Our partner in podcasting, The Gravel Ride Podcast, sits down this week with Tony Pereira of Breadwinner Cycles. To learn more about this Portland, Oregon based custom builder, check out the podcast below. Tony was part of the 2021 ENVE Builder Round-Up in Ogden, Utah.
Automatic Transcription by The Gravel Ride (please excuse all errors)
Craig Dalton: [00:00:00] Tony, welcome to the show.
[00:00:01]Tony Pereira: [00:00:01] Thanks for having me, Craig.
[00:00:02] Craig Dalton: [00:00:02] It’s great to see you virtually from your office there.
[00:00:05]Tony Pereira: [00:00:05] It’s funny now that we’re all accustomed to this it’s it makes it really easy.
[00:00:08] Craig Dalton: [00:00:08] Yeah. It really is. If you don’t have your setup dialed at this point, I don’t think you ever will.
[00:00:13]Tony Pereira: [00:00:13] Yeah. Right.
[00:00:15] Craig Dalton: [00:00:15] So let’s start off a little bit by getting to know you and what led you to becoming a frame builder
[00:00:21] Transcribing…
[00:00:22] Tony Pereira: [00:00:22] It’s been a while now.
[00:00:23]I worked in, I started out in the outdoor, your industry, I started working in ski shops when I was 16, which was in 1985 and grew up working in ski shops. And then in college, I started working in a bike shop and after college, I moved to Utah and skied and rode and worked in bike shops there.
[00:00:44] And I got really active. Like community when I lived in salt lake did that for quite a while. Eventually got bored of being a bike mechanic, just hit my limit on that and what I’ve always been a tinkerer. Playing around in the garage, working on cars and motorcycles and of course, bicycles.
[00:01:01]I learned how to breeze a little and weld a little bit from a friend of mine. And then just brought all those things together. And I was a fan of the old mountain bikes, the, IBUs and salsa. And of course the Richie’s, the Richie has always had those beautiful, huge fillets.
[00:01:18] And and I’m like, I knew how to braise. So I’m like, I wonder if I could make a mountain bike and, it was, that was two, this was 2002 or so, so almost 20 years ago. The internet was there. We were using all like listserv type communication. But there’s a pretty active frame, builder listserv.
[00:01:37] It’s still exists. But I got on there and started figuring it out, build a couple of mountain bikes and I, after building one, I was like, oh man, I gotta do this. Bringing my love of bikes together with making things and And I just, I was hooked for sure. Riding that first bike is such a joyous,
[00:01:54]it’s gotta be an amazing feeling to ride something that we’ve actually made super gratifying.
[00:01:59] It sounds like you and I came up in the same era, which was that period of time where there was a lot of great mountain bike, frame builders and custom steel bikes. Every state seemed to have a builder of some notoriety. Yup. Yup. So how did you teach yourself? Was it really through, obviously you had a little bit of hands-on experience from your father’s friend to teach you how to weld and, know what equipment was needed.
[00:02:25]Craig Dalton: [00:02:25] Were you able to glean some of the basic fundamentals from that list? Serve and ask questions?
[00:02:31] Tony Pereira: [00:02:31] Yeah. Yeah, it was great. I know I, Richard Sachs is one of the. More professional frame builders that was on there. And he’s always been really generous with his time. And there were a number of others as well, but I remember him in particular, but yeah, there was a great group of people that, that I, you know, some of them I’m still friends with.
[00:02:49] Remember Steve from Coconino was getting started exactly the same time. And the two of us were like bouncing things off of each other. And just getting our feet wet, but I, I’m fortunate to have, I have a natural aptitude for using tools and problem solving and, figuring things out.
[00:03:08] So yeah, I was able to teach myself, with the help of that listserv, obviously how to make it all come together. And, I look back on those early frames and I still have a couple of them and they were pretty bad. The first there’s 20 or so that I built for me and my friends. So they were pretty rough, I should say rough.
[00:03:25]They weren’t, the finish was rough. They worked fine. But I started building bikes for customers after about the first 20 or so bikes mostly worked, went to my friends and. And they were starting to get pretty good by that.
[00:03:36] Craig Dalton: [00:03:36] And did that just happen via word of mouth with the 20 out there, people would see it and say, where did you get that thing?
