The design of the Apogee One started with the idea to rethink what is important about a full suspension bike. We wanted to design a bike that responded well to the trail and rider and deliver a unique ride quality. Current frame designs rely on a very stiff frame to maintain pivot alignment for the best suspension characteristics. Unfortunately, these stiff frames don’t allow the frame to flex in response to any lateral forces and so they can feel unstable and skittish when riding through rough terrain.

To separate these two very different demands on the frame, we took inspiration from the motorsports world and decided to use two subframes attached to a center unit, similar to a stressed gearbox/engine with front and rear subframes. This allows us to build a very rigid and precise structure for the suspension module to control the linkage movement and still be free to design to whatever lateral stiffness we want in the front and rear subframes without affecting suspension performance. You can see this type of design separation everywhere in the vehicle world with motor/suspension units bolting into electric car bodies or how aircraft engines are mounted to the wings. We simply borrowed this design idea and applied it to the problem of a bike.

The big benefit of this design is that it allows us greater design freedom. With a conventional frame, the frame holds the pivots in alignment, connects the rider contact points together, and is also an aesthetic component. This means that any change in frame is inherently a compromise between suspension performance, rider geometry, and aesthetics. By breaking out the suspension pivots into a separate module, we can design the module to be rigid, precise, and compact without affecting the geometry or stiffness of the frame. Any changes to our front and rear triangles don't affect the suspension pivot alignment and potentially compromise bearing life.

This also means that we can design the bike to flex to maintain traction and improve the ride quality. Extremely stiff bikes can be good in certain applications like bike parks and smooth XC/Gravel trails where you are either mostly seated on rolling terrain or putting a lot of sustained force into the frame. However, in many other conditions where you are riding on uneven terrain or through rock gardens and similar trail features where you aren't hitting things square-on, designing a frame to flex laterally will allow you to maintain control and to generate more traction.

Another benefit is that we can mix materials. Right now we are using aluminum for the module and steel for the front and rear triangles but there is no reason why we couldn't also offer Titanium, or Magnesium, or any other frame materials.

Lastly, with a modular design, we can start to mix and match components and modify specific components, we can choose to mix a steel rear triangle with a titanium front triangle and an aluminum module or even change out the linkage components to change the suspension behavior without affecting any frame geometry. We have the freedom to continue to develop the platform and continue to provide value to our customers for years to come.

Making Suspension Work
Suspension frames all need to meet a set of basic requirements
At least one pivoting link to let the rear wheel follow the ground.
All the pivots in the suspension must be as close as possible to perfectly aligned
The shock must be aligned to the rest of the pivots to allow for free movement

To meet these requirements, a frame must have a high degree of stiffness between each of the pivots to keep them aligned while you throw the bike around. Otherwise your suspension will bind up whenever you hit the smallest rock off-center.

So come to our first truth: your frame must be as stiff as possible between the pivots for maximum suspension performance.

Making Braking Work
Thankfully the days of tiny forks that you can see visibly flex towards you during braking are mostly over. But from those early years of experience, we know that during braking, you need as much front-to-back stiffness as possible to let the suspension fork work for you and to not bind. The same applies to the rear suspension: if you have too much flex front-to-back, you will either bind your system of pivots or start hitting other parts of your frame with your rear wheel.

Now we have our second truth: your frame must be as stiff as possible front-to-back for maximum suspension and braking performance.

Making Turning Work
Turning on any two-wheeled vehicle is a very interesting balancing act (pun intended.) You need some stiffness to let you start the turn but you also need to let the frame follow rough terrain while the bike is leaned over because the bumps are no longer going directly into your suspension and are then absorbed by the frame. If the frame is too stiff, you skip on the tops of the bumps and you don’t get any grip. This is felt by the rider as “chatter” coming into a corner. If the frame is too soft, you go into the corner just fine but then in the middle of the corner the bike flexes too much and ends up pointing you in a direction you weren’t expecting. This is the “noodly” feeling you feel as a rider. This effect is also very noticeable in rock gardens where a very stiff frame will “ping pong” through a rock garden while a soft frame will “track straight” through the rock garden.

The ideal frame is one that will flex side-to-side to absorb the chatter, and find grip coming into the corner, but doesn’t flex so much that it makes it difficult to predict where it will go next.

Making the Frame Work
On most suspension bikes, the pivots are spread out very far on the top tube, seat tube, chainstay, seatstay and maybe even the downtube. This means that the frame needs to be very stiff to make the suspension work well and you have to sacrifice handling to improve bearing life and suspension feel.

With our module, we can make all the points between the suspension pivots very stiff while allowing the rest of the frame to flex just enough to improve the handling of the frame. We don’t need to compromise on the suspension performance or the handling.

Steel has a great mix of strength and stiffness. It lets us do more to control the ride quality of the bike without sacrificing durability. We do this by choosing the tube diameter for the flex characteristics that we like and then choosing the wall thickness of the tube based on our durability requirements. The strength of steel lets us find the right mix of those two variables that work well with our test riders.

