Welcome to what is probably going to be an intermittent gabble of world vomit, based around or R&D, testing, our race teams travel and training, magazine articles and anything else we want to put down here.
But let's start off from the beginning, although I'm sure most of you have already heard the story, be it through one of our live streams, or a chat we've had over the internet.
I'm Tim. I'm one of the two idiots who own Sick Bicycle Co / Sick Co race team. I'm the dude facing the camera.
I've ridden bikes all my life. Not figuratively, literally. As soon as I could balance, I was on a wooden bike. I've raced BMX, ridden BMX park, street, vert in the 90's, dabbled with XC in the late 90's, freeride, DH, the lot. Oh, I even sling a leg over a road bike and my fixie every now and then, sue me! Bikes are an escape from the shitty things going on in the world, they let you de-stress in the most unique way. Anyway, enough about the far back, let's talk about the near past, when Jordan and I accidentally started our own bike company.
Jordan. Who's Jordan? He's the mad scientist in the Slayer shirt. He's responsible for the insane geo 90% of the time. Don't worry if you get us confused, our own wives even think we look alike.
So cutting a long an convoluted story short, we were fat.
Like, it's ok, you can totally look over our old photos and tell us it, it's cool, we were fat and out of shape, creeping through our 30's and both decided to do something about it.
We started running and going to the gym - now I know you're sitting here reading this thinking "Tim, why the fuck are you telling me this, fool. I don't care about your fitness regime" - I promise, this is all part of how Sick came about.
After a short while running cross-country and doing a couple of Warrior Runs, we were in a much better position, doing 20km relatively easy, but as always, constantly taking the piss and nattering constantly. "This would be so much easier if we had bikes" Jordan exclaimed.
A month later I had bought a Canyon Toque EX, and Jordan had built up an Ellsworth Isis.
That was almost exactly a year ago to the day. We don't fuck about.
Jordan went through god-knows how many bikes, as they were never quite right, and I was constantly changing settings, swapping parts and generally costing myself a fortune trying to get the bike to ride how I wanted. Every time I changed something, it messed up something else.
Roll on January 2017 and we had another one of those "moments". You know, the one where we decided something would be easier with bikes and ended up with bikes? Yeah, one of those.
Bryan is a master frame builder. He is the dude who teaches the people who teach people how to build frames. He knows his shit. We threw a few emails back and forth, a couple of phone calls and the odd Instagram like here and there and he decided he would build our prototype for us.
But let's start off from the beginning, although I'm sure most of you have already heard the story, be it through one of our live streams, or a chat we've had over the internet.
Who the hell are we?
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| Tim pretending to look like he knows something |
I'm Tim. I'm one of the two idiots who own Sick Bicycle Co / Sick Co race team. I'm the dude facing the camera.
I've ridden bikes all my life. Not figuratively, literally. As soon as I could balance, I was on a wooden bike. I've raced BMX, ridden BMX park, street, vert in the 90's, dabbled with XC in the late 90's, freeride, DH, the lot. Oh, I even sling a leg over a road bike and my fixie every now and then, sue me! Bikes are an escape from the shitty things going on in the world, they let you de-stress in the most unique way. Anyway, enough about the far back, let's talk about the near past, when Jordan and I accidentally started our own bike company.
 |
| Love is in the air? |
So cutting a long an convoluted story short, we were fat.
Like, it's ok, you can totally look over our old photos and tell us it, it's cool, we were fat and out of shape, creeping through our 30's and both decided to do something about it.
We started running and going to the gym - now I know you're sitting here reading this thinking "Tim, why the fuck are you telling me this, fool. I don't care about your fitness regime" - I promise, this is all part of how Sick came about.
After a short while running cross-country and doing a couple of Warrior Runs, we were in a much better position, doing 20km relatively easy, but as always, constantly taking the piss and nattering constantly. "This would be so much easier if we had bikes" Jordan exclaimed.
A month later I had bought a Canyon Toque EX, and Jordan had built up an Ellsworth Isis.
That was almost exactly a year ago to the day. We don't fuck about.
Jordan went through god-knows how many bikes, as they were never quite right, and I was constantly changing settings, swapping parts and generally costing myself a fortune trying to get the bike to ride how I wanted. Every time I changed something, it messed up something else.
 |
| Some catalogue pose shit right here |
"I wonder how hard it would be to build your own bike?"
Now this sounds like an OK thing to do on a small scale - go do a frame building course, make a frame, annoy all your friends every time they see it that you built this frame. Job done. But we had big aspirations. How can we make our own bike, and market this on a large scale?
Jordan is a master at his art. His background is varied and interesting, going from F1 carbon layup, to owning a tattoo studio, but something he really does know is geometry. More importantly, what geometry should be, rather than following the normal trends.
Many late night text would flash up on my phone saying "I've done it", often followed by "fuck, nope, not quite". But when he had the final working model in Linkage, I got a short video of what would end up being the Gnarpoon.
OK, so we have all this in the virtual world, but how do we make this happen. We spoke to loads of people and did tonnes of work, but essentially it came down to us being normal human beings and not being able to afford $50, 000 setup for a machining setup in China like a lot of the big-boys use.
Undefeated, we continued chatting casually to people, and Ali at Fat Creations suggested someone to us.
This is where Downland Cycles come in.
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| Meet Bryan |
Whilst talking, Bryan suggested maybe doing a hardtail too - just to test the geometry - so Jordan got back to it again, with me reigning in some of the geometry choices, and pinged across the files. Bryan tweaked it so it would be a working model and got to work.
One week we were invited over to "finalise some decisions in person", but instead were presented with our first baby. The Gnarcissist - Bryan has a habit of doing this, telling you one thing and surprising you with another. WOW.
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| The OG Gnarcissist |
The hilarity of this, was it was the tube set Bryan had been making us learn on. We had been building our own prototype without knowing it. What!?
This thing ruled. It looked sick, it was lighter than we expected, it was ours.
We sat and chatted with Bryan and Julie about our aspirations, and they agreed to be part of it, making our steel frames, and generally making sure we aren't too stupid some of the time.
6 months after the idea
We now have The OG Gnarcissist, which is effectively our small, and the Gen 2 which covers s/m and l/xl sizes. We have The Gnarpoon in early prototype, and a couple of other special sneaky frames in the works. 6 months. As I said earlier, we don't fuck about.
The industry has been super supportive, people on the whole have been ace (although we have built a little hate cult, who dislike everything we do and are) and we're ready to kick some ass.
We just wanna have fun and make cool bikes that people like riding, that's all.
Oh, did I mention we started a race team too? Sick Co. Because you can never have too many projects on the go at one time. It's like balancing plates, but all the plates are those trick ones you get from the Magic Store that don't ever really fall off, they just slow down.
I won't talk about the Sick Co. now, I'll let Alex, our resident EWS competitor, take the lead with that.
Tim
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