[00:03:42] I had some, I had a core group of friends in salt lake that worked in the bike shop with me, or were associated with the bike shop called wild rose. It was a, early mountain bike scene, mouth bike shop. And two of my friends, Alex and Jeff. They were all, they were 100% on board with me.
[00:03:59] They were like, yeah, you got to do this. And we’re going to help you build a, some bikes, let’s go racing. And we went out, we were all mountain bikers. So we were out riding a single speeds and the inner mountain cup series in Utah, which is a, I think still exists was a really popular mountain bike series.
[00:04:18] There were, I think there were 10 races around the whole state. And we got out there and we were top five races. In the single-speed category we started doing that and we would do 24 hours of Moab every year. So we just got out there, we just put it out there and we were having fun and people liked what we were doing.
[00:04:33] And I know our very first, my very first customer, he was a guy that we beat in a race and he came up to me at the end of the race. He was like, you guys are having fun. I want one of those.
[00:04:43]That’s awesome. Were you operating under the breadwinner brand at that point? No. That was Pereira cycles.
[00:04:50] The names, namesake brand at that point.
[00:04:52] Tony Pereira: [00:04:52] Right. So that was in Utah and in 2004, or so, and then I moved to Portland in 2005. And when I moved here, I decided not to get a job and go in full-time building bikes. I had a few orders under my belt. And I just, I went for it and it worked out.
[00:05:11] Craig Dalton: [00:05:11] And did you stay under your namesake as the
[00:05:13] Tony Pereira: [00:05:13] Brandon? Yeah, it was prayer cycles until 2013. That’s when I hooked up with IRA, we’ve been building under his name, I Ryan, and and we started breadwinner.
[00:05:26]Craig Dalton: [00:05:26] What about that partnership with IRA made it attractive to you to bring different perspectives and skillsets to the team?
[00:05:33] Yeah.
[00:05:33] Tony Pereira: [00:05:33] Yeah. Different types of riders, but have a like-mind as far as there are eye for style and quality, we both worked with the Rafa clothing company and their very early years, we were friends with the guys that got it going here. And when they were based in. And our friend Daniel conceived of this project called the continental.
[00:06:00] And it was a group of writers, originally six writers and IRA. And I were two of them who wrote around first in the Northwest here. And, we have a photographer along with us and they’d made some beautiful images and created that whole brand. That’s now Rafa. And like a lot of that, the imagery that they still use is of that same stuff.
[00:06:20] But like big mountain rides and we’re actually doing a lot of gravel riding on 23 millimeter tires and our road bikes. But riding some really cool round, the epic kind of rides that everybody makes fun of Rafa for now.
[00:06:33]Craig Dalton: [00:06:33] I certainly remember that era when those finished visuals and videos came out and they were.
[00:06:38] They were certainly evocative of where ultimately gravel slotted in this big mountain adventure, not your Saturday group, not your normal Saturday group ride type of riding.
[00:06:49] Tony Pereira: [00:06:49] Right yeah, that was super fun. And out of that Rafa asked us to build, they decided that they were going to get five bike companies.
[00:06:58] We were the smallest one and market alignment. That was all through their website. They took the orders and then we would, we build the bikes and I can’t remember. I can’t remember exactly. It was like Cinelli I know Chanel Lee was one of them. It’s they’re slipping my mind now, but they’re all like big bike brands.
[00:07:17] And then it was me and IRA and we were the only ones that were on that continental team. So we called that bike, the continental. And it had my logo on the right side of the down tube in Iris on the left side of the down too. He built mostly with lugs. So it had a lugged head tube and a talk to C2 junction.
[00:07:37] And then the bottom bracket was Phillip raised, which is my style,
[00:07:40] Craig Dalton: [00:07:40] interesting collaboration
[00:07:42] Tony Pereira: [00:07:42] together. We sold 22 of them. So not very many, but out of that, we’ve found that we really liked working together. And we were like, all right and honestly, we made some good money off of it. Like building that money.
[00:07:55] That was how many bikes each of us would build in a year. Right back then I was building 25 likes a year or maybe even a
[00:08:01] Craig Dalton: [00:08:01] little less. Yeah. It’s funny. In talking to other builders, you talk, you think about the pace in which these bikes get built. If you’re building them all by yourself. Two three weeks to build a bike is, about what it takes and do the math.
