The Duo returns for the 12th episode of the FSC. In this edition they interview Dustin Adams, C.E.O. of a startup composite wheel company in British Columbia. They chat about what it’s like to start a composite outfit from ground zero, the benefits of complete product control, why made in Canada matters (does it?), and luxury American potato chips. Don’t miss out on this one. You can find We Are One here: www.we-are-one-composites.odoo.com/
Shawn: 00:00:00 Hello everybody and welcome to the twelfth episode of the fiber side chats hosted by rockets composites, the nation’s leader in carbon fiber fair and inspection where your hosts Sean’s small and I’m Dan stinely and we’re here with
Dustin: 00:00:13 Dustin Adams one composite.
Shawn: 00:00:16 And on today’s episode we’re going to talk all with the British Colombian manufacturers of carbon wheels about production, about why made in Canada matters and about process control. Stay tuned for this one,
Shawn: 00:00:44 So before we get into this week’s interview, which is a great one, and you should definitely stick around, wink, we want to address some of our carbon queries. We haven’t done these for a couple of weeks, so if you’re unfamiliar or a new listener, the carbon queries are using hashtag carbon queries, is our way to connect with our audience. We take questions submitted through twitter, facebook, email, or instagram, and we address them here on the show. So let’s get into it. First question submitted by our friend Rick Crocodile, otherwise known as Patty beco regarding the [inaudible] halo. Um, if you’re not familiar with what this is, is essentially a piece of titanium that is round and curve, and what it does is it goes on the front of an [inaudible] car to help protect the driver’s head in the event of a collision or parts flying on the track. Now the question is, could the halo be made from carbon? Would it be reusable after impact if it was made from carbon? And would it be cheaper if it was made from carbon? Sean, you want to take this one?
Shawn: 00:01:46 Yeah, I actually had to look it up because I would never heard of it. And then I saw what it was and it’s a very expensive piece of titanium. It’s also terrifying watching some of those videos of tires flying added at what? Three hundred miles an hour. It’s not fun to watch and see why they’re making mandatory every car because I mean car crashes are terrifying and then you get inside how faster f1 cars 212, 250. They’re terrifying. My kind of personal motto is you know, the right material for the right job. Carbon is incredibly awesome at a lot of things. Impact is not one of them. Um, titanium is, I mean it’s, that’s why it’s used as springs really. Well. It can move quite a bit and dissipate a lot of energy and that’s why this is made out of titanium and it needs to be light, you know, they could, they could make it out of steel, it would be heavy, you know, for cars are Harry, you know, they’re more awake, conscious than cyclist probably.
Shawn: 00:02:46 So, you know, technically you probably could make it out of carbon and a lot of lower modulars cards that are really good, you can blend in. A lot of capital are Aramids or, and Negros are fiberglass is, it’s just not worth it. It’s too complicated of a layup a, it would be more expensive yet again, it’s a safety part. So really repairing it. It’s kind of a one and done kind of aspect, you know, after such an insane impact, you know, theoretically you can make out of the carbon, you could repair it, but it’s just not feasible, you know, it’s not, it’s not worth it. Safety intensive part. Yeah, I am sure that the 20,000 each. Yeah. My question was with a 3d printing it. Do you think you know? No, no, it’s too big. Too Big, too big and they need too many of them and I think it’s a Po, a open platform for every car.
Shawn: 00:03:40 So what I think is probably one company making them for all cars, sort of answer the questions of could it be made from carbon, would it be reusable after impact and would it be cheaper? It could it be made from carbon? Yes. Would it be reusable? Most likely not and it definitely would not be cheaper. So if you’re unfamiliar with the [inaudible] Halo, that kind of new for this season, go and check it out. Word to the wise. Some of the videos regarding why the halo needs to be use are pretty intense. Explain it to self explanatory. Quick Opportunity of just because you can doesn’t mean you should. You know, metals are great that a lot of things. So metal. Thanks for that question. The next question submitted by at steal, steal, steal. This one came through instagram. It matter what fiber type and architecture woven unidirectional, other you do repairs with.
Shawn: 00:04:31 How do we identify and assess the substrate with which to match the repair? Was He asking how does he identify? How do we, what’s our process? Was pretty easy when we started the ultrasound. That gives us the exact layer thickness and that’s, that’s pretty straight forward on down to a one thousandth of a millimeter. And then really you just how many bugs we’ve looked at. 8,000 almost. Yeah. There’s only so many ways to make a pizza I guess. So we kind of know what’s in everything almost off the bat, but then really when we have the bike in and we start repairing it, you know, for the most part, every bike is predominantly unidirectional. Uh, even if there’s an aesthetic outer layer doesn’t, it doesn’t do much for the overall structural integrity. Um, so we, the architecture, I guess the fiber type or the weave is pretty obvious.
Shawn: 00:05:19 That’s usually unidirectional. I mean, we, as we’re at on our interview here is talking about a Yeti. They use, um, some plain weave in the middle of their laminate. That was a bit of a surprise. I haven’t seen that before. You know, it’s good for impact, resistance in damage mitigation. I would say if you do hit something, damage isn’t going to go very far and the structure’s fine. So yeah, a couple things. We have seen so many bikes that we kind of know what we’re looking for, but also using ultrasound technology, we’re able to fully diagnose the original intended layup and then go and match that as best as we can or we tweak the layup design to make it better and stronger in that area. The same way when you remove ever all the damage you take note of your fiber angles are probably more important and that’s a hard one to figure out. Some of those unit directional layers look really a compacted so they’re hard to really note if there is year degree versus [inaudible] degree or 12 and a half degree or something.
Shawn: 00:06:13 Great question. Thank you. Steal, steal, steal. The next one submitted also through instagram from big red. Kevin bought what is up with no threaded bottom brackets on carbon frames or I think he also meant what is up with the lack of threaded bottom brackets in carbon frames is because the durability of race frames is not aligned with having a robust bottom bracket. What are our thoughts on the matter of Sean?
Shawn: 00:06:37 Um, you know, and there’s a multitude of reasons. One of them right off the bat, it’s heavier.
Shawn: 00:06:42 You’re trying to make an 860 grand and Mondo frame having a threat about him rack it is going to make it difficult to achieve that for any bike you’re going to add probably 80 to a hundred
Shawn: 00:06:52 comes right off the bat of an aluminum thread. Even if the tie and laid the part and you insert it and you know, there’s a lot of people that would choose a threaded bottom rack. And even with the extra added weight. And I kind of wish there was that actually there’s a few companies out there. I have a still uses threaded bottom brackets I think. Right. Does open, is that profitable? I don’t remember what opens using the other day. It comes down to a way, I mean, that’s one of the reasons. The other reason, kind of the one that’s not as obvious is this similarity of materials and production. You know, we’ve looked at so many darn bikes over the years and carbons great, uh, you know, it’s not great and mixing and carbon with any other material, especially aluminum. Aluminum is a sacrificial anode essentially.
