The Crank Brothers Cobalt crank was one of the big hits of this year’s Interbike trade show in Las Vegas, largely due to its unexpected and unconventional design. Eschewing carbon, the Cobalt is a composite of a different kind: an aluminum base bonded to a stainless steel cover. Like all Crank Brothers products, the Cobalt combines a striking industrial aesthetic with hardcore cycling functionality.

Andrew Herrick, who serves as Crank’s marketing guy (though not officially; the company does not use job titles) gave us the lowdown on how this unusual product was created.

VeloNews: When did you begin work on the crank?

Andrew Herrick: It wasn’t quite two years ago; I guess it was in January 2003. The idea was a cup of coffee conversation between Carl [Winefordner] and Frank [Hermansen] and I at 9 o’clock in the morning, and we thought that we would take a different approach to it.

VeloNews Q&A: Crank Brothers’ unexpected crank

We started off by saying that there was a nice opportunity to beautify the side of a bicycle. And in Carl and Frank’s usual way of thinking, they also thought there might be a different approach to getting there. So as a marketing guy, I was thinking, “What’s going to look pretty,” and they were thinking, “How can we come up with a way to make it lighter and stronger and stiffer, and then also make it pretty?”

So we started with that, and 48 hours later they had the patent written. That’s really how quickly the idea came to them.

VN: It’s not an intuitive design at all. You’re using a forged aluminum base that is post-machined, and a stamped stainless steel cap that creates the rigidity in the structure.

AH: A box section, yes. The way Carl and Frank described it to me, and I remember the conversation very well, they picked up a Pearl Izumi shoe box and took the top off and said, “Look how flimsy this is,” and they flexed the bottom. And then they put the top on the box and it was like a brick. And then they made a prototype in the machine shop and had a very, very, very crude example of that, and you could see very quickly how it was going to work.

So the trick has been making the cover, and how do you make it so that it is thin and beautiful, and when you do the stamping, how could you achieve this beautiful form?

That led us to a vendor that does a lot of work for Apple; they make the stampings for the G4 Titanium notebook. So we knew that was the look we were going for, and luckily we knew someone who knew the vendor that made them, and we approached them with the patent and the idea and they got real excited about it.

VN: Joining the two dissimilar materials in what needs to be an unbreakable bond must be a real challenge, especially when you have to worry about expansion and contraction with temperature variations and water penetration and so on.

AH: We first join them mechanically, and that takes a lot of load off of the bond. It’s joined mechanically at the pedal and the BB. And then you’re really looking for a way to get these materials bonded, in a similar way that carbon fiber is bonded. The bonding — between GE and Du Pont and 3M, I think we’ve experimented with bonding agents from all these companies — the bonding has come so far. They have the same issue with Apple notebooks, so what they have is a robot that applies the glue; it looks like a little glue pen, and it applies the exact amount. The important thing is that you apply the right amount, and apply the right amount of pressure and that you cure it for the right amount of time, and that was something that they knew all about. So again it was an application that was being used somewhere else and we were just able to adapt it.

VN: The other thing that is different about the crank is that the obvious trend is toward carbon. You have plenty of experience with composites, and yet you’ve gone a different direction here.

AH: I think it is rarely a matter of what the market it doing. The Eggbeater for example — the way that Carl and Frank’s brains are wired, and it’s funny that the two of them are so similar, and I haven’t met any other two people like them in my time in the bike industry, which has been 15 years — they don’t look at the market. They simply look at it from their base of influence.

Our brand is very influenced by not only Apple Computer or the obvious car influences that we all see, but also what’s gone on in home appliances like Sub Zero refrigerators, and beautiful wine cabinets that have these stainless finishes that can be polished out and really look wonderful. So I think they were excited about it, but they also felt from the functional standpoint that stainless steel is a great material to work with. It’s very malleable, it’s very beautiful, it can be finished in a number of different ways, polished and brushed and other things that you can do. So it wasn’t a matter of saying how do we make a carbon fiber crank or a steel crank but how do we make a great product that we can beautify? They didn’t say how do we make a four-sided pedal, they said how do we attach a shoe to a crank? And they came up with the solution in the middle that had nothing to do with what anybody else had done, which is why at the time it was quite a leap.

VN: What is it about the crankset that makes it the first component that companies want to develop?

AH: I think it was the one in which we came up with the best solution first. I think that we still have several other patents that are currently issued or pending in other categories and this one was one we got really excited about personally. And we tend to do it that way. We gravitate in the direction of something you get most excited about. I don’t think that we really looked at it from a market potential standpoint; I think we looked at it from a product standpoint first. And we always decided that maybe we’ll only sell 1000 of these a year. That’s what we do with the Triple Ti, it’s 1000 or 1500 pairs a year. We don’t do it to drive volume; we’re really passionate about it and we think it stands for our brand. And where our company is in its development right now — and it’s still a fairly young company — we feel this is a really good example of what our company stands for: craftsmanship and beauty and simple and function and some innovation I guess.

VN: But now that you have the product, you must have considered the market opportunity?

AH: We think — we’re in an unusual time, in that something is going on, quote unquote, because years ago, would you have broken up a Record gruppo? Would you have put an Athena derailleur with a Record crank? It never would have happened. Now you’ve got people with FSA and Deda and they don’t have any problem breaking up pieces. That’s a huge shift in the way a consumer thinks.

So we think there’s a great opportunity in the aftermarket for people to want to change the way their bike looks, to say nothing of what the OEM opportunity is. The OEM could be zero, it could be really big; that remains to be seen. But I think if product managers are looking to differentiate the look of their bikes, and the whole world’s in carbon right now, one way to do it is to find something else.

VN: Are you getting inquiries from product managers?

AH: More than we expected. So we’ll see. We have to make sure we can make them first, because they are slow to make. We did a time study on some of the manufacturing and it is a labor-intensive product. It really has to be perfect. For sure we’ll get better at making them, but right now it’s slow going. Which is okay; we’re not in a hurry.