[00:08:14] You can’t do much more than 20, 25 in a year, and
[00:08:18] Tony Pereira: [00:08:18] you nailed it. We were doing the math and we’re like, all right, we can’t scale what we’re doing now anymore. Some people can, there’s a few builders out there that can crank them out, but we couldn’t. So we’re like, let’s figure out a way to keep building bikes, but make more of them.
[00:08:34]And maybe make a little bit of a. And the breadwinner name was really something that we hung on that first Rafa project. It was just what we used to open a bank account. You’ve never had any plans to make it a brand. It was a, kind of an inside joke.
[00:08:51] Craig Dalton: [00:08:51] Yeah. I love that. Yeah. We can’t make bread any other way.
[00:08:54] This is the breadwinner project.
[00:08:55]Tony Pereira: [00:08:55] Yeah. Yeah. My S my son had just been born. IRA had just gotten married and we were. We got to figure something out here and we started calling breadwinner. It was again, a joke between us, but a year or two later actually a year after the Rafa thing we got approached by the folks that were starting up Shinola.
[00:09:14] Yep. Just now mostly a watch
[00:09:16] Craig Dalton: [00:09:16] company. Sure. I remember those bikes. Were they, were you behind them? Bikes as
[00:09:20] Tony Pereira: [00:09:20] well. And we designed there. And bill built some prototypes for that. And we got paid well for that. And we took that money and started breadwinner.
[00:09:33] Craig Dalton: [00:09:33] Okay. Yeah. You know it, I imagine it’s always a challenge as a frame builder.
[00:09:38] Once you have the knowledge of all the different types of machinery that could make your process more efficient. Acquiring said, machinery is a big financial outlay. So having those rare opportunities like with Shinola. Rapha before that I’m sure, really accelerated your ability to be a builder that can kick out more than 20 a year.
[00:09:58] Tony Pereira: [00:09:58] Yeah. And it helped them. It gave us a little bit of time to come up with some new ideas. Like we could sit back and go, okay, what do we want this, what do we want this thing called breadwinner to be? And we realized that a lot of our customers. If we’re waiting a year, sometimes two years to get their bike at the end of that long wait, they were often not happy.
[00:10:21]There are lots of opportunities for things to go wrong and or for them to just lose interest or, just, it just it’s too long. So we said, all right, with breadwinner, we’re going to deliver the bikes in eight to 12 weeks. And that we’ve tried to do that the whole time. We’ve done pretty well until this.
[00:10:39]And now that’s completely out the window. It’s six months now.
[00:10:43] Craig Dalton: [00:10:43] Fortunately, everybody’s waiting that long for a group of, at this moment. So you’re all right.
[00:10:47] Tony Pereira: [00:10:47] Yeah. The frames, we can turn around, we can build the frames in the same amount of time. If we can get materials, there’s, we’re run out of tubes.
[00:10:55] We run out of head tubes or bottom bracket shells or whatever it is. And we’ve had moments where we just have to stop. We can’t build bikes in the last year. That’s really been unusual, but then our painters backed up because, there’s this bike boom. So he’s extra busy and but anyway, yeah, so it’s a little longer now, but yeah, excuse me.
[00:11:17]IRA’s always been more of a a road rider and a gravel rider. He won the first trans, Iowa gravel race. And I’ve been a mountain biker. I started mountain biking in 87 and started riding a road bike. When I wrote with those Rafa guys,
[00:11:31] Craig Dalton: [00:11:31] you said it sounded like at the inception of breadwinner, did you see the market opportunity being a little bit more adventurous road, bike style?
[00:11:39]Tony Pereira: [00:11:39] Not particularly. We, that was just. So our first lineup, we didn’t have a gravel bike. Sure.
[00:11:48] Craig Dalton: [00:11:48] Yeah. And was it a mountain frame? Go ahead.
[00:11:51] Tony Pereira: [00:11:51] Bye. The continental, which is a classic steel fork road bike, we still have that the low lows, our road bikes still are our mainstay road bike.
[00:12:00]We have the JV racer, which is our cross country mountain bike. And then a city bike called the Arbor lodge, just the neighbor neighborhood we lived in. And we had a touring bike, which we don’t actually don’t offer anymore. So that was it. Six bikes that first year. And I believe it was the next year when we came out with the B road, which is now our most popular bike.
