New Alps to Climb : Placentia’s ‘Wise Man of Mountain Bicycling’ Pedals After Europe

As the fax machine in bicycle designer Richard Cunningham’s office beeps a trouble signal, he pokes his head through the door to the workshop to see who is trying to send a fax.

Eddie Rea, who is one-third of the team building bicycle frames at Mantis Bicycle Co., is trying to reach Northumbria but isn’t sure whether that’s in England or Scotland. Going global has its problems.

Last year the company dialed Mexico by facsimile and, because of a glitch, reached the Soviet Union--20 times.

“It sounds funny to say this, but we’re one of the leading bicycle designers in the country,” said Cunningham, an Orange County native who founded Mantis in 1980 and is called by one industry watcher the “wise man” of mountain bikes.

Mantis turned out 325 custom bicycle frames last year--about one a day. The company rang up revenue of $324,000 last year from sales of its Mantis bikes and the designs that Cunningham creates for West Coast Cycle of Culver City for its Nishiki bicycles. His clientele, originally made up entirely of Californians, has grown to include bicycle enthusiasts in about 30 countries.

He is one of five tinkerers who emerged from the early years of mountain biking as the sport’s leading designers--people who started out in garages, putting fat tires on single-speed road bikes and adding heavy-duty brakes and a lower gear for steep climbing.

His innovations are often adopted by major bicycle makers, earning him a special place in the field, according to industry experts.

“He’s basically the wise man of mountain bicycling,” said John Ker), editor of BMX! Plus magazine in Mission Hills.

Today, Cunningham is facing a decision about whether to take his designs to an outside manufacturer and have the bicycles mass-produced for overseas sales. The timing is right: His name is good in the industry, and the European market is booming.

Cunningham thinks Europe will be the last big market for sales of mountain bikes. He said he believes that the U.S. market has reached its peak and that soon the weekend warriors here will give up the sport for a flashier fad, leaving only the most avid enthusiasts--about 25% of today’s riders.

That gives him about a year, he figures, to decide whether to stay small or try to take advantage of the demand in Europe.

Ash Jaising, president of Bicycle Market Research Institute in Boston, predicts U.S. sales of mountain bikes, which inflated at a 50% annual rate in 1988 and 1989, will start to flatten as early as next year. But sales in Europe should reach U.S. levels of about $756 million by 1993, according to Mountain Bikes magazine.

“Europe is going crazy over American technology now,” said Zap Espinoza, editor of Mountain Bike Action magazine. “Here, European road bikes have status; there, it’s American mountain bikes.”

For Cunningham, the chance to make more money weighs in favor of bigness. But he is concerned about losing control over the quality of his bicycles and giving up the sense of satisfaction he gets from completing a new design.

“If I became a full-on manufacturer, I think I’d lose the edge that makes our bikes really good. A welder in a factory in Taiwan spends 20 to 30 seconds on a weld, so you have to build in fail-safes like thicker tubing and easier joints. You make little compromises.

“The bicycle is no longer a living, breathing thing in your hands; it’s a commodity going through a factory, and it can’t go through fast enough for you.”

He said he believes that the niche he has carved for himself as an innovator and high-quality craftsman will help insulate him from the predicted decline in U.S. mountain bike sales.

“I build the ultimate high-end dirt bikes that don’t even care if there’s pavement,” Cunningham said. “The people I sell to will be in that last 25%, that won’t change.”

Mantis’ three frame styles each cost about $1,150. Add paint, tires, wheels and accessories and the price comes to about $2,250. Mass-market mountain bikes start as low as $100, while premium models generally range from $300 to $1,000.

Pat Nolte, a Mantis customer and schoolteacher in Whittier, likened buying an assembly-line bicycle to buying clothes off the rack instead of having them tailor-made.

“It takes a designer to figure out how to get my size on a bike with big wheels without changing the geometry too much,” said Nolte, who is 5 feet tall.

Cunningham’s workshop is a two-story garage, where, on a recent weekday morning, the door was wide open to let in the morning sunshine and three dogs were hanging around. Behind the garage was Cunningham’s 1966 Volvo station wagon, with the warning “Always Late” printed above the license plate.

Cunningham, a short man in blue jeans and a green sweat shirt, pulled his own lime-green bicycle out of the back of the Volvo. It’s a model with an elevated chain stay, a Cunningham innovation that solves a problem off-road riders have with dirt and rocks getting caught between the chain and the metal that protects it.

He raced motorcycles for years and switched to bicycles when he began noticing that his motorcycle was tearing up the landscape. He rode the dirt fire roads in the Santa Ana Mountains and began to wish for wide tires to grip the hills and wheels that slant independently into a curve. He tinkered and road-tested.

He built some bikes for friends and, in 1984, with the XCR model, hit it big by making the front half of the frame from lightweight aluminum instead of steel. Gary Fisher of Fisher MountainBike in San Rafael bought his design and mass-produced the CR7, which is modeled on Cunningham’s bike.

Cunningham has not bothered to patent his other designs because he believes in making them available to the industry as a whole. “To me, the goal of doing anything is being effective as a vehicle of change,” he said.

His most recent design is the Flying V. With its flattened sheet metal frame in place of tubing, the bicycle is reminiscent of the old Gibson guitar for which it is named. Cunningham has even strung three shifter cables side by side along the body to resemble guitar strings.

It is about 5 pounds lighter than Cunningham’s other frames and can be molded to fit the shape of the rider in the way that a straight tube cannot.

He is working on a front- and rear-suspension model.

“I think I could still build a better bicycle,” Cunningham said. “When I stop believing that, I’ll do something else. I’ll walk.”

Mountain Bike Sales Are Pedaling Fast While U.S. sales of all types of bicycles have been slowing in recent years, mountain bike sales have been growing sharply. In millions Total sales of all bikes: ‘89: $10.7 million Mountain bike sales: ‘89: $3.5 million Source: Bicycle Manufacturers Association