Shawn: 00:07:36 So basically it will corrode into nothing and you know, you can prevent that with good practice and procedures of insulating it with a layer of fiberglass or something. And that’s an easy step to screw up. And when you’re, if you’re making 10 to what, 20, 30,000 bucks a year, it’s a higher chance of failure. Um, you know, a lot of bikes used to have aluminum dropouts in the back and that’s fine. You had to give if you do it right, but, you know, the long-term solution, a lot of them were gluten really well or insulated. Same thing with older mountain bikes. The pivots or you know, it’s a carbon [inaudible] like on the rear triangle when we repair. And a lot of these, um, the threaded insert that goes into the carbon part is not insulating. They fail two years out,
Shawn: 00:08:18 they become corroded and literally just rattle our dropouts follow-up because pour bonding.
Shawn: 00:08:23 Yeah, it’s frustrating from a, you know, a carbon engineering standpoint. You’re just like, well this isn’t the carbon’s fault. This is the damn manufacturer’s fault for not putting the stupid thing together. Right. And it’s frustrating. So that’s kind of number two, you know, it’s a higher risk of failure. So way number one is weight to the higher risk of failure. Why do I have a three? I guess it more expensive for the manufacturer because it’s an added step. I mean because a lot of them they can bond or a mold the shells as is. And I why people are having problems with press, but it’s like it’s not a perfect system. I say. I always say prep summits are good. They can be as good as a headset headset, right? Because it’s the head. I always think of it as just a headset or head to turn 90 degrees and they could be made of that same level of tolerance is they’re not often, and you’ll get, you know, a misalignment between the two phases are angular misalignment or all sorts of issues and that’s why they’ll cause problems. I’m rambling. Do we have a third answer? Um, we can put a threaded insert in your frame. I mean, it’s true. We can definitely put it. I mean, there’s some brands you can tracks. We can’t, uh, because their [inaudible] and their system is enough to cut a lot of stuff out. We’re not going to do it. But, um, if you’re using a BB 30 or press fit [inaudible] system, we can put in a threaded shell pretty easily. Usually it’ll be forever because we’ll do it right.
Shawn: 00:09:50 So, yeah, at big Red Kev bought the long and short is it’s more expensive and it’s a higher risk of failure and a, it’s a higher weight penalty. So those are Kinda the three reasons why you don’t find them in the majority of bikes. My long-term dream is
Shawn: 00:10:06 that precedent gets better. Uh, I’m, I’m a [inaudible] fan only for the sole reason. It’s universal universality, that word awe approach. You literally just have an open hole on your bike, right? You can put me people that can glue stuff together all day long. Right? So I see him like, Hey, a big open hole. I see a canvas, right? A Beautiful Open Palette of bottom brackets, standards Galore, and I can pay my Picasso of them often. Don’t give the industry any more ideas. No, I’m just saying it’ll, you know, you can put in those little tricks that I love, you know, single speed. So it’s like yourself. What do you mean eccentric?
Shawn: 00:10:48 thanks for the question submission at big red. That doesn’t answer it. Please ask again next week and that’ll come up with that third reason onto our fourth and final question for the week. Thank you everybody for the submissions. Yeah, it was a lot of them this week. So far. Fourth question. Yes, we did get forward carbon queries this week. What do a you do and be recommend consumers do with unrepairable carbon? Any way to reduce, reuse, recycle before going to landfill? Again, that one’s from at the cushman submitted through twitter, were there to, what do we do with unrepairable carbon?
Shawn: 00:11:27 It sits around here for a long time until I do something stupid with it. Um, that’s not a good answer. Um,
Shawn: 00:11:33 honest answer it and we’ll hear later in our interview that, that is pretty standard to hang on to things until you have enough by people that are hoarders, but if people are all matter where you are, doesn’t matter how many weird one inch bikes yet
Shawn: 00:11:50 nine speed is the way to still have a handful of nine speed chains. I guess I use a mommy single speed. It’s been, I don’t know,
Shawn: 00:11:58 the long and short is there is no real great solution yet. Not on a small scale. Carbon recycling does exist and what happens is the parts get chopped up very, very finely and then heated. So all the excess resin epoxy is burned off and you do have a pretty pure carbon leftover, but the strands are so short, so it’s hard to make parts that are actually load bearing in any relation to the original carbon structure. Am I right about that?
Shawn: 00:12:32 Basically you though that recycled carbon and snows whisker casting you, you use it with like nylon. Anytime you’ve seen carbon reinforced nylon, that’s where it ends up, so yeah, the sense it’s not a long film meant at that point. It’s a filament of maybe quarter inch and a half inch, but it’s more becoming an additive strength than an original totally itself and it’s an amazing additive because yet again it retains like 80 five to 90 percent of it’s in inherent, original made strength, so it’s still an amazing product. You just got to clean it up. And the hard part where this is difficult for the bike industry, I know specialized has done a lot of research into carmen manufacturing, so it’s track on track. I think we’re as somebody in North Carolina and specialized works with somebody in Arizona and the reason why those places exists in the aerospace industry, aerospace and wind represent 91 to 92 percent of carbon February usage and they have a lot of waste.
Shawn: 00:13:32 Not saying every part. I mean every part definitely matters and we take this very seriously. That’s what we tried to repair everything, but um, we basically said we don’t have a good answer. There’s not. And those companies have to pay to recycle, you know, that’s the other frustrating thing. It’s not like a Daniel and talking about your can have it OK for everybody else to the idea cans and order ten cents Texans here. So which is fine, but when you’re cycling carbon or composites, you have to pay to get recycled and yeah, that is the ethical thing to do for sure. But it doesn’t, but it hard to justify, harder to justify, harder to justify. And for small businesses it’s just one more expense and is. And there’s a new carbon repair or sorry, carbon recycling facility in Washington now a top important Angela was actually, they don’t want to get them on the podcast because they’re using a lot of Boeing stuff. Um, you know, Boeing is probably one of the biggest users of carbon in north world. Actually a, that’s a guess, but lately. So we’d love to talk more with them about what they’re doing, how do we get involved, but you know, it was Kinda like, yeah, you don’t want to throw it out, but it’s not hurting anything.