[00:12:20] And that was our first ground.
[00:12:22]Craig Dalton: [00:12:22] Interesting. So how long did, what did that look like in terms of the proportion of which frames were selling and when did you start to see that? Hey, the be road is actually the bike that is most appealing.
[00:12:34]Tony Pereira: [00:12:34] At first we didn’t have it. So it was, we were mostly selling Lolo’s.
[00:12:38] That was our logo was a Continentals, definitely on the road. And then we put the B road out there and the low the road bikes were still more popular for that first. So that would have been 20 14, 15. I think in 2016 it started to shift significantly. And then it was like 50% road or gravel bikes.
[00:12:58] And then we came out, I think we came up the G road, the following year. And now. 60 or 70% gravel bikes, gravel slash bike packing bikes. Yep.
[00:13:09] Craig Dalton: [00:13:09] Yup. Yeah. That’s in that, that tracks, what I imagined would happen, it seems on point I was imagining that based on your sales stats, you would have your finger on the pulse of where, and when that gravel product started to break and break free of the pack.
[00:13:25] Yeah.
[00:13:25] Tony Pereira: [00:13:25] Yeah, no, it’s been, yeah. It’s. Four years or so where it’s been clearly the front runner. And I feel like this year we did a few more road bikes and some of those were people that had bought gravel bikes from us. And they were like, all right, now I want to road bike. Yeah. People still have their quivers and the gravel bikes have been, real quiver, quiver busters.
[00:13:45]A lot of people use those bikes for everything. When you come around and you’re like, all right, I want a real fast bike too. And then you get that
[00:13:53] Craig Dalton: [00:13:53] road bike. I think, as we were talking about offline, the geometry changes in mountain bikes have made them a different beast than what we were riding in the late nineties and a hell of a lot more fun.
[00:14:06] Yeah. And I imagine that’s a, kind of a growing segment of interest because people are looking for something special to have underneath.
[00:14:14]Tony Pereira: [00:14:14] For in the mountain bike world. Yeah. I would love to sell more mountain bikes, but the reality of it is that we it’s a niche thing for us. So we do a handful of mountain bikes a year.
[00:14:24]I love them. I are good. Water’s my all time favorite bike. But those it’s designed around the plus tires. So I’ve been running two sixes or two eights on it lately. But man, that’s just such a fun bike for all, all around riding and yeah, you’re right. The geometry has changed. I think because forks have gotten longer, it’s forced us to change the bikes, but the other thing that’s changed a whole lot is the trails.
[00:14:48]We went from old hiking trails that were Rocky and not necessarily flowing. Just go pick in your way through, through these trails to trails that are built for bikes, the bill for around bikes, with berms and jumps and rollers and all kinds of features. So the bikes have had, had to evolve with the trails.
[00:15:07] Yeah. But yeah, I love riding the hard tails and the the they’re super fun. That’s, it’s been a good, that has been a fun evolution to be, to feel like I’ve been.
[00:15:16]Craig Dalton: [00:15:16] Let’s talk about the mountain bike. One of the bikes you’re bringing out to Utah for the envy builder Roundup. I know some of the listeners have probably caught pictures of it already, but why don’t you talk us through that model?
[00:15:25]Tony Pereira: [00:15:25] Sure. I told you about my friends, Jeff and Alex that helped me get started mountain bike with breadwinner or with prayer cycles. Jeff, his name is Jeff Bates. He passed away. A number of years ago of skin cancer. And so the first mountain bike that we made was called the JB racers named after him.
[00:15:43] We still, and we still have it. That’s our classic 20 Niner hard tail, cross-country machine. And we’ve, we’ll always have that in our lineup. It’s very similar to the bikes I was making under the Pereira banner. Talking about this trail evolution a few years ago I started riding a bunch at a trail system here near Portland called Sandy Ridge.
[00:16:03] And it’s this new Invus style flow trails are built just for mountain bikes. And that cross country bike is not the right bike for that. So I’m like, all right. And I’d had this in my head for a few years. I’m like, I think I want to build something that’s more slack. It’s a bigger. It’s still a hard tail.
[00:16:21] It was there weren’t a lot of them happening at the time. But finally I’m like, all right, I’m building this thing. And so pretty slacked out. I think at the time that was a 66 degree head to bangle with a 1 64. It was around 27, 5 wheels. The first-generation about Otis and we started.
