Reminiscing part 3

Cutler's Performance Center bike brochure

I figured I had posted way too many updates already today.  But I couldn’t pass this one up.  I was cleaning out my office at the house and came across an old brochure for something I designed back in 1997/1998.  At the time I was living in Logan, UT and my dad was living in Sandy, UT about 100 miles away.  Well his snowmobiling buddy Dale Cutler had recently hired a guy named Devin Flynn that was seriously into mountain bikes.  Dale decided to expand his snowmobile business and make a line of mountain bikes.  So on the weekends, I would meet up with Dale and Devin at my dad’s house (he had the SolidWorks) and we would work on a new bike design.  I had been doing this for a while before the bikes while designing an engine for Dale that was a 1000cc snowmobile engine based on 2 Honda CR500 cylinders.

Well, after several weeks of work, we had a final design for 3 bikes.  A cross country bike, a long travel version of the same, and a downhill bike that was vastly different than the other designs.  The unique feature on these bikes was mainly the rear suspension.  That’s the part I came up with.  We used a Garlock bearing (same style that snowmobile drive clutchs use on the outer sheave) that wrapped around the crank shaft.  The arms of both the rear suspension and the shock levers were billet with a significant amount of material cut out of them to reduce weight and try to keep strength at a maximum.   The tubes were welded onto billet lugs.  And the shock mount was a nice looking super light weight billet piece that was welded to the main tube.

The rest of the bike as far as down tube angles, tire sizes, and that sort of thing was specified by Devin.  I just made them fit.  Well, once we were done, Dale and Devin got some big name guys to ride the bikes and race them.  Turns out the bike did very well for it’s short life.  In fact it was so well done the first time, we never even had to make a single revision to the design.

Here is the rest of the brochure:

CPC mountain bike designed by me

Long travel and cross country mountain bikes

Best one is not shown

Well, unfortunately the best of the bunch is not pictured in this brochure.  They did make them, and raced them.  Last I heard, they took it to some bike show in Vegas in 1998 or 1999 and K2 bought the rights to it.  In fact, this brochure was the one they made to take to that show.  I don’t know what happened after that.  I did see a blatant rip off of it made by Ellsworth selling at Dick’s Sporting Goods a few years ago.  I think they wanted something retarded like $4,800 for just the frame.  It looks like Ellsworth has changed their designs a bit since then.  I would hope so, it was years ago…