Shawn: 00:14:52 anything. There’s not creating ways does. It obviously isn’t great. Recycling, everything’s better, but at least it’s not like toxic waste that it had the. Yeah. So what do we recommend? Send it to us. Yeah. We’re working on it to. We’re trying to figure out a, you know, end of life scenario for a lot of consumers because you know, there’s a lot of people, you know, as cyclists in general, we interact with the outdoors so much like you want to take care of it, you want to be the conservationists and you know, whatever that means to you obviously take that as well. But you know, give us a shout. We can give you some good leads. Definitely brought up a great, great question and as we said topic for another show. Thanks again for the Great Question d, Cushman, uh, again, as we said, kind of hard one to answer at length. It’s definitely going to be the subject of an upcoming episode, but thanks for pointing that when our way, if you do have a question, a burning question that you want an answer to, feel free to submit any time using the Hashtag carbon queries, twitter, instagram, facebook, email, go onto our website and use our repair for him as well. We’ve had carbon queries that so keep them coming. One of our favorite parts of the episode is answering her audience’s questions
Shawn: 00:16:15 so we’ve got a segment of this weekend cycling for you as well. Kind gone away for a little while as the road season was obviously pretty quiet in the off-season, so not many this week in cycling so that we could have done but new topic for you this week. If you tuned in to one of the smaller races of the past weekend, the doors, they’re Virginia blonder in. Also known as the Johan Museo Classic, kind of a smaller race in the north. Very, very interesting race as it stood a three man break to quickstep guys and won Lotto race color, a one off with about 50 kilometers to go. Duked it out towards the finish quick stuff. Obviously put on a clinic on how to ride in a [inaudible] break. Great Finnish. But something interesting for our show happened. One of the wanting group go bare writers, which was a small Belgian team, uh, therefore failed in the middle of attorn probably 500 meters after finishing a cobbled sector.
Shawn: 00:17:15 They were making a, you know, very easy, slow, smooth, normal, left-hand turn and the fork fragmented in half directly below the stem clamp. Pretty scary. He went in the ditch, he did go in the ditch, not injured. We don’t think he got up a bruised, probably bruised, real math. He did look very pissed mindfully. So the last shot of it as well as having a man with a dog in his jacket, helping the guy out. The last shot was this writer, uh, just turning around and heading the opposite direction of Peloton. So I suppose that he was riding home a f-ed thrown in the towel on that day, but it brings up the topic and we talk about this all the time. Forks are inherently very dangerous. It’s a two and a half millimeter tube that is holding up the entire weight on your bike. So if you’re going to go out, if you’re gonna do gravel rides.
Shawn: 00:18:10 That’s all well and good. Check out your fork every once in awhile. We’re always here. Ultrasound really is the only way to know if your fork is going to be damaged. Our gas on this is, you know these, these writers only have a number of bikes. They train on them, they put a ton of miles on them. You know, writing cobbles, crap probably crashed in the off season. They’re packed and shipped all over the world. They’re packed and shipped all over the world. You know, a very, very small void or de lamination could have caused this accident through repeated use. And again, this is, we talk about this all the time. He didn’t propagations cause cracks and failures down the road. And so that is very probable as could of what happened here. So if you’re going out in the back roads, that’s all well and good. Just make sure you get your [inaudible] inspecting every once in a while, especially if you have an older bike.
Shawn: 00:18:59 We provide that service also. You can kind of pop it out and check yourself. It is hard to know if anything is going to be broken if you can’t see it. So we are here as a resource. Feel free to reach out to us anytime about that. If you have any sort of big impact more than anything. Like if you’ve fallen really hard front ended into something you know, who knows like current [inaudible] are really strong but crashing and crashing. You know, I inspected one yesterday. The guy drove it into his garage and frame was fine, but your [inaudible] was actually broke a right where the stem medic because the handlebars when right into the garage, rest of the fork was fine. But that whole top area, it was just, it was bad. And yet again, and didn’t look visually bad, but there was sure was any new fork, you know, a couple of hundred bucks.
Shawn: 00:19:43 Not Cheap, but boy safety is paramount. Safety’s paramount. So yeah, if you have a question or any impact or let us scan it and man we should go to the big race. I mean could have saved that guy’s day. Everyone. Commodores, bike broke to preventing that could’ve saved given save this wanting group guys day. How are we? Can just walk around in lab coats and its our ultrasound and put her glasses up her nose and I have glasses and contacts. Figurative glasses. Not My little glasses. Yeah, you can find their race out there. The stream that I watched the act came around the 47 minute. I forget exactly where it was, but yeah, go check it out. See what we’re talking about. Smart ride safe. Be Cool. If you have any questions. We’re here to help.
Shawn: 00:20:44 Dustin. Hey, how’s it going? Pretty well. This is a. I’m Dan
Shawn: 00:20:48 and I’m here with Shawn, our owner. Hey Dustin. How’s it going? Going really, really well. Thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with us. We are very thrilled to have you on today. That’s my first podcast, so it shouldn’t be interesting. Oh, that’s awesome. Even better. First of many. Yeah, for. Hopefully it is the first time. Any check in, uh, every, every so often with y’all. Good. Yeah, definitely. I mean we want to share a story and uh, it’s always good to, uh, to talk to people within the industry, so yeah, definitely. Yeah. And I mean your wheels look absolutely beautiful. We’re, we’ve got the website up right now and we’re looking at the little web m on the bottom that you guys have role and have everybody working in the shop. Yeah, it was great. Like I said, thrilled to have you on. So again, a thanks for always trying to find people that are doing, you know, not just boring stuff with carbon or importing or doing whatever like, you know, obviously anybody can do that, but we’re always trying to find the people that are doing something interesting, bringing little science and love to it as we always say.
Dustin: 00:21:50 Yeah, I mean products definitely out of the, out of the norm I would say from, from what’s going on in Industry today, and uh, we definitely took a different, a different look and an avenue as to what to what most people would say is, is traditional, that’s for sure. So yeah, it’s always a interesting to, to go against the grain every once in a while.
Shawn: 00:22:10 Well, we will get started with it. Uh, as we said in the intro, we’re speaking with Dustin, the CEO of. We are one composites. And where are you guys located? Dustin. We’re in a small town of Kamloops, British Columbia, up in Canada. Designing wheels for how y’all ride up there apparently, right?
Dustin: 00:22:31 Yeah, it’s a countless. Isn’t known as the rowdy place, but a changing. There’s more and more trails opening for the rowdy crowd, more of a fast cross country kind of a zone in NBC, in the one for the big free ride movement that happened in the mid two thousands.