[00:16:39] So we came up with the design and when it came time for a name, I thought about my buddy, Alex, who was the other guy that helped me start get started. And he’s a funny guy. He’d always come up with these funny sayings and give everybody nicknames and just have these funny phrases. And he, one of them was when.
[00:16:58]You’d see a cool bike or something. You’d say, dude, that’s bad Otis. There’s out of nowhere, I don’t know where it came from, but he just used to say it all the time. So I’m like that’s a great name for a bike. I’m going to call the bike bad Otis. So called the bike bad Otis. You bring it to the two north American handmade bike show, which was in, I don’t remember where it was that year Sacramento.
[00:17:23] Environmental. Yeah. Yeah. I think it was. Brought the bad odors to Sacramento, big hit. We got some nice press on it. A couple of weeks later, I get a note from a guy on Facebook and his name, bad Otis. He’s Hey, like I see bad odors pop up in my messenger. Hey man, why do you have this bike called bad Otis?
[00:17:47] That’s my name? I was like, I don’t know who you are, but all tell me why that’s your name? And it turns out he’s a fairly well-known artist in the punk rock world. Interesting. In the LA punk rock, like old school, seventies, eighties, he was like the t-shirt artists that did like the circle jerks and black flag.
[00:18:10] And like all those I might be wrong about some of those bands, but He, if you see his work, it’s like it’s of that era and he’s still working artists. And we had a conversation. I was like, I’m like, man, I don’t know anything about you. I wish I did. Cause I’d want some of your, I would’ve wanted some of your stuff back then, This is just the name that came out of nowhere from my friend.
[00:18:32] And he was like, all right, that’s cool. He was totally cool about it, but he thought he’s been ripped off over the years. Yeah. Like people that work in that realm there’s counterfeit, there’s making rip offs of his old t-shirt designs from the eighties and he’s had enough of it. So he saw his name pop off and he’s oh, here’s another one.
[00:18:50] And it turns out there was, it wasn’t that wasn’t the case. But Long story that has nothing to do with the bike, but funny about the name. Anyway, last year, we’ve seen this long travel hard tail, so big fork, hard tail, a ball over the past few years. There’s a lot of them out there.
[00:19:10] And just like with the full suspension bikes to get really slack and the head tube angle tend to have a long. Front center so much longer talk to you, but with a steep C2 which gives you a lot more stability when you’re in the air, you’re diving into berms or going down really steep stuff. And, we said, Hey, we should try this.
[00:19:29]I guess maybe a year ago we built a bike cry there was for a Chris king event and and he’s been riding that for the past year. And so just again, slacker, I think we went to a 64 degree head to bangle or something like that. His really steep, like 76 degrees C to bangle.
[00:19:47]So it climbs you get your weight far enough forward that the front end doesn’t want to walk you’re around. Okay. But then once you put your dropper down, you stand up, you’ve got that hard charging, like super slack.
[00:19:57] Craig Dalton: [00:19:57] Yeah, I find it really interesting. Just it helps looking at those bikes helps me think about gravel geometry in many ways.
[00:20:03] Not that there’s any parallels between the two, but I’ve often. Yeah, I had trouble like figuring out, what is the steepness of a C2 bangle do? What does the head tube angle do? And the more I play around with different bikes and different equipment, you start to see. And some of these things creep their way.
[00:20:18] Some of these philosophies, not these extremes creep their way into gravel bikes in one shape or form IMS.
[00:20:24] Tony Pereira: [00:20:24] Yeah. Yeah. W you’ve got the, I forgot what it’s called, the transition. They have that
[00:20:28] Craig Dalton: [00:20:28] crazy that isn’t the slack evil Shammy, Hagar. Exactly. Tony let’s talk about the gravel bikes in your lineup, and I’d be curious for you to describe to the listener, the different models and the different tubes that’s that you use.
[00:20:43] And, with carbon being like the material, that a lot of these bikes get pumped out. Yeah. Why don’t you talk to the listener about what a steel bike can do and how it feels and why it’s so special? Sure,
[00:20:56] Tony Pereira: [00:20:56] sure. I think cars, there are many wonderful carbon bikes. There’s nothing wrong. I’m not like a agnostic.
