Naild: The Darrell Voss Introduction

HISTORY LESSON
After the early years of racing and shop ratting, Voss landed his first industry job at Everett Manufacturing, owner of Kool Stop Intl. “Richard Everett allowed me to access the shop in the evenings and work on side projects. I was in charge of building tooling for various projects in rubber, plastic and castings by day, so this knowledge came into play during my nights of tinkering,” Voss said.

In 1984 Voss started looking for a road bike, but being six-foot seven inches tall made it difficult. “I sought out several custom frame makers and decided to work with Gary Klein as he understood what I was looking for from the structure of the frame and application,” explained Voss. “During the custom-build process we ended up having many discussions about bikes and the manufacturing process,” soon after Klein asked Voss to help make some tooling for several of his bikes. Afters everal years of working for both Everett and Klein, Voss made the full-time switch to Klein in late 1989 to support the production plant and develop engineering. A job he says was overwhelming, “I was very young and didn’t have the experience or support around me at the time; it didn’t last as long as I wished with Klein when he sold the brand to Trek in 1995. It was clear early on that there was going to be changes coming to the company and in 1996 we parted ways. I hated moving on from a brand that we worked so hard to develop into a premier bike company but it was just not a good fit for both of us,” Voss shared.

After working with bicycle frame manufacturing for the previous eight years Voss decided to transition into the budding market of suspension components. “I had developed some good relationships in Asia during my previous jobs and after helping Spinner develop a suspension fork I was contacted by Rock Shox to support manufacturing of an entry level line of products for them. After working with Rock Shox and spending a lot of time in Asia I felt it was time to move on when I was approached by SR Suntour in 1999. We, USUL Corp, have been supporting SR Suntour for over 18 years now, which is about half of my 31 years in thebike industry, wow, I just dated myself!” said Voss.

In those 31 years and nearly two-dozen patents, Darrell had a key role in countless advancements in the bicycle world. Klein was highly regarded as a brand that created some of the most elegant and beautiful bikes in their time, and Voss played a role in that. At the time most brands were using 6000-series alloys and Klein started forming shapes from the tubing, something we now call mechanical and hydraulic forming. If you look at Klein’s Adroit, Attitude, Pinnacle or Top Gun bikes as examples, one can see the aesthetically pleasing shapes of the tubes and increase in stiffness over other bikes of the time. This led to some of the first experiments in hydroforming tubes and while Voss takes no credit for the basic concept or being the first, he is proud that he was part of the leading edge of bicycle manufacturers creating beautiful hydroformed bike frames. Another common technology still used today with Voss’s fingerprints are tapered steerer tubes. “In the late 1980’s Gary Klein took a thin section of an aircraft torque tube, and put it in the first version of a Mission Control assembly,” Voss said. Later in 1989 Voss took on the job of creating the first tapered steerer and head tube and slowly worked towards making it cleaner and slimmer. Voss was also an early pioneer of internal cable routing as he was trying to reduce a cracking problem caused by stress risers at the weld zones where cable bosses were being attached to the frame. After test drilling a frame and cycling it on the test machine only to learn that the drilled frame lasted 22 times longer than any frame with welded housing tabs before it. “I was nervous as the guys were giving me a hard time for taking a drill to a brand new frame (badly needed for outgoing orders) but I said, look we’re either gonna learn something or I’m gonna need to look for a new job, ”Voss shared. Another development still employed today is hollow crown forks. Voss explained, “Around 1993, I started working to improve the structure of suspension forks as the early products just couldn’t hold up under me. We started making hollow crowns on the forks and increased the stiffness while also decreasing weight, it was pretty cool and is something most high end forks still have today.”

GROUND TRACING AND FORWARD PROPULSION “I wanted to look at designing a bike from the ground up instead of the top down. I wanted the wheel to trace the ground and be able to move up, out of the way while driving back down on the backside of obstacles, which will accelerate the bike and rider,” Voss told me. He continued, “Others have used sliding systems like Maverick, but ours differs as it uses a single stanchion rather than modifying the front triangle to move the sliding portion of the ‘links.’ We placed the sliding element within the swingarm, this provides improved stability of the IC, better stiffness transfer between front and back frame structures while generating a fulcrum with the link that acts like a control cam throughout the travel.

“The primary link, which in my definition, is the link that is primarily in alignment with chain load throughout the range of motion, is like a Canfield, DW and many other type links as it travels in motion with the chain. My secondary link in this case, is connected below the primary link, whereas most are above. In my opinion, when you put the link above, there is tension on the link while pedaling, but when you brake it pulls apart. It’s a varying tension-compression system. Think of it like electricity, all bikes are currently Alternating Current (AC) where my bike is Constant Current (or DC). Naild bikes keep compression loads stacked in the same direction so you never have one side of the frame under compression while the other is under tension. Think of your links when you enter a turn hard on the brakes, one side is pushing and one is pulling. The Naild system has eliminated that with this design.”

KINEMATICS When we moved on to the next topic of kinematics Darrell opened up with a rhetorical question – “Do we need expensive parts on our bikes to have fun? Absofuckinlutely not!” He said. “We need to address this because so many people are trying to make up for shitty kinematic design with expensive shocks and tunes. The big reason testers are loving these bikes so much is that we are able to run almost zero damping in the mid stroke and just let it do the resistance work at the end of the travel!” Voss explained. Darrell views kinematics as the most important part of designing a properly balanced bike and that means using stored potential or active energy and converting it to forward propulsion. What this could mean for end-users is a cheaper and better performing bike—two things Darrell is passionate about. By creating a bike with superior kinematic design Naild is able to get the bike to perform incredibly without a thousand dollar shock.

DAMPING One of the most interesting parts of the R3ACT-equipped bikes is that the shocks have greatly reduced damping needs. They are able to operate with much less damping resistance in the initial 75% of stroke while not blowing through the travel or bottoming out harshly. The design uses shocks that are wide open through the mid-stroke but maintain factory end-of-travel damping. This is achieved through design, and the benefits I felt on trail were very real. I’d never ridden a bike that let the rear wheel get out of the way so quickly. Voss had a theory he shared regarding damping and it’s something he followed while developing the squat and other performance curve of his bikes. “Dampers equal restriction. Restriction equals resistance. Resistance equals friction. Friction equals loss of energy,” he proclaimed. In summary, if people are making up for poor designs by putting more damping into the shocks, all we’re doing is creating more friction, which slows down the rear wheels ability to move out of the way and therefore the rider’s forward momentum.

FUN ON BIKES Over and over throughout the course of this project Darrell has been consumed with how much fun people will have on these bikes. After one of our test sessions when I was trying to put words to the experience I just had he interjected, “Words can never replace the tactile feedback that one experiences on a ride. We will not even try, but my dilemma is how do we let people know what you’re feeling right now!?” This is where my job got even harder.