Shawn: 00:22:48 Could you describe. We are one for our listeners who may not be familiar with you.
Dustin: 00:22:53 We are one composites is a small startup composite, a wheel manufacturer. We’re new to the market in 2017 and it had been working with my engineer Fraser Andrews for the better part of six months before we launched our brand and uh, yeah, we’re proudly manufactured here in Canada and we make both cross country downhill and enduro rooms in both [inaudible] and uh, we assemble wheels here as well.
Shawn: 00:23:20 And what’s the size of the operation currently
Dustin: 00:23:23 as far as manpower goes? Correct. A manpower. We are a seven person crew and we are looking to double that in the next two to three months. Believe it or not. Yeah, we’ve got a massive push in. Yeah. So bit of a growth phase right now. So yeah, it’s been, it’s been a good, a good beginning and A. Yeah, we are definitely bodies so I’m looking for some solid people right away for sure.
Shawn: 00:23:48 That’s excellent. What do you think is fueling the growth so rapidly know? I think just the, the way we run our company, I mean
Dustin: 00:23:55 it’s proven to be profitable and it’s proven to be a successful model at a reasonable price with a lifetime warranty. We, we’ve kind of ticked all the boxes possible and to go up against the other North American manufacturer and be, you know, 50 percent of their costs that are retail level thing that’s catching a lot of people’s eyes.
Shawn: 00:24:15 Yeah. Especially from a smaller operation. That’s Kudos to you.
Dustin: 00:24:19 Yeah, I mean it’s a really, really focused a lot on our process and uh, w w we know that it’s scalable and uh, we’ve proven that from day one that every month we continue to grow, if not close to double every month as far as sales and output ghosts. And uh, we continue to chip away at those numbers and increase as the mangroves for sure
Dan: 00:24:40 before we get a little too deep into the business. We kind of want to start out at the base level. Uh, how did you get your start in composites? Anyway?
Dustin: 00:24:48 So it was with. I started kind of working with another business called Nova wheels in early 2000, or sorry, late 2005, early 2016, claiming owner in that company I’m interested me as to what they were doing was the first time I had heard of carbon rims and whatnot. And uh, we, uh, we were manufacturing with light bicycles and uh, basically cut my teeth there and kind of found a that there’s a really cool unique way to build some characteristics or the product that I wasn’t really familiar with and um, I, I always like to tinker and whatnot. Um, I should’ve been an engineer instead. I was a bike racer and I never really went.
Dustin: 00:25:27 The school kids kind of got in the way of all that stuff. So, um, yeah, that was kind of where it started out is, is ah, with my tenure at a noble.
Dan: 00:25:37 Is that how you got started in the bike industry as a racer?
Dustin: 00:25:42 No. Yeah, yeah, as a race. But yeah, so I raced mountain bikes for a number of years. I guess it’d be it almost 20 years. I had a pretty good run of it. I was a ranked in the top in the world at one time, not a number one guy, but I was a up there and a top North American in 2002 to 2004 as stood on many norma podiums back in the day and uh, was Canadian national champions, so on and so forth. So yeah, I did a lot of product development and with a giant and a few other companies along the way. And uh, that was my main focus in Andrea into the bike business, so to speak. So probably at that point you’ve rode every other carbon grim out there, right? No, I mean, back in the day there was no such thing. I mean, it was, it was flabbergasted that I didn’t even know that it was such a thing.
Dustin: 00:26:26 Honestly, I cannot lie. Two Thousand Fifteen, this is the first time I learned about carbon rims as a or carbon as a rim material, a altogether. So the moment I heard about it and learned the kind of unique characteristics in increased strength and all that stuff went on until when I started with noble, it was a, that was the first time I had learned about comps at rims and uh, as a, as a whole, it was really interesting because you could engineer and design the actual product, uh, give it characteristics and a unique abilities with materials and so on and so forth. So it kind of really got me interested, not only that, I was also involved with, uh, with concrete molding before. So anything with a mold kind of a really piques my interest in it was kind of neat to, to, to learn it and kind of get my kick off there.
Dan: 00:27:15 What kind of stuff are you building out of concrete?
Dustin: 00:27:17 Doing a lots of unique 3d sculptures and a three dimensional products for both the like design communities and so on and so forth. Doing a glass fiber reinforced concrete, stuff like that. So all kinds of really high detail molds that needed a lot of precision and attention to detail or else the finished product wouldn’t look good. So I did definitely a transfer, a lot of a lessons learned, I guess, into what we’re doing now. Yeah, I was just going to say that’s the kind of sounds like a, some other, uh, uh, construction that you have to pay attention to ever build a concrete canoe. A, I know, you know, I, I, I wish I had time for something like that. I’ve been looking at a concrete boat for a long time. My grandfather was a boat builder, so I say one day that I’ll pay homage to that and uh, and get out there and do that for him.
Shawn: 00:28:08 That’s always the classic, like college engineering challenges, building concrete. It definitely people’s minds. Concrete floats. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So why start a wheel company in the first place, Dustin? Uh, well for me getting involved with noble, I learned a lot about the industry. Um, I learned the ins and outs and the ups and downs of, of how it operates, especially in the composite sides of things and visit a lot of factories in Asia and kind of talking to other people that I know in the industry as to where the carbon composites rim kind of a and we’ll aspect is going. And uh, I wanted to bring North American manufacturing with noble and there was a bit of a head bonking I guess, so to speak there. So after I decided to go ahead with this, I, you know, I left the mobile and uh, I think there was a business case to be had to be able to control your manufacturing and control your process and so on and so forth.
Dustin: 00:29:10 Because in Asia they just don’t have that ability or your kind of vanilla you’re with mixed in with everybody else and you kind of get what the factory workers don’t want to put out. And uh, just doesn’t interest me to go and make a s an OK product. We wanted to make a product that we knew the ins and outs of how we can improve it on a daily process and uh, you know, really make a true ground up product right from day one to where we are now. And that’s kind of where you develop the idea of what you call your closed loop manufacturing. Yeah, I mean ultimately we wanted to manufacture all aspects of what we do. So we, uh, we make our own molds who, uh, we have a machinist on staff that does all of our oils. We cad and do all the work, all the engineering work, the testing on the rims. Everything we do with our product from the ground up is done here. The only thing we don’t make as our fasteners and hardware like nuts and bolts and stuff like that. But, um, everything else, uh, yeah, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve designed and detailed into the process from day one.
