright, we can be the best in the world at headsets, this suspension seatpost which was at the time the best in the world, and this Double Barrel thing.'' Over the years, we have focused on those three things by hiring the right people and making the right investments. We’re now up to five engineers in our department. So I would say that focus is the biggest change that I have seen in my time here. We put our resources and energy in a much more focused set of product lines.
How do you guys manage real world mountain bike testing? What kind of an impact does the surrounding area (Pisgah and Dupont) have on your ability to develop products?The first thing that comes to mind is that we go and ride. We’re a company of riders, located in one of the world’s best places to ride mountain bikes. It’s really easy to have an idea, or proof of concept, slap it on our bikes and go ride.
We’ve got really good trails that are twenty minutes away, and we have epic trails that are forty-five minutes away. It’s really easy to get that initial feedback and do a lot of early tuning for pre-development.
Once we get it to a point to where we’re happy with a product using our internal resources, we tend to go to our OEM customers, and we tell them we like something and let them ride it. They’ll give us feedback specific to their own designs, and we like to make sure everything checks out. We can also send stuff to our sponsored pros, and they’ll help us out with durability testing. We have internal resources; we have our customers, and we have our sponsored athletes.
You guys obviously have very measured means of data collection within your facilities. How do you measure data when you’re testing on the trail?We’ve been working on a data acquisition rig for a few years now. I think we’re on the third generation of it at this point. It’s a set of linear potentiometers that you mount to the shock, and it has a little data recorder that looks like a Gameboy from 1997. You hit record, and it records all of the positions of the shock and fork as you’re riding, and you just put it into excel and you get a graph of displacement and velocity. It’s not super fancy, but it works really well. We can also take this information and put it into our dynos, so we’re able to get real world rebounds for different types of impacts.
Are we in the midst of a period of refinement right now with mountain bike-specific technologies? Where do you see the next big innovation coming from?I think it’s always tough to see innovation when you’re in the middle of it. I’ve been thinking about this a bit. I’ve been into bikes since the sixth grade, and I’ve seen a lot of innovations, and I’d say that there have been more innovations now than ever before. There are more good engineers, and more companies with more resources than ever before. There’s a lot of stuff happening right now that is very innovative. But there aren’t any major innovations currently, like what the disc brake or dropper seatpost were for their times, that I can see at the moment. But then again, it’s hard to see it when those kinds of things are happening. People were questioning those two things when they were first released, but now you can’t ride without them. All around, things are getting lighter, faster and stronger. But it might be five years before we’re able to look back and see the true value of current engineering and development.
I have two predictions for you as far as “
game-changing” innovations go. They may prove to be super wrong. I think that adjustable geometries on bikes are going to be big. There are some examples out there now. Cannondale has it out right now. So does Canyon with the Strive. I think that is the next step. Droppers were the first step. I think adaptable geometry bikes will get better, and maybe it’ll one day prove to be something people can’t live without. The other big area is electronics. As much as it’s easy to hate on it, I think it’s just going to get bigger. It’s expensive, and you have to worry about battery life and durability, but I think that it’s just going to get better and better. It’ll get cheaper too.
The Customer Service Team
What’s a typical day like for the customer service team?It starts at 8:30 am. It’s a full day usually. We answer phones, respond to e-mails and run the gamut from small orders, to trouble-shooting products, and helping them decide on their needs. We get a lot of headset questions. What kinds of shocks fit different bikes. Pros and cons of leverage ratios, and coils or air shocks, etc.
Our first priority is to knock down any emails we can, especially on a Monday. Gary has the ability to get on our Cane Creek Lounge, a forum that you can get to from our suspension website. It’s basically Facebook for our shock owners. You can get in there, create your profile, and chat amongst other owners and with us. Gary is responsible for the responses there. He also helps with service centers, making sure that the right procedures are being done worldwide. Our main focus is to make sure that the customers are having a good experience with us, even if they’re having troubles with their bikes. We want them to be loyal to us, so we need to provide a high level of experience.
| Sometimes our OEMs will contact us directly with an issue looking for help, but it's always the best to get the bike's owner to hit us directly. We want to make sure the end user is satisfied. You can call here and talk to an actual person. |
Does the Lounge get a lot of use currently?It can be varied. The original intent was for it be fully user-based. We wanted people to be able to help each other and for it to be a community of riders sharing knowledge with each other. It’s never really quite caught on that way, and we felt the need to field a lot of questions ourselves. So that might mean that folks are not as interested knowing that we’re the ones answering the questions, which is the same things as basically calling us directly. So we try to give things a little bit of time, depending on the questions. If it’s something that I know other users have dealt with before, I’ll sit on a question and let other users go in and help out. And there are certainly guys that are more into it than others, just like Pinkbike commenters. Some are pretty active and take a lot of initiative. I try to encourage it when I see it. I don’t know that we’ve done a lot to really push the Lounge and get more users involved. I think that when we first launched it, we gave it a big push. It actually stays pretty active.
We really encourage people to post their tunes once they have them dialed in as well. We like to know what kind of bike they’re using, the kind of riding they do and their settings. We’re still considered by many to be an aftermarket company, so it’s hard for us to say for certain what any specific tune is going to be for everyone. We can look at leverage rates and give our estimates, but ultimately it’s still very subjective.
We want to impart tuning knowledge as much as we can, but some people don’t really want to know how to do it, they just want it done. So one of our big challenges is taking what we know, and putting it in layman’s terms so that we can help as many people as possible because the Double Barrel is more complicated than many other shocks out there. But once you realize you can make this thing feel however you want it to, you realize how awesome this shock is.