[00:21:03]Gotta have steel. Steel is real guy I have been, but I’ve left all that behind, I think. Many great materials for bikes. The thing that, that keeps us making steel bikes is how great it is for custom bikes. Yep. And small production, small scale production. So there are, I don’t know how many hundred hundreds of different tubes to choose from so we can really vary the.
[00:21:34]The ride of the bike based on the two parameters. So your two parameters are the diameter, the wall thickness, and then the, but pro budding profile. So steel tubes are thicker on the ends. We call that the, but everyone’s heard of budded tubing. Most people don’t know what it means. But they’re just, they’re thicker on the ends where you do your welding is the welding affects the strength of the material.
[00:21:57] So it has to be a little bit stronger where you. And then the middle of the two where you don’t heat, it can be a lot thinner and a lot lighter. So you save some weight. And then each tube comes in a certain length and the butts are a certain length as well. You removed some of that to get your finished to blank.
[00:22:12] So you, we can really tailor each individual to, for each bite and dial in, optimize the weight of the bike and optimize the ride quality, mostly through the diameter mall, thickness of the tube to the field. Optimize it for weight and strength.
[00:22:30] Craig Dalton: [00:22:30] Is there in that sort of get to know the customer process, you’re learning their weight and riding style.
[00:22:36] Exactly. And you can make adjustments to the way the bike feels based on what they’re telling you. How
[00:22:43] Tony Pereira: [00:22:43] exactly. Exactly. Yeah. We have people come to us, oh yeah. I used to be a football player and I’m pretty big and I stomped on him. What I want to really like, bike, packing bike, and we’re like, all right we’re going to make it a little heavier and we’re going to use a little bit bigger tubes and it’s going to give you the best ride, and then on the other side, we have somebody that’s a hundred pounds and they don’t, they, and they don’t want the bike to feel like a dead brick. We can either use a smaller van or two to where later to tailor to that, to their style and their size and their.
[00:23:16]Craig Dalton: [00:23:16] For most of the listeners, I’m imagining that they aren’t custom bike owners as someone, when they’re going through the purchasing process, obviously the sky’s the limit to blends things like that, that you can help work with them on how do you help guide people to get to the right spot?
[00:23:33] Tony Pereira: [00:23:33] Yeah. Yeah. The way that we work we’ve we try to make it approachable and easy. That was another goal of ours with breadwinner was. When I’d made my Pereira cycles, I was like, what kind of do you want, and I would make you a road bike or a cross bike, or they didn’t have names.
[00:23:49] There was no model names of any kind, but, and I realized that was, that made it hard for people to come through the door. So now we have like our gravel bikes, our first one was called the be road and be roads are like rural roads in the Midwest where I grew up. And And so you would say, okay, I want to be road.
[00:24:06] And that has a carbon fork and a steel frame. And we work with people on there with their fit and everything and how they want the bike to ride the design side’s all on us. The customers, our customers, sometimes they want to have more say in what goes, where, and, but we’ve got a pretty good idea for what works and the materials we should use.
[00:24:25] So we have all that. And then, yeah, and then the component. Whenever you
[00:24:29] Craig Dalton: [00:24:29] want. So that be road model sounds like maybe it was the gravel bike extension of that continental. That was it more in their kind of road plus world than that to a cross bike.
[00:24:41]Tony Pereira: [00:24:41] Yeah, we based it on our cross bike. Mostly because at the time the carbon forks you could get, it would fit a wire tire we’re cross forks.
[00:24:49] Yeah. So it kinda just fit into that realm. And we were we’re very limited in what tires there were that time. And there was the the panel racer Passilla was really popular Yon Hina from
[00:25:01]
[00:25:01] Renee Harris, which was compass, which before that was something else I can remember what he called it, then they had, and there was another name before compass.
[00:25:10]Those tires were around anyway. They weren’t very wide. I think our first B road had 30 twos on it, which is like a big road tire now. Yeah. So yeah, we did the D road for awhile. I think two years. And then people started asking for, six 50 V with wider tire and said, all right how are we going to do that?
[00:25:28] There wasn’t a carbon for two years. So we’ve talked to our friend, Chris Iglehart who’s across the street from us over here. And he’s been making those segmented forks since he was at fat city
[00:25:40]Craig Dalton: [00:25:40] back in the eighties. That’s so the moment you said that, and I’ve got a picture up of that fork right now, and you’re absolutely right.
