So, with the bit now well and truly between my teeth I decided to find out whether or not I was alone in my thoughts, and the easiest way for me to do that was to put a piece up on the Dirt website explaining the situation and asking anyone who would be seriously interested in buying one to leave a comment saying so. Now the number of comments on web stories varies a fair bit, but I don’t think we’ve ever had over a hundred, so I’ve got to admit I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t get the full amount needed, but how wrong I was.

Within just a few hours we’d reached that magical figure, with many reckoning they’d want more than one (in fact I seem to remember Brant Richards of Nuke Proof, Ragley, etc., said he’d take 100 himself), and then just a few days later we’d gone past quadrupling that figure. It turns out that I wasn’t the only one to be surprised by the response, Cane Creek had been pretty blown away too, especially when they also got several phone calls from bike manufacturers about it.

This was when I really started to get the feeling that I might have been wrong about the scale of Cane Creek. Firstly because I couldn’t believe that a massive company would even consider changing their mind, and secondly because after several more emails from Josh it became apparent that he was working crazy hours to try and improve his original prototype. Obviously he didn’t have a pile of minions to do the dirty work. Anyway, it turned out that Cane Creek were pretty pleased to get such feedback because when you’re so immersed in the bike industry, surrounded by the latest and greatest shiny stuff, it’s far too easy to forget just how many riders are out there on older stuff, and their different needs. They were so pleased in fact that not long after this whole thing kicked off I got an invite to go and visit them.

Now I’m really starting to doubt my intuition because for some reason I had it in my head that North Carolina, where they are based, was super flat. I was even thinking that right up until the last ten minutes of the flight from Chicago to Ashville. Everything I had flown over up until that point was flat as a pancake, but then suddenly these mountains appeared out of nowhere and stretched for as far as I could see. Yet another serious misconception then. It also appeared that I had landed in the middle of nowhere, you don’t get airports much smaller than Ashville, and I soon discovered Cane Creek weren’t even based in the relatively bright lights of Ashville, they were right out in the hills.

My first impressions on pulling into the enormous Cane Creek car park didn’t really help the confusion about what kind of company I was about to encounter. On the one hand I was faced with a fairly sizeable and corporate looking building, and the car park which would put most supermarkets to shame, but then on the other hand the car park was almost empty. Another thing I did immediately notice though was the number of bike racks on the few cars that were there. Enough of the guessing though, it was time go in.

I think it’s fair to say that I quickly came to the conclusion that Cane Creek was anything but the faceless corporate company that I had once imagined. As soon I was in the door I was greeted by a waggy tailed dog, and then in the corridor was a plethora of bike stuff, from exotic hand built singlespeeds to full–on DH bikes, and a whole manner of different bike parts. It was already apparent to me that these guys live and breathe what they do, it was about as far from sterile as you can get, and I loved it. I then got a quick guided tour of who’s who, and it really was pretty quick because in total there’s only about 30 people who work for the company. As far as I can remember that’s a fair few less than Hope employ. So it wasn’t long before I asked how can such a relatively small company produce so many headsets, after all that’s what had led to my original impression of the company, and I could only spot two CNC machines in the entire building. The answer was a pretty simple one; they only made a small fraction of them. It wasn’t a case of them getting another factory to make them though, it all stemmed from the fact that up until last year they held the patent for the ‘Aheadset’ (what we now all just call a headset). Whilst many companies paid a royalty to use the design with their own name on it, there were also several manufacturers in the Far East that were allowed to produce licensed headsets that bared the Cane Creek name. These were mainly used by bike manufacturers on new builds.

That cleared one thing up, but I was still left wondering how a company of this size was based in a building that could easily house two such companies, if not three. Normally when I go and visit a company they’re bursting at the seams, but parts of this place were like a ghost town. It turns out that the company was based in this building even before it was Cane Creek, with the original company being Dia–Compe. Dia–Compe were, and still are really, a big old company, and as well as making their own stuff in this factory, in 1989 they also started to manufacture and distribute the original RockShox suspension forks. There were still a few old relics in one of the many store rooms giving testament to this heyday of production at the site. Then Cane Creek name came about when the US division of Dia–Compe wanted to produce some higher end components bearing a different name, and then shortly after in 1992 the employees grouped together and bought the US division, and that I suppose is really the true beginning of the Cane Creek that we know today.