How important is it to Cane Creek to try and develop more OEM relationships?The OEM partnership is really important now. It wasn’t that way in the beginning because, quite frankly, we didn’t have the volume of products to go that way. We were too expensive, and people weren’t as comfortable with us. But over time, smaller OEM brands courted us, and it jump-started our ability to get going with rear suspension production. Our biggest OEM early on was Intense. Then Specialized came along, and it’s grown quickly from there. Especially in Europe with Canyon, Cube, Ghost and BMC. Knolly is on board now, as is Canfield, Banshee, and Ibis.
There are quite a few smaller ones, which are really important to us because they have these cool niche markets. Overall, the exposure is fantastic. As far as customer service goes, there are now certainly more irons in the fire. You definitely want to make sure that your OEM’s are satisfied with what we’re doing as well.
Cane Creek was always known as this boutique brand. It’s cool to see it go from an after-market, niche brand to having more of a global footprint. There’s still a bit of that boutique allure because it’s not what everyone else is running, and it’s not as prevalent as Fox or RockShox. John Otis, our OEM sales guy, has been very instrumental in kicking open new doors for us too.
With warranties, no matter what bike our product is on, we prefer that users or shops contact us directly, so we can have first hands on the ball. We want to make sure that it’s going the right way. Sometimes our OEMs will contact us directly with an issue looking for help, but it’s always the best to get the bike’s owner to hit us directly. We want to make sure the end user is satisfied. You can call here and talk to an actual person. You don’t have to deal with automated e-mail responses, or go through a huge phone tree. You call and speak with any of the four of us. Sometimes people can be surprised that they’re chatting with a real person. You can’t beat direct interactions.
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W T F??? BULLSHIT!!!!!! "With warranties, no matter what bike our product is on" ???? My warranty was refused because shock was used on bike which wasn't listed on their website!!! Bare in mind that for example SantaCruz Nomad 3 initially wasn't listed in first production year. My shock DB inline developed well known issue, which normally is repaired under warranty unless they find any reason to refuse it. Moreover communication was really poor and they didn't even bother to reply when I tried to discuss this issue. Shame on you two-face capitalism...
However, I still feel the same issue is present with the DBA CS, albeit it to a much lesser extent. If I set sag at the recommended 30%/17mm, it feels wallowy mid-stroke and bottoms out more easily than it should (even with hi and lo speed compression maxed). It doesn't bottom harshly all the time anymore, but it definitely uses 100% travel more frequently than it should. If I pump up the PSI to get rid of this, then the sag is off and it loses small bump sensitivity (even once I turn down lo speed compression).
I am a big fan of Cane Creek customer service, but their products leave something to be desired IMO. Will not be getting another shock from them, Float X2 or Debonair for me next.
To top it off the shock was drained in oil from top to bottom and it took me a while to clean it. So take away the money from the German service center guys and give it to the american guys.
No one ever replied to my e-mail and therefore - @canecreek your products are great (when working) but your service (Austria and Germany) is crap and not worth the price your products cost.
Probably a stupid suggestion, so don't take offence, but have you tried turning the HSC knob the other way? (I turned it the wrong way at first try)
Thanks for the suggestion though! I think at this point I just need to take it to SuspWerx or something and get it tuned.
All the best! Hope it can be sorted out.
evo.bionicon.com/das-130-bike
The Magic link changes the rear suspension curve and sag. When it increases the sag, the BB drops, HT slackens, and chainstays slightly lengthen. With the kona design, it isn't on or off, but varies between the two based on rider and terrain input, all automatically.
Of course it was the Germans. I'm glad someone's been working with this concept, even if the execution leaves a few things to be desired; hopefully with further refinement the design comes to something. I'd be very interested to give one of their bikes a try. The only functional disadvantage I can think of is that with the infinite adjust, it could be difficult to get one's geometry exactly right for given conditions. Given that, Swing Link sounds exceedingly interesting in that it works automatically. Looks complicated, but I'm going to go read up on it. Thanks for the new leads!
Also had an issue with the db air cs on my 26 enduro getting stuck in the travel and not returning. Sent it back for service, and it is working for the time being, but im hesitant to trust their products after my experiences.
The fox shock on my old 2011 stumpy has held up to so many hours of abuse with no issues that i was blown away by the reliability problems i encountered from my cc shocks. I have also heard the enduro's shock mount design creates excessive leverage ratios that wreak havoc on shocks. Just sharing my experiences.
They do perform well, but i never got to put in enough hours to really start dialing the shock in, so.....?
Im looking at a monarch for my e29
Pac NorWest is calling (but wifey wont let us leave)....oh well, the riding around here is pretty damned good...not loudly broadcasted...but there are some solid technical trails hidden within the chapparal.
Kindof like tourists saying Frisco..
Nice article Brice.
Aside from this, love the performance and coming from a motorsport background I like that it's four way adjustable - a proper damper.
Now I just need a fork that matches the rear suspension performance...
Sorry for the delay on our response. Please email our Customer Service crew: info@canecreek.com they will address your 10 series issues.
I don't know maybe I have already visited to many automotive suppliers, but Doritos on the assembly workbench, tools piling up on the workbench next to the cnc and the headset parts being assembled between bags and paper towels...
But I really do like the gym!
Gotta say... I love my CCDB coil and my 2 airs. Just wish canr creek could knock me up a body to work with the Nomad Mk2 push link (only fox fits).
What??
cheers, RedBurn