From a manufacturing side, it's easy to work with which gives us a lot of flexibility in the designs that we create. It's also one of the easiest materials to recycle that we could use and is also very easy to repair should it be damaged. We want a frame that will provide an unparalleled riding experience and will survive a lifetime and steel is our answer for how to do that.

You can design something out of carbon that will ride the same as a steel bike, but to make it survive a trail you design for strength and durability. When it is finally strong and durable enough, you often have a frame that is too stiff. Additionally, Carbon Fiber cannot be recycled and restored to the same level of performance that it started from. This means that more often than not, it will just end up in a landfill.

We won’t rule out carbon composite materials entirely but the application needs to make sense.

Aluminum (Aluminium to those of you across the pond) is one of the early “super materials” in the engineering world with products incorporating the material for lightweighting use as early as 1890. While Aluminum alloys are the material of choice for most metal bike frames, these materials require heat treatment to achieve the peak performance of the material. Heat treatment introduces many issues in developing the frame such as embrittlement of the material, misalignment of the final frame, and potential contamination. This requires a large amount of expertise and energy to do correctly and we do not wish to pursue this at this time.

Additionally, to maximize the properties of Aluminum tubing, your tube cross-section increases in size and stiffness which can push Aluminum frames to be stiffer than what we aim for. It is possible to reduce that cross-section and get the stiffness back in the right ballpark but this more often than not results in much thicker tube sections and very little weight reduction for a significant increase in manufacturing complexity.

We personally like the way titanium bikes ride, but the difficulty in manufacturing in Ti does mean that we wanted to start in steel. But we wouldn’t rule it out for a future release.

For Manufacturing
Modular design lets us use the ideal manufacturing methods and materials for each part of the bike. By machining all of the suspension components out of aluminum, we can maintain much tighter tolerances than if we were to try to machine welded frames after welding. Separating out the material of the Front and Rear Triangles, we can then weld them together and have a much higher degree of flexibility in the geometry that we run. Essentially, we let machines do what machines do well, and let humans do what humans do well.

For Design
A full-suspension frame needs to achieve a few different goals: keep the suspension pivots aligned, allow the frame to flex to track the terrain, and keep the rider in the right place. By utilizing a modular design, we can design the suspension module to maximize stiffness which will dramatically increase bearing life and improve the feel of the suspension. This then allows the frame to flex independently from the suspension allowing us to control the lateral and torsional motion of the frame to improve the feel of the rider. It also permits more freedom in the geometry of the frame to fit a wider range of riders.

For Adaptability
We have the ability to upgrade and develop the components throughout the life of the frame when using a modular system. This means any improvements that we might find can be added onto the platform and doesn’t have to wait until the development of the next full frame update (typically 4 years in a standard bike company). It also means that if a new component comes along we can upgrade a part of your frame to meet those requirements without requiring a completely new bike.

For the Planet
If any part gets damaged it can be separated from the rest of the frame for easy repair or replacement. Any updates will require component changes and not an entirely new frame. The customer can also disassemble the frame at the end of its life and split the parts by material for the most efficient recycling.

Building Industrial Expertise
We started in the bike industry working for brands that manufactured or were based in Asia and learned quite a bit from their expertise in manufacturing and production. We want to bring some of the know-how back to the United States and encourage the regrowth of industrial production. With increased expertise in the same time zone, we are able to make design changes more quickly and reduce the time to develop new products. This also helps us to secure our own supply chain within the US that will not be impacted by choices of “The Big Three” of the bike industry.

Shorten the Supply Chain
Following the COVID pandemic and subsequent bike boom, we are now starting to see many bike companies go out of business due to significant amounts of unsold product on the shelves. Much of this can be attributed to the long (+3 Month) delay in their supply chains from Asia and poor responsiveness to the changes in orders. By producing our bikes in the US, we shorten our supply chain and allow us to make faster changes in our product orders reducing the amount of material stocked and enabling us to better weather economic storms.

Reduce the Ecological Impact of Manufacturing
Manufacturing overseas does reduce the cost of manufacturing by consolidating all of the processes into a smaller area but it also generates a lot of Greenhouse Gas emissions through the shipping required to get the product to market. The majority of bikes sold in the United States are shipped from Asia either on a cargo ship or with air cargo, both creating a significant amount of pollution. By producing in the country that we are selling the frames, we dramatically reduce the emissions produced in shipping the final product to your doorstep. We all enjoy spending our time outdoors and we want to continue to enjoy the planet we are on for generations to come.

Our choice of a linkage-driven single-pivot suspension platform is driven by two things: durability and performance. A single-pivot design is extremely simple and with nearly all mountain bikes running 1X drivetrains today, we are able to optimize for peak pedaling performance without compromising descending performance. The simplicity of the design reduces the number of components which in-turn reduces the weight and the number of parts that can wear out. Using a linkage-driven rocker does increase the complexity but allows us much greater tunability in the leverage curve which we use to control the ride feel.

High-pivot suspension is inherently complex with the introduction of an idler to the system. While it can solve many problems, we did not feel that it was the right fit for Apogee One.