Ahhhh, the pitter patter of clunky workboots on the roof...

The cannery is a big, messy, old building that has been reconfigured and jerry rigged seven ways from Sunday for so many years now that attempting to do structural work on the place is sort of like slicing into the ultimate layer cake of disaster (note: if you click the link back there, the photo was taken in 1947. Aside from a pretty hard to miss climbing gym wall in the foreground these days, the place otherwise looks almost exactly the same. Eerie…). Pull back a piece of corrugated metal to fix one little problem, and you’ll be sure to uncover six or seven other problems, all attached in some inextricable way to the root problem. Which brings us to these guys, who’ve been tromping around on the roof of the place for TWO MONTHS now. Wintertime around here is interesting. When it rains, the acre or so of uninsulated metal roof on the place springs leaks in so many different new spots that the buckets on the floors of the various businesses housed here resemble that scene from Disney’s Sorceror’s Apprentice.

So now, as we lean into summer and our army of roof elves does its magic, the indoor puddles will be a distant memory, right? Riiiight… We’ll believe it when we see it. As it sits, the entire roof of the old tin shed is slowly turning a rubbery gloss white, and the neighbors who used to complain about dairy delivery trucks in the wee small hours, who then switched to complaining about anything Richard Novak decided to do to stay in business are probably now bumming hard about the daily symphony of compressors and the occasional white mist floating down from above. Dog only knows what it must cost to try and patch this old girl up, but we’re not gonna throw out the bucket brigade until we’ve made it through another winter…

On an unrelated note, as soon as I turned around from snapping this picture, the shutter clicked on this horrifying image:

Be nice or they'll put fish in the seat-tube before packing your bike out the door

Following the outing of Dano last week, where we revealed his alter-ego as Zoolander, it seems only fair to shed some light on the other lives of some of the other people who bring you your bikes. The guy on the left, with the straight hair and the kind of rogue hobbit look, is Danny B. He’s the master of all shipping here. If a bike or a t-shirt or anything at all that goes into a big brown truck and makes it out the door here, it’s thanks to him. But in real life, he’s also a Rock God. You think we joke? No, we don’t.

And right next to him is Willie, the warranty guy. And furniture maker. And Russian wristwatch collector. And metal tormentor. And sometimes creator of very unique motorcycles. Potentially a bit sketchy, and probably in need of jetting, but real damn cool regardless. Both those photos (the ones in the last two links), by the by, were courtesy of the lovely and talented Strange Angel.

Speaking of people who work here, or in this case who used to work here, Brian Vernor just made a new film:

Which goes a long way to explain where he got that faraway look in his eyes. Actually, that look was already there. This film, however, looks like it could be a real beauty, and something of an evolution/departure from Brian’s past two works (both of which were intriguing and diverse in their own way):

Hey, who’s that guy doing the voiceover for PureSweetHell? Must be a total tool… Hey, didn’t I see a guy in We Just Work Here trailer that looks like the same guy making motorcycles, that Willie guy? HEY! Isn’t that Willie guy the guy riding the motorcycle in that motorpacing segment in PureSweetHell? What kind of nepotistic shit is this, anyway? What kinda bill of goods are you Santa Cruz clowns trying to sell us, anyhow?

Sell you? We’re not trying to sell you anything, dear reader. Except perhaps for several hundred copies of We Just Work Here. Discount bulk purchases can be negotiated by contacting Rob Roskopp directly…

Finally, some parting words about new and revolutionary things. Seeing as how we’ve already upset the armchair engineers of Poland with our inability to be forward thinking enough, we’ve put our acquisition and design team into overdrive. As per our company directive: “all front burner, all the time,” we’ve acquired the patents to something awesome that will revolutionize the revolution. Yeah, that’s right. Coming to endo-proof your life soon. The 29″ bike will be chump change compared to this beauty. You read it here first…

So, the mention of an upcoming 29er from us had a pretty interesting ripple effect. On one hand, it sent the traffic for this otherwise unknown and invisible blog through the roof (such as it were) for a few days. And on the other, it drew in some pretty interesting commentary on just what kind of 29er we’d produce. On the other, other hand, it was enlightening to read the range of emotion regarding what this move might mean for us as a company. There were brand loyalists who stood up and cheered at the looming possibility of owning a Santa Cruz with their preferred wheel size. At the same time, there were brand loyalists who saw the impending big wheel bike as some sort of capitulation on our part – not only will we be sellouts pandering to market share, but apparently, we’ve so lost the plot that this whole VPP thing, as well as the carbon bikes, and in fact, just about everything we’ve made since the introduction of the Bullit, has been a sad mistake. Good thing we’re not too thin skinned… Enlightening, like watching one of those car-crash simulation videos.