Dan: 00:30:09 For our listeners that might not be familiar. What’s the process of designing and machining? I’m old, like, you know, I’m not, I’m sure not everybody understands that you have to have these big machines pieces, uh, you know, to lay up into, you want to walk us through that process a little bit.
Dustin: 00:30:27 There’s multiple things you need to look at. One is the material you want to use for expansion in terminal capacity and the rate at which it is going to keep and retain heat, so on and so forth. So you gotta look at your career cycle for the residence to make what you’re going to start with either steel or aluminum. Um, so we decided to go with an aluminum mold because the thermal properties are a lot better, heats up better with the and more evenly than, than steel and more rapidly. So we could, we could produce a decent amount of rooms every day. But the actual molds themselves you have to worry about, you know, parting lines and you’re making a round part. So you kept the kind of think about how the product is going to go in. And not only that, how are you going to be able to remove it without having a big, uh, a big issue along the way? So it’s a, our molds are made up of six different pieces, um, and we do a split half, uh, design and uh, we try to make it as seamless as possible. It’s not really a seem, I guess as a parting line, small and as tight as possible with our machining process being as accurate as we can make it.
Dan: 00:31:32 What is the number of rims that you’re putting out per day? Do you have a hard number on that?
Dustin: 00:31:39 Currently we’re sitting at 22 and we want to get that up to the [inaudible] by the end of the year.
Shawn: 00:31:45 Pretty impressive. Impressive. In drilling the spoke coles, what’s the process of that look like?
Dustin: 00:31:52 Um, so that’s one point that we’re working on. We’re trying to design a machine that does it for us. We want to automate that process. But right now we have a simple Jig a that we use and we use an angled a set, I guess the angle Jig in a, in a Jig that marks off the holes and we’ll drill it by hand. So with it, uh, that’s a very big challenge is drilling composites. There’s not really anyone out there that manufacturers a great drill. We’ve had, you know, we’ve had Sandvik here to talk to us about all their newest, latest, greatest comps, drills and, and products that they can do. And every one of them has failed up until, you know, has never really passed what we think is acceptable. So that’s, uh, that’s the most challenging part we face, day to day is how do we replicate the holes so that it doesn’t tear fiber makes a nice clean entry and exit. Uh, you know, that’s a, that’s a big, big deal.
Shawn: 00:32:47 Robots are short-lived, they just don’t last long and we just don’t, we just go through them quick where you’ll get one or two good drills out of it and then you’re like, hey man, we’re out.
Dustin: 00:32:56 We’re thinking that a manually right now with the manual, like we have a high accuracy, but it’s a manual drill press. We use three of them in a row. That’s how we kind of, we do one side with one drill, the other side, like 16 holes with one, we flip it the other way to, to a seven and a half degree angle drill the other [inaudible]. And then we have another drill press that just drills the, uh, the reverse thing where the nipple, that entry holes, exit bulls. Um, so with those we figure that the RPM is never isn’t as high as we’d like to achieve. So we want to get some stepper motors in there to train, get that to a, to an, a, an appropriate rpm. And then not only that, it’s just the feed by hand to me. You can do your best to try and feed it in at a reasonable pace and speed. But without the accuracy of like linear scale, it’s going gonna be a bit of a challenge to maintain life for sure.
Dan: 00:33:47 Yeah. Especially when the human having to do everything rather than a computer home.
Dustin: 00:33:51 Exactly, I mean I think, I think we’ll see fitlife increase once we achieve what we want to do with our drilling machine for sure.
Dan: 00:33:57 So can you, can you tell us about more of the concept to trail Hashtag that you guys use [inaudible]? It kind of sounds like we’re starting to touch on that a little bit. What does it all mean for our listeners? Like what, what is the point for you using closed loop manufacturing to literally design every part of this manufacturing?
Dustin: 00:34:18 Well we deal with it every day for, with, with every other manufacturer that we deal with. They outsource something and we, we deal with the issues. Um, so the biggest thing that we wanted to achieve here is if there’s an issue, we don’t find out about it when the customer has a problem, we find out about it on the factory floor so we can resolve or mediate that issue right away and you know, make it right so that we don’t have to deal with these small kind of tooth aches along the way when we’re dealing with dealing with manufacturing. So the entire process, if we didn’t own it, uh, it didn’t interest me because you don’t ultimately have control or complete control when it comes to manufacturing. So it’s the expensive way. It’s the kind of the long way. It’s been a very arduous battle to get there and we were delayed almost two months to launch and um, you know, every day we’re constantly improving on stuff.
Dustin: 00:35:12 But the beauty about that is, is we can improve on that. So we’re not settling and saying, OK, we’re, we’re here, we’re good, we’re, we’re banging out rims and people are buying our product. We don’t have to worry about our process, it’s great. We can constantly do better and we’re constantly trying to improve on speed of process. Um, you know, how do we, how do we start dropping weight and rims, how we can, you know, at a, at a reasonable cost, keep our costs low and our output is high as possible. So it’s an interesting thing for us to be able to watch on a daily basis where, where we’re making gains and we’re, we’re, we’re losing so that we can, we can work on those areas, have a lot of great ideas on how to continuously improve that entire process. How do you think you’ll handle that by doubling your staff?
Shawn: 00:36:00 I mean, when we’ve doubled our staff, it was unleashed all sorts of new problems. This is, yeah, this isn’t my first business. I’ve had, you know, many of them live in the past 20 treatment and employee business doing a granite countertops in that for eight years. So it’s a staffing is always a challenge. It’s always going to be a challenge. We’ve, we’ve taken a fresh approach with this one and uh, I did a lot of reading and research about management and how to start a great company. So on and so forth. And um, no, we really want to focus on the lean manufacturing aspect of things there and you know, empowering our employees and creating a great culture for people to want to be involved, to want to come to work and be excited about what they, they, uh, they put out. I mean we, I’m a very, very fond follower of evil lunch and our from a Patagonia.
Dustin: 00:36:51 I love this concept. I love that, you know, is people are first in the company and that’s what we’re trying to develop here is, is not top down. You know, I need to make as much money as I can so I can retire in Palm Beach. I’m on everyone here to, to make a good living and for everyone to want to be involved for the long haul and put forth their best working hours while they’re here. So, Hey, off topic question, what do people in Canada instead of saying Palm Beach, where did they say like Victoria for like where, where Victoria would be that one. Yeah, for sure.
