RAD RIGS
Cam Monteith’s self-built Factory Cycles Squatcho
Words Justin Henehan
Images: Cam Monteith
I’m an absolute sucker for steel bikes. I think it’s partly to do with being bitten by the mountain bike bug in the 1990s, an era when slender steel tubes were the stuff of artisans. The famed ride-feel is part of it, but there’s also an aesthetic experience that’s strongly informed by the spirit of the maker—a wabi-sabi situation.
That’s why I felt a warm glow in my heart cockles when the social media algorithms threw their bones to reveal the Factory Cycles Squatcho.
The Squatcho is the brainchild of Cam Monteith, a Kiwi who, after drifting through Europe in search of trails and snow, finally washed up on the shores of Whistler in 2022.
Cam’s father was an aeronautical engineer, which meant access to a workshop that dreams are made of. His childhood was one of tinkering, turning and milling his boyhood fantasies into reality.
It was all motocross bikes for Cam in those early years, right through to an industrial design degree at Victoria University in Wellington. However, student life in the capital meant money and motocross options were scarce, forcing him to look elsewhere for fun. His first post-uni job solved the cash-flow problem, but not the access issue. By then, however, he’d discovered mountain bikes.
After a few years working at a steel fabrication company, Cam and his partner chucked it all in to travel and ski through Europe, eventually jumping the pond to the ski slopes of Canada.
Cam’s enthusiasm for skiing slowly began to melt away, so, in February 2022, he bought a computer and began designing the Squatcho, with the plan that it’d be ready for opening day at Whistler Bike Park.
“I finished it the day before,” he says
“I’m just a guy with a computer and a few skills who can just make a bike, really.”
Cam Monteith
The problem was the entire project was seriously budget dependent. Working as a bike mechanic at a local bike shop meant Cam wasn’t rolling in cash, and rent in Whistler is not cheap, so the Squatcho was funded with whatever money he could squirrel away between pay days.
“There were definitely no external factors at play—I’m just a guy with a computer and a few skills who can just make a bike, really,” he says.
Cam could have just bought a bike through the shop, of course—it’d be way easier and cheaper, but that’s just not how he’s wired.
“As a kid, I was always building things like drift-trikes and all sorts of random shit, so I always wanted to build a bike. My first proper bike was a Rocky Mountain Altitude A50, and I cracked it after a month of riding. I paint-stripped the frame and rewelded it. Ever since I fixed that frame, I’ve always wanted to build a frame.”
Cam’s main goal for the build was simple: just make a full suspension bike … it turned out to be a very complicated kind of simple.
“The further down the rabbit hole I got, the more complex it got, and it kind of got to the point where if I was going to do it at all I’d try and do the best job that I thought that I could do,” he explains.
The design and the CAD modelling only took a few weeks, he says, but wrapping his head around the kinematics proved to be a bit trickier.
Cam looked to Neko Mullaly’s Frameworks project for inspiration and guidance. While the two bikes are radically different, Mullaly’s ideas about lines in systems and predictable suspension were a big influence, Cam says.
“There’s a theory that a long-travel bike can’t be a good pedalling bike, and that’s true in some ways, but I wanted to try and make a 175mm-travel bike that could pedal all day and feel like you have that travel everywhere. Apart from the fact that it’s crazy heavy, it actually pedals really well.”
For a home-build, it’s very professional looking, a result of contacts made during his previous life as a fabrication engineer. The profile machining company he worked for would sometimes outsource jobs to rapid prototyping companies in China and Taiwan, he explains.
“It’s super easy to do—you don’t even have to do drawings or anything, you just need to send them a CAD file and spec tolerances on bores for bearings, and that’s it. It just shows up and it looks totally professional.”
Pretty much the whole back end of the bike was made that way, Cam says.
The front end was welded by Cam using readily available chromoly bicycle tubes, except for one.
“The way that I designed the bike, I needed a really tight radius on the downtube, and the only way I could do that was to make it out of a piece of exhaust pipe tubing. So, the downtube is not a bicycle-spec tube at all, it’s a car exhaust pipe.”
“The downtube is not a bicycle-spec tube at all, it’s a car exhaust pipe.”
Cam Monteith
The choice of steel for the front end was partly practical (he had a DC welder and experience welding steel) and partly functional.
“I feel like a lot of aluminium full suspension bikes are way too stiff. If you’ve watched a bit of the Neko Mullaly Frameworks development stuff, he talks about compliance from his front triangles, and you can definitely feel the difference.”
Cam really wanted a bike with a low anti-rise number to keep it active under braking, but he was struggling to balance other factors, like pedalling efficiency, he says. The solution was something that you’d only see on downhill bikes 20-years ago—a floating brake.
For the original design, Cam used an aluminium bar to connect the brake to the front end, but that bent on the first carpark lap. Then, one day, an old mate who happened to also be the head engineer of a titanium 3D printing company in Auckland, came and stayed with him in Whistler.
“He just said, ‘I’ll make you a brake arm’,” Cam says.
“I made a design for him, and he sent it back over, and I tried it and it felt like a totally different bike. Even just riding around the car park, when you pulled the rear brake on, the bike didn’t squat at all, it just came to a halt without any effect on the suspension.”
Another outlier of the Squatcho is the geometry—Cam runs longish chainstays (450mm), relatively short reach (480mm), and a very high front end.
“I grew up riding motocross bikes where you’re always trying to sit on the seat and your effective reach is really short, so I’ve always ridden smaller bikes,” Cam explains.
“On those bikes, I was always trying to balance the front centre with the rear centre to get more weight on the front wheel and make the bike as predictable in its suspension and its geometry as possible.”
“I grew up riding motocross bikes where you’re always trying to sit on the seat and your effective reach is really short, so I’ve always ridden smaller bikes.”
Cam Monteith
A bike with a long reach, slack head tube and short chainstays will have no front-wheel grip, Cam says.
“I’m about 6-foot, 4-inches, and I’d ridden a lot of bikes that had 500-510mm reaches, and I never felt that I could weight the front wheel properly.”
The effect, he says, is a more centred position in the bike and more room to move to put his weight where it needs to be.
“Also, having a higher stack means you’re not getting pulled over the front of the bike, which makes descending steep stuff easier,” he says.
Cam’s goal is to get the Squatcho to the point where it’s not a project, it’s just a bike—a goal that sounds simple but one that many home builders strive for. He’s most of the way there, he says, having raced the Trans BC and a host of other races last year.
“For a very good portion of the season, it was like that, I had zero problems with it. Now that it’s the off season, I’ve been trying to break it to try and see what’s not strong enough. Now that I’ve got a base standard of how strong everything really is, I can make it stronger or more flexy or less flexy in places. That’s what I’m trying to dial in now.”
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