[00:25:47] That was the fat fork.
[00:25:49] Tony Pereira: [00:25:49] Yeah. So Chris was the guy that made all those forks. Amazing. Yeah. And he’s now across the street and he also welds all our bikes. So IRA and I have, we still touch every bike and I tack weld all the bikes, but Chris does our finish welding. Gotcha. We build three bikes a week, so we can’t have a welder on staff.
[00:26:10] We can’t, you just can’t have somebody. That’s not a full-time job. Yeah. So ever since the very beginning of breadwinner, we built over, we built going on 900 bikes. Now Chris has welded every one of them. And so when we decided we were gonna, we were gonna do another bike Soon to be called the G road.
[00:26:27]We went to Chris and Hey, how about we use an I go for it? And he was all for it. And man, those forks, he’s got some magic dust in those forks. They are they’re spectacular. And they look like the old fat forks, but they’re not they’re just the same style. He has a custom drawn fork leg made by Reynolds.
[00:26:48] It’s a one inch heat treated steel tube. The fork blades are made out of. And he has his own little gussets that he uses and is the way that he puts them all together. Just their magical fork. They’ve a really fantastic ride quality. And to go back to your earlier question about why steel it really, hasn’t been a fantastic ride call it’s springy and lively.
[00:27:12] It’s stiff when you need it to be, but compliant enough, it’s really comfortable. I feel. It’s everything that a carbon bike designer is trying to, and trying to work out. You’re
[00:27:24] Craig Dalton: [00:27:24] probably right there.
[00:27:25] Tony Pereira: [00:27:25] Yeah. Yeah. If, oh, if we could only make this bike ride like a steel bike, it, and many of them do, some of those carbon bikes are beautiful.
[00:27:31] They ride great. But anyway, but yeah the G road steel fork is fantastic. And that’s still what differentiate differentiates the B road from the G road. It’d be roads, the carbon. Gravel bike erode the steel for both can be built with 700 C or six 50 B wheels. The B road. We now use that the envy the G series for the gravel for which works with six 50 B.
[00:27:54] And it’s got the mounts for cargo cages and internal wiring for life. Got all that stuff that we couldn’t get before. And that’s, that was what got us going with the idol for the idle fork, it’s got a straight intranet, an eighth steer tube, so it has a different aesthetic to it.
[00:28:11] It’s a more slender bike. It looks like an old school mountain bike. We usually set them up with drop bars, but sometimes we do a flat bar too. And man, a flat bargy road feels a 1993. Bad city fat
[00:28:24] Craig Dalton: [00:28:24] chance. That would be an amazing bike to have in your clinic.
[00:28:28]Tony Pereira: [00:28:28] Probably a little lighter than that bike was just because the tubes are better now.
[00:28:31] Yeah. But yeah I I love that. I love that style of bike. It’s really fun to ride. Yeah. It brings me back to those early mountains.
[00:28:38] Craig Dalton: [00:28:38] And which one will you be riding in the out in Utah.
[00:28:41] Tony Pereira: [00:28:41] I’ve got I’ve got, it’s actually the bike that we brought to envy last year. It’s the it’s a be rode with. And last year was when they launched that adventure for, I guess that’s what it’s called.
[00:28:52] It’s called the adventure for, and so yeah, the road with the adventure fork and I’ve got six 50 B, you’ve got these G won the Schwalbe, the G one bite, the two, the 2.0. That’s such a fun tire. And again, it’s like a really lightweight old-school cross-country tire reminds me of a, like an old continental damn.
[00:29:13] What was that? The vertical. You remember that time? I don’t remember that one before,
[00:29:19]Craig Dalton: [00:29:19] but I do. I do. And appreciate that tread pattern. I’m a Panaracer gravel king plus guy were asking me the STK for the most part, and I love the way it rides on the road, but it’s super capable. Off-road so you’ll see that on my bike out.
[00:29:33] And you great. Yeah. Cool. Tony, I appreciate the. I’ll have links to all the bikes and the pictures and everything the listener needs to get to know Breadwinner a little bit better.
[00:29:43] Tony Pereira: [00:29:43] Excellent. Thank you so much.
Until next time here’s to finding some dirt onto your wheels.
Craig
The Gravel Ride Podcast