It’s still too early to go and spill the beans entirely on this bike, and if we keep dribbling it out slowly all summer we’re gonna really run out of things to talk about by August or September or October or whenever it is that we’ll be launching the bike. Got to keep some of our powder dry, so to speak. But, in the interests of clarifying things just a little bit, we’re going to go on record with a few safe statements. The reason for this is partly our compulsive need to rein in the internet armchair engineers of Poland before they get too carried away, and partly because we enjoy watching our concepts get kicked around by the public with all the delicacy of a dirt lot grudge soccer match between rival gangs of field workers. Sooo, in the interests of clarity:

1. It will not be a big wheel Chameleon. Nor will it be a big wheel Jackal. And before anyone goes and says it, no, it won’t be a Stigmata with more tire clearance. It will be a full suspension bike. Why? Because we “do” suspension bikes. Sure, there are some hardtails in our line (which in some eyes already makes us sellouts or something, see above), but we have spent a lot of time refining and evolving a couple different suspension platforms. Besides, there are already scads of 29″ aluminum hardtails out there. More than you and me and a whole army of monkeys can shake a stick at.

2. It will not be a Bullit, Driver8 or V-10 with big wheels. All you freeride 29″ riders out there, and all you folks clamoring for a big-hit big wheeler, sorry to disappoint you. Much as we think there are a lot of really cool applications for big wheels, we’re not even close to imagining that they pose any advantage over 26″ wheels when you’re dangling more than a half a foot of suspension, bombing head-size rock garden sand hucking off ladders. Yeah, we know. They roll over things better. Please don’t send us any pictures of that guy in Colorado going off a jump. We’ve seen it. We still think that high-impact riding in huge terrain with lots of gnarl is not the kind of thing you should be doing on a 29″ wheel. We think this because we have a hard enough time keeping 26″ wheels together in this terrain, on our own bikes and those of everyone else we know who charges hard.

~ I’m gonna take a minute here and just pedal down memory lane with my own personal involvement with 29″ wheel bikes. For better or worse, I’ve been flailing around on various iterations of the things since a little before there was a specific tire for them. I’ve endured lectures sitting slackjawed and drunk in Crested Butte at the end of Wes Williams’ long pointy index finger sometime back in the 1990s when he was calling them 28″ers because the Continental touring tires he was touting measured out to that. Mountain biking’s hippie dad, Gary Fisher, even gave me a pair of tires – a Panaracer Smoke 700×45 and a Bruce Gordon Rock and Road – for a URT titanium/alunimum project that Mark Hoffman was working on around 1997 or so. Maybe that makes me an “early adopter.” I dunno. I sure did spend a lot of time and energy and money building and having built some pretty freakish experiments, during those young years when some of the more rabid proponents of the bikes touted among their advantages such mouthgarbage as “I sure do endo a lot less now” (which can only lead one to wonder how much someone was endo-ing before, and if it was a lot, why they weren’t spending some time learning how to ride a bicycle. Did those same folk have to wear helmets when walking around inside their own homes? Jesus, people who endo all the time are best given a wide berth, or encouraged to find some other, less self destructive pastime…) But I digress. Suffice to say I’ve given the idea a lot of rope, and while I completely understand the zeal that accompanies cool new stuff, I also have to concede that there are limitations in any design direction one chooses to explore. Steam turbines are probably not the best way to power commuter cars. Nettles shouldn’t be used as toilet paper. Enough. I think you understand where I’m going. Rather than dig my hole any deeper, I’ll let the engineers argue about the “why we’re not re-inventing freeriding or jump bikes with a big wheel” line of thought from here on out. End rant ~

3. It will not be made out of Exogrid titanium/carbon.

4. It won’t be made out of bamboo, either.

5. Don’t even say steel. Come on, pay attention. All we’ve ever made have been aluminum bikes, until our recent foray into carbon fiber. So, it’s probably not a big stretch to contemplate what we’ll be making these bikes out of. Hmmmm, I’m thinking real hard here, and I’m gonna go way out on a limb and say that we’ll make them out of one or both of the materials THAT WE HAVE SOME EXPERIENCE MANUFACTURING! Unless our experiments with spider silk turn up some real promising results in the interim. Too bad the little guys keep eating each other. It’s a spider eat spider world out there on the cutting edge of science.

6. It will not, contrary to popular belief, be named the DavidCopperfield. I actually lobbied hard for that, but there’s a long standing tradition of naming bikes here, one that strictly forbids naming bikes after magicians OR Dickens novels. So that was an argument I was bound to lose.

7. It will have a whole shit-ton of “science” thrown at it. Really. So much that robot voice computer enginerds even geek out on it…

Okay, that ought to do it for now. We’ll really have some info on this big wheel bike one of these days. Just keep checking in. Meanwhile, it’s time for a weekend. We’re gonna be busy testing bikes. Usually it’s pretty fun, but you’d be surprised just how much messed up trouble we can get ourselves into:

That’s Sully, one of our art guys, holding the camera, and his son’s best buddy and future SCB test rider putting his helmet to use. Good thing we have professionals out in the real world doing it right:

Stay in one piece out there!