Dustin: 00:37:26 Everyone. Vancouver’s too expensive now. Victoria is too expensive. I guess one would be like qualicum beach there, there you do retirement capital of vc. You hear, you heard it here first that everyone said real estate business here. This is most of your staff then ride because everybody does. Yeah, that’s one of our last. The one only thing that we, uh, we demand from, uh, when you come on board or an is that you must ride a bike and you must be active in the writing community. So that’s our one stipulation and uh, so far we’ve been doing really well with that.
Dan: 00:38:03 Um, we’re really happy you brought up the idea of lean manufacturing because it’s something that we are huge believers in as well. How do you exemplify those practices around the shop on a daily basis? And then if you could, you know, save time, doing one thing in the next week. Ideally, what would that one be?
Dustin: 00:38:25 I’m no expert on lean. I’m, I’m learning more and more as I get into this. I would say that having the luxury of seeing everything going on and then kind of overlooking aspects, I guess it’s kind of like a kaizen atmosphere here and everybody is, is, is, uh, has the power to bring those, to bring issues for so that we can solve them, has a tough question. I mean we, we, we just ultimately, I mean if you put us in a shoe-box yeah, we try and focus on a lot of the lean parts, but ultimately we just want to make better parts and do a better job all the way throughout. If I was to put my finger on one thing, we want to do better and faster, it’s definitely drilling. I mean that’s always the holdup that’s our, that’s our bottleneck right now and I wish we could be faster and more proficient at that. And then we’re definitely making headway on getting their big lovers here. Right in like, I mean like what’s a, what philosophies and how do you guys input all that stuff down there? I mean, what do you guys like to do?
Dan: 00:39:24 I mean, you said it, the really the Kaizen, you know, the continuous improvement at Sean’s kind of drilled into all of us, excuse the Pun, I’m Shawn’s really drilled into us about saving seconds, you know, and if you, if you say the second of the day over the course of a year, it’s a huge amount of time. So one of the things that we’ve tried to do is in last year in March we moved shops. So when we set up our new shop, we really wanted to design the space to cut down on walking time for example, you know, making communication easier between, you know, the different stops of the repair process. Uh, you know, we’re trying to speed up things. They’re trying to speed up customer relations
Dustin: 00:40:06 system as well as far as inventory. And basically, I guess the point of lean is you’re never done. No. You can be. I mean, that’s. Yeah, if you’re done then you’re going to die, right? Yeah. We’re. Everybody is aware of what we’re trying to achieve here. I mean, I guess the big thing is we’re trying to open communication across the entire floor so that everybody can help each other improve and then has the power to do so. I think speed is always one thing because we’re constantly, you know, getting demand. So if we’re not improving our processes as far as speed goes, then we know without obviously without, uh, without having issues with quality and uh, that’s everybody’s kind of up to it because they wanted me to meet a goal and we’ve set targets and we try to achieve those every week.
Dan: 00:40:55 Kind of going along the same thing of quality and manufacturing. The next question we’ve got for you is why does made in Canada matter?
Dustin: 00:41:04 There’s days I wonder.
Dustin: 00:41:08 That’s totally. Honestly, I thought I thought. I think it’s more of an American pride thing. Honestly. I look at it all and I think guys like that I’m at allied and stuff like that, you know, [inaudible], these guys are doing some great things in a lot. I think in the US, you guys really get behind those companies and you really, you really support them. And I think in Canada, I have to say, I haven’t, I haven’t really seen that. I think people’s jaws are still dropped as far as like, is it even possible, you know, they’re still wandering, no, it can’t be done, you know, as a, is it real, is he really going to do this? And is it gonna be something that continues forward moving forward? Um, and I think they want us to kind of see proof in the pudding before they’re going to jump behind it.
Dustin: 00:41:49 And I think at that point being made in Canada might be something that people will catch onto and realize is important. But, uh, for me as a, as a for my goal and what I wanted to achieve is to be able to inspire other people to do such a thing. I mean, we’re so reliant on overseas manufacturing and overseas for every aspect of what we do in life. And uh, you know, my grandfather was a boat builder and uh, you know, that that’s gone by the wayside and have watched so many people, you know, rely on unionized labor and kind of take it, take the easy road. And I think doing this kind of shows, people that, you know, you don’t have to, you know, it sounds really cheesy, but you know, you can dream big and you can achieve these kinds of wild dreams if you have a good plan and the right people in place.
Shawn: 00:42:38 Luckily, you know, you guys are a little more politically stable than we are. I mean, for example, we just had our president, um, you know, thrown down and aluminum and steel tariff. We felt that. Yeah, it’s just like, boy, things are made here. You’re kind of insulated from that a little bit. I mean, it’s going to raise prices on everything realistically. But I mean, um, I hope that we don’t get wrapped up because we are classified in, in vehicles when it comes to actually tariff classification. Um, so if they start being crazy and slapping tariffs on vehicles and that definitely can have an implication on our business and I’m not too happy about that. So we’re, we’re kind of trying to come up with creative ways to get around it. And uh, I don’t know, I really don’t know what to do at that point because if there’s a 30 percent increase on our product then it’s going to really suffer.
Shawn: 00:43:31 We’re all gonna feel it and it’s crazy because it’s just kind of, I mean, nobody’s down here in the states. It feels like, boy, that stuff is changing every, every damn day. I mean, it’s really, it’s really too bad. I mean, uh, you know, I’m not, I don’t like to play the political role and is politics it’s way above me and way out of my hands. But ultimately we’ll have to be honest, I focused a lot of my attention outside of the US in the first year of this business because I know the instabilities there and we’ve seen it. God, what’s, what’s that going in the next day? I really don’t know. I mean, he has his own kind of agenda and it’s like, you know, it, it will change soon, but not soon enough. I don’t think you guys have been focusing then a European market. I’ve been really focusing on Europe.
Dustin: 00:44:12 Um, and we’ve been spending a lot more time in New Zealand and, and starting to enter into Australia and Singapore are actually, believe it or not, they’re, they’re really big markets, so Malaysia is picking up quite nicely for us. Singapore loves carbon bikes. You know what? I had the luxury of meeting a really great active guy over there. His name’s Wilson Low and he, uh, skiing anything riding and uh, you know, I’d have to say the people that I have met there that do ride there, there were some of the most stoked people on biking that’s I’ve ever met at all.
Shawn: 00:44:42 Can you clarify a little bit why you, your company is categorized under the automotive realm as far as terrorists.
