Yeah, it's pretty cold when you get in the shed in the mornings, but you get the fire
on, get a cup of tea on and do some work. So warm up and get about the cold and get down to work.
Yeah, first thing we do in the days, well for me it's put the computer on. What do you do?
Warm the welder up, give it a bit of a kick. Orph and I met when we were at uni and we kind of went
out riding and stuff like that. Our background was in downhill kind of thing, that's what we wanted
to do and because we were riding in places where the trails weren't that tough or big or anything,
we both wanted a hard tail that he'd have the fun of a downhill bike on but without having to
have a massive gnarly trail. That's where the idea of the balter came from. We made most of the
tools we use ourselves, we made the jig ourselves and we've got our own pile of scrap that we dig
through and if we need something we generally make it ourselves if we can. As a kid growing up my
dad was into racing cars and if he needed something he'd make it himself. I got into racing
downhill as a teenager and got really annoyed with my bike breaking halfway through the season so I
had this idea in my head that I was gonna start my own bike company and make a downhill bike that
would last the whole season without breaking. From then on like I went to college and got the
grades to go to uni and all that kind of stuff with the idea in my head that I was gonna start
a bike company and make frames myself and then I met Tam at canine and we figured out that we
both wanted to start a company at some point. Then after uni I got a job as a welder and while
I was there I got a phone call from Tam one day while I was at work saying so we're gonna start
this bike company then and we've just done it in our spare time from then on really and we've
both held down jobs and just done the BTR thing in the evenings and weekends and like building
bikes in the shed and they're going all over the world we're getting inquiries from places like
French Polynesia and we've just got a Japanese distributor and it's European distributor as
well. It's quite nuts really just to think two guys with a dream in a shed and it's actually
happening. Yeah. When I was at K9 at work there's a design engineer and we did all the stress
testing and stress analysis kind of figured out what was actually going on with the bike what
forces go through it what it's got to do how the suspension behaves what's good what's bad
that's where I learned to do that and it's something that I've carried over to BTR and we
still do all the stress testing in CAD and we work in a shed but everything is still done on
computer and measured with calipers you know it's all tough. We still hit things with hammers
every once in a while but it's all got to be accurate because the end of the day someone's
gonna have to go careering down a hill on it or something. The first frame we sold went out to a
guy in California which was so exciting it turns out that someone had stuck a picture of the
frame up on some American forum and he liked the look of it and the idea of what the belt was
aimed for and ordered it. Yeah, it's pretty off, no questions asked pretty much.
We've made a custom full suss frame for a guy that organizes races in the in the Kent area
he was speaking to Tam about suspension and all the current bikes and stuff like that and yeah
we designed it from the ground up for him like the amount of travel he wanted leverage ratios
cockpit size everything it's just that's that's the kind of thing that we can do because flexible
like that. The people that normally come to us asking for customized frames and custom junctions
and stuff are basically kind of one of two types but they're either someone who wants something
unique they want a bike they can turn up to a race and they'll be the only person with that bike
there or some people come to us and they literally can't find what they're looking for on the market
sometimes they come to us with a geometry and they say I want this specific geometry and other
times they come to us and say I want a bike that's like kind of behaves like this and does a bit of
that but it'll still go uphill as well as down or whatever they want kind of thing so if someone
wants something that's similar to what someone else makes but in our style or made from steel
instead of aluminium and that kind of thing we can just we've got the flexibility to do that where a
major manufacturer just couldn't or they can but it costs them a lot of money so they don't basically.
When I was racing down here as a teenager and stuff like I was always in my head that you know
in order to be a better rider you had to ride a hardtail. You'd always be at races and you'd see
these absolutely tiny kids on a full eight inch downhill bike it's just like championship downhill
bike yeah like how are these kids supposed to learn the skills that they need in order to be fast
on a bike that takes all of the track out so like I had it in my head that I wanted to make
a downhill bike for kids of that age so that's where the uh the ripper frame came from so 24
inch like downhill hardtail based on the belter that just scaled down a little bit yeah you start
to build in this frame yesterday morning like all the tubes in ready and it's coming together now
coming together so a lot of welding to do but in some ways the welding doesn't take the majority
of the time it's all the setup and the preparation the notching the cleaning de-boring well we could
save ourselves so much time if we just notch the tubes and stuck them in the frame the customer
would never know the difference of like deburring all the edges of the gussets and stuff like that but
like when we're making the frame it makes all the difference to us so when you're getting a frame
from us it's had the someone's loved it from the start basically yeah it's not just a job we want
every frame that makes a bit of a kind of bit of a child kind of thing bit of creation so every single one we give a bit of attention to along the way
with two of us here in the shed it can uh can get pretty cramped it's a bit at hand doesn't it you know
when we're in mid frame build it's it's hard to keep track of where you're putting things and stuff
you're like where's this tool time have you seen this it's been half our time wandering around going
where is it what have we done with it i'll be scratching through all the tools on the bench
i'm like time why don't you just put stuff away i'm using it it looks a bit like
organized chaos in here and it is a little bit like we uh so it's only a little bit organized
it's mainly chaos i think the way that the two of us look at bikes is quite different to a lot of
people because we just look at them purely as something that's functional i mean i see my bike
as a tool to do a job as long as it works and gets me down the hill as fast as i can then
that's all i care about yeah when a bike is going to work right it will look right as well so it's
quite a nice thing that kind of works and yeah and you could say the same thing about a world like
if if a world looks nice it's nice and neat all the way and everything's uniform you know you can
say that that's going to be nice and strong yeah yeah good well yeah i find that when you're behind
the welding helmet and you're sitting there concentrating on the world it's quite a lot like
being in a race run you're just you're concentrating on just the task in hand trying to make it
absolutely perfect no mistakes anywhere yeah that's all just part of the craftsmanship that we put
into the frame like the pride that we take into making a frame like it's all just part of the
the time that we spend in trying to make these frames as good as we possibly can
we wouldn't bother making a frame if we didn't think it offered something different what was
already out there with no interest in making another bike the same as everyone else it's just
well there's no point really so all all the stuff that we do we try and add something of
ourselves or something that's going to make it perform better work better feel nicer look nicer
whatever it is we're going for try and give the best we can into everyone kind of thing now as
we're building the frames we can upload pictures to facebook and like email email the customer
pictures of of their frame in motion they seem to really enjoy their just seeing the process
seeing things yeah a frame you know from tubing just actually turn into a bicycle it's quite cool
i enjoy it and then when when the frame's finished and we've put all of our blood sweat and tears
into it like we feel completely attached to it and then we send it out the door and hear hear
back from customers like how much they enjoy riding the frame like it's really satisfying
yeah i'd say just getting good feedback from people and you know they get their frames through
the door they because we're in contact with pretty much every one of our customers by email or by
phone or whatever they they generally get in touch they'd be like oh my frame's just arrived i'm so
excited they just recently announced that we're going to be uh revamping the belter just giving
it a few tweaks and stuff like this and uh one of the guys who bought a belter commented it was
like how do how can you improve on such an awesome frame and it's just like when you hear things like
that just makes it all worthwhile like all the late nights and yeah you know works are actually out
there and people are really enjoying them it's not it's not just us it's cool yeah it's really good
so
You