Dustin: 00:44:50 It’s due to a wheel. They classic by bicycle wheel or bicycle hub wheels or rims under the vehicular a category. So if you’re looking under the tariff, there’s no actual tariff under cycling. It’s under vehicles. So I’m, I’m concerned I haven’t talked to my, my, uh, broker yet, but I’m concerned that if they do slap a tariff on, on vehicle export and import than we will be wrapped up in that and I don’t know if that’s going to be a blanket thing or if it’s going to be more precise as to certain tariff code or not. But uh, um, I’ve definitely been losing a few hours of sleep over that in the last few weeks. Yeah, I guess I have an open call. If any of our listeners out there are in the import export business, reach out to us and help us clarify. We want to know is. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s hard to find that information. It’s not easy. I mean a good broker mainly they deal on a lot of other stuff, but I haven’t yet found a solid guy that deals specifically with bicycles.
Dan: 00:45:49 That’s really, really interesting. Just because something has wheels automa added automatically classified as automotive.
Shawn: 00:45:57 My weird guests is because they all used to be spoken way back in the day. It kind of lumped it in with motorcycles as well, right? Yeah, I don’t think. I think it was just easy. They’re like, ah, bicycles this, put them in with these guys. Pretty much the same thing after all. Um, I just, I had a weird one today about the code slapped the, came up from product was pulled from ups and they said I was under what they call it has seven and a that’s classifies it as a vehicle and they asked for like, what’s the Vin number? The make the model of your vehicle or you think it’s bicycle rims are like, yeah, well it got pulled. We have to ask for that information. And I’m like, there’s no such thing. You’re like one, one, one, one, one, one. It’s always interesting. That’s definitely something that we deal with all of the time is shipping across borders into other countries. It’s, it’s always a challenge, no doubt about it. But you learn, um, you learn through the first shipment, second shipment and the third shipment as the, you know, the ebbs and flows of it all. And we forgot a great broker now that we work with for our year and stuff. And uh, like I say, we’re looking for somebody in the US and now there’s this whole Nafta thing might go south.
Dan: 00:47:16 What’s the process of setting up this international distribution?
Dustin: 00:47:20 So we, we don’t really distributed. We just shipped from here.
Dan: 00:47:25 OK.
Dustin: 00:47:27 Indirect fire, indirect consumer direct done through the factory. Uh, I mean, we, we ultimately, again, that’s about owning our process. We really want to deal with the customers, want to hear the customer’s problems first hand, we don’t want to hear it hand. Um, you want to deal with our customers, want to know who they’re talking to and develop long term relationships with these people so they can hop on the phone and if they have a problem or if they want to talk about, uh, improving, uh, an aspect of our product, they can, they can do that. So you put a distributor in the way wanted it. Definitely makes it challenging for being competitive price wise, but also, uh, you, uh, you kind of fall out of touch with a lot of things along the way as well.
Dan: 00:48:06 That’s really impressive. Since we, since we’re touching on the price a little bit, we’ve got another question for you. Uh, how would you answer the question of why you would spend more on your wheels versus say an alloy pair?
Dustin: 00:48:21 Well, first of all, I mean the one thing that we just implemented was a lifetime warranty. There’s not one alloy wheel offering a warranty. Um, so
Dustin: 00:48:30 know when you can actually actually get a replacement rim if you break one. Um, that’s a big, big reason why a, it is a lot more money, but the way aluminum rims or are manufactured, I mean it’s, it’s a very quick, fast assembly line. You buy extrusions and once you have the extrusion engineered and um, you get a machine that’s completely automated and it can spit out rims, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds on an hour, a hourly basis. Uh, and we don’t have that luxury. We have virtually the exact same overhead is as a, you know, an aluminum rim manufacturer, but our output is a lot less and ultimately it really boils down to how much we can produce in versus how much it costs for us to operate. We need to make a profit and we want to be a profitable companies. But, uh, that’s the big cost difference, but the reason why you would buy in a carbon [inaudible] is a performance is one, strength is another. Uh, we can actually tune a, the feel and the ride of a rim, um, ribbons wind up a lot quicker and a, at the end of the day it’s just, it’s a better product for a wheel and it’s more of a precision product than is
Dan: 00:49:41 how have you then tailored your lamps, schedules, apply manuals to achieve the right qualities that you want out of. We are one.
Dustin: 00:49:50 Uh, so that’s where we’ve really spent a lot of time with [inaudible] software and so on and so forth. And, and that’s the big thing right now with, with comps that wields, does impact resistance. And we focused most of our time on how to achieve a supple ride, ah, that’s not going to jar you to death and not so much a rigid kind of rim, but also be able to withstand a lot of impact and we’ve played with different fibers, not only carbon but other, other material as well to help aid and, uh, and get that rhythm to where we want it to perform. But what we looked for is we call kind of like a leaf spring, where are our rim kind of absorbs impact and then rebounds to, um, to where it should, when it’s been disturbed.
Dan: 00:50:36 That’s awesome. One of the things that we always talk about is the beautiful [inaudible] inability of carbon, where, I mean, you said that you work with your engineers, you can really design and achieve any kind of effect that you want. So that’s awesome to hear that your company is doing exactly that.
Dustin: 00:50:52 Surprising. I mean you, you think like a, you know, a 10 millimeter wide strip of, of carbon that goes into a certain place. So the rim, and then you change the orientation of just that single layer and then you go to test it on the, on the rigs, and it’s, uh, it performs completely different and gives you a completely different output than, than the one previous. So layer by layer it is a very, very big difference.
Dan: 00:51:13 And then what are your testing procedures like? Are you doing a classic drop tests? Are you taking actual wheels out into the field after a drop test? Uh, walk us through that. We
Dustin: 00:51:25 do a non-destructive tests right away, um, to test for basically your radio and lateral stiffness to kind of see where a rim is sitting and that’s kind of a benchmark test to kind of, OK, well here’s, here’s the first production line that we were committed to and um, we set targets with the rim itself. Uh, but ultimately the wheel is what really matters. So we then do the exact same tests, uh, with a, a static we’ll, uh, so that it’s fixed up hub so you can kind of gain or gauge how much stress and strains going through and how much movement you’re getting out of the product. And then, yeah, we also do impact test as well. And it’s, it’s something that we’ve been kind of talking more and more about because it’s such a, it’s an odd way. You can do one side, both ran lips, you can angle the wheel and ultimately it’s, it’s a benchmark test to see if you’ve made improvements from, you know, from one lab to the next.
Dustin: 00:52:27 If it, if it is, then OK, well maybe we have something to look at. But uh, right now, uh, we’re really happy with where we’re out there and we’re going to start working on bringing in other materials and trying to see if we can get some more movement without actual fiber. Um, um, displacing when we, when we have impacts that we actually can absorb more impact. And I think at some point it’s got to be OK. We don’t need an insert and we’ve, we’ve got it to a really, really good strong rim that rides really well and it has all the tuna, the characteristics that we were looking for. Um, but it’s going to be really challenging to make that rim that’s going to last forever with a every impact under the sun. We want to make it so that we’re maybe looking at doing some really unique inserts like Kinda like what [inaudible] done with really happy with what they did with their insert and it’s a very cool thing that they’ve done. We want to see if we can improve on that strip. I, I think they were onto something there because they basically were able to achieve kind of like a use the effect, but I don’t. I’m not sold on the impact resistance of just having a larger are fatter surface. Um, as an answer to it to impact. We don’t, we don’t really buy that.
Dan: 00:53:44 Why not expand on that a little bit?
Dustin: 00:53:46 It might be that it’s going to improve on flat resistance because you have a flatter portion there and your tire won’t pinch or get caught. But as far as the actual overall strength on the impact, I don’t think it has any impact at all as it’s always kind of interested in a lot of ultrasound up here is kind of like seeing the post impact ultrasound because you know, we can start measuring some of the micro [inaudible] laminations going on that, you know, can exist, you know, they may not be visible yet, but we can usually measure. Those were always interested in checking that out to see, you know, just the, you know, we, we work with all a lot of forks and steer tubes in. A lot of them don’t look broke or they’re. Yeah, that’s uh, it’s something that we’ve been looking at getting it into as well. And uh, you know, it’s really challenging because it’s like, it’s a visual thing as far as when it fails, it’s not really much we can do. It’s not like we can save it. Uh, you know, once you, once you have a broken room, it’s, it’s, I don’t know if you guys successfully repaired them back to radial dimension and all that. So the tire hold there and everything is kind of a, you know, we don’t have capacity.
Dan: 00:54:52 It’s too, it’s too, it’s too hard. It throws off so many things and it’s unfortunate because people ask us all the time if we can save rims, but realistically, I mean you just said it in the room is never going to be the same. The profile is different. The tension is different because we’ve bought up one side, you know, it’s just, it’s unfortunate. But you know, we hear people in cases of people repairing grams all the time and it’s unfortunately, we don’t think it’s there, um, which, which is, you know, the value of carbon. It’s, it’s kind of a shame but it’s getting better and we’re all getting better. But yeah, rim repairs, repairs are just not.
Dustin: 00:55:31 Yeah, I think it’ll be really, really difficult. I mean, the only way that I could ever see it working is if you had the actual mold that it was made in where you can kind of shave away a lot of the broken and the laminated portions and try to infill an overlap from there and then bring it back into vacuum. But uh, yeah, it’s a challenge at that point. It’s cheaper to make. We’d be less time consuming. Yeah. At the end of the day, I mean, it may not be materials cheaper, but uh, yeah, he had a lot more labor going into it, doing it that way for sure. I think that at the end of the day, what we’re trying to focus on is how do you make a rim lasts throughout the cycle of, of ownership. I mean, we want to make the world’s strongest Ram, but not just strongest in and lightest and all that stuff, but we want to make it last, like how does, how do we have no degradation, um, throughout any layers that consistency across the entire room so that a guy buys a bike and he sells it within five, six years, but the wheels are still original on it and he didn’t have to repair them or have any issues along the way.
Dustin: 00:56:32 I mean, that’s, that’s our goal. That’s why we kind of love working with composites is, you know, they don’t really have that fatigue life when all things are done, right. They should be a lifetime forever. Yeah. Ultimately, I mean, it really, really should. I mean, it’s, it’s difficult to, to achieve everything that I think that’s the biggest challenge with, with bicycles is that we are so fixated on, on weight, um, and it really does make it challenging to make products, uh, you last the way that people would expect. And we battle that all the time we launched. People were laughing at us because we know we will honor the 490 gram [inaudible] and it was purpose-built, Enduro rim and, and we built it that way because we knew it was going to last and was going to take a beating and uh, um, you know, someone’s looking for a 15 gram savings in their room and we get those conversations all the time from customers wanting, do you guys manufacturer, you know, have a tolerance of plus or minus 10 grams, can you pull the lightest rooms off the off the shelf so we can build those up and that’s how people are so fixated on weight.
Dustin: 00:57:36 But durability never seems to really come into play for a lot of people.
Dan: 00:57:41 Yeah. With that said, we went through a couple of forums and comments sections on things that were, you guys were posted and you guys do a very good job at replying to people. Uh, let’s say tactfully a field fielded a lot of tough questions in those forums. Yeah. You guys are very great at that. So Kudos to you
Dustin: 00:58:06 say that I haven’t sat there and looked at my reply and deleted it and put it back up. I’ll be honest with you, there’s been a, when we first launched the MTM Mtb, our forums were just, just heinous. I mean, I just, it’s uh, it was challenging. We try our best and we try to put our, you know, put ourselves out there for question and, and, and for feedback and uh, yeah, they get torn up. Uh, you know, the first few weeks of launch it was definitely a challenge and uh, did some, did some head smashing on the keyboard a few times. But, uh, I think at the end, uh, we’re, we’re starting to kind of show our colors and improve our position in the market.
Dan: 00:58:44 Yeah, absolutely. And the quality of the products you make, you know, the way that they look, all the, all the content that you guys put out to the people that you have writing wheels are doing an absolutely magnificent job of, you know, to use the phrase. Right. So I think everything is lining up for you. It’s just really, you know, it’s really funny, no matter what comes out in the bike industry, regardless of quality design, whatever, they’re going to be 100 people who absolutely hate the shit out of it on the Internet. So there’s no reason that’s what they do. Arkansas, there’s lots of those
Dustin: 00:59:22 guys. No doubt about it. Yeah, we were very, very familiar with that term around here. Um, yeah. It’s uh, I don’t know if it’s just something in the bike business or what it is that if people feel like they’ve been lied to for so long, I really don’t know what it is. But mountain biking ever used to be like this. I’m used to be so positive and people would want to get together and ride. I mean the early days of pinkbike when, when it’s first first started, I remember, you know, raddock and his brother, when they started pinkbike in Calgary in their basement, I mean that, that forum launched and people were just stoked to ride and like high five each other and everybody was happy and it was like if you had a problem, it was like, I’ll see you on the race course and we’ll settle it there when I win this weekend.
Dustin: 01:00:00 But now it’s like people just, they just really genuinely just want to just rip into somebody regardless and have no remorse or, or a measurability of, of, of, of what they’re going to be held accountable for it. They just wanna spew and it’s like, what,