Cyclist
Dream bikes: Moots Vamoots CRD
These days there’s a certain image attached to titanium bikes: that they’re good for all-road and gravel. In a sense, that’s not unfair. Bikes made from titanium can deal with a bit of rough and tumble and offer a forgiving ride quality that’s appreciated away from the tarmac. However, a consequence of this perception is that when it comes to pure road riding, titanium is increasingly overlooked in favour of carbon composite bikes.
Nonetheless, there are bikes such as the Moots Vamoots CRD – a fully integrated, lightweight titanium design with sharp handling – that make a good case that ti done right can and should be considered the equal of any of the near-identikit composite road race bikes it shares a market with.
‘Given where the Vamoots CRD is positioned, I think it’s reasonable to say its customer is used to good bikes,’ says Moots CEO Nate Bradley. ‘They’ve had the Dogmas and the Tarmacs, but really what they’ve had are similar flavours of the same design. So where the Vamoots CRD stands apart is in ride quality.
‘We’re giving up some of the aero advantage of course, but I don’t think customers truly understand what titanium bikes can do for their speed until they’ve tried a bike like the CRD. Even after just one ride, they start to understand that feeling fast is different to actually going fast. The benefits of comfort and control over the more aggressive performance metrics become apparent.’
The CRD – Complete Race Design – is the latest in the long line of Vamoots road bikes, the name being a portmanteau of ‘Moots’ and ‘vamos’, the Spanish for ‘let’s go’. The model has always been about a subtle approach to speed.
‘Considering how long we’ve been building Vamoots bikes, I’d like to think we’ve gotten the hang of it by now,’ says Bradley. ‘The Vamoots was officially introduced in the 1990s – before that we’d been a small builder that didn’t do designated models. As for the CRD, it was made possible by the work done in the development of its predecessor, the RSL. That bike introduced our RSL tubeset, which creates the CRD’s unique blend of comfort, light weight and stiffness.’
Butts are no joke
‘We’ve worked with titanium tubing manufacturer Reynolds for many years to refine the RSL tubeset, getting our butt profiles and butt specs where we want them,’ says Bradley. The CRD uses a double-butted front triangle, which means the wall thicknesses of top tube, seat tube and down tube vary in thickness, being thicker at both ends and thinner in the middle.
‘Reynolds is able to get the butting pretty extreme in certain areas, making the tubing pretty light,’ says Bradley. ‘We’ve worked with them to optimise butt lengths and transitions to make things perfect. This helps keep the weight in check. At 1.4kg for the frame the CRD beats out rivals by around 200g. We’re proud of that because it was so much easier to make a light frame when road bikes used rim brakes and mechanical gearing – everything just hung on the outside. It’s more complicated these days.’
Most of the frame is made from the 3Al-2.5V titanium alloy that is a little easier to work and refine in the ways Moots wants. The rear thru-axle is printed from the 6Al-4V alloy however, and that same titanium is used for the seatstays.
‘6Al-4V is higher strength but less adaptable, and it doesn’t work in certain areas,’ says Bradley. ‘The loads on the seatstays are very perpendicular though – left to right under pedalling and vertical in support of the seatpost – so harder titanium is good there as it’s smaller and lighter but stiffens up the rear end. You get more of a snap back out of it under acceleration. Used elsewhere this would make the bike harsh.’
Bradley says a key attribute of the CRD is that Moots doesn’t just adjust one tubeset for different frame sizes as other brands do, but has different types of tube combinations that mean the framesets can perform the same no matter what size they are.
‘We offer nine stock sizes plus custom options, so whatever height the rider is, the bike will ride in the way it should,’ says Bradley. ‘It’s stuff like this, the unglamourous stuff that’s hard to market from, that I think sets the CRD apart, even from other titanium bikes. Materials don’t get better, production doesn’t get better. Frame alignment, geometry, surface finishes… we major in the minors. It doesn’t necessarily get appreciated by the customer – and we don’t want it to be, because that’s what they’re paying for – but everything is how it should be, every time.’
Love of labour
Achieving that consistency means that although Moots has grown significantly since it began in 1981, it will never be an operation based on volume. Each CRD frame can take up to eight full days of labour to produce, although that has to be done over the course of eight to ten weeks.
‘The way we have our production process set up means we do things in batches to make it more efficient. We’ve got quite a variety of models these days, so changing things around all the time wouldn’t make sense,’ says Bradley.
Typically Moots bikes are completed in 40 to 50 hours of cumulative labour, whereas the CRDs take anywhere up to 65 hours.
‘The CRDs combine all our most advanced features,’ says Bradley. ‘It’s the RSL tubeset with 3D printed dropouts and internal cable routing. These steps add in so much complexity, from the time spent on initial machining through to how much welding is done on the frame.’
Of all the features introduced on the CRD, the internal routing is the most striking. Unusually for titanium it lends the bike the clean lines of modern composite designs.
‘Man, designing that in was a headache,’ says Bradley. ‘On metal bikes it’s just a hard thing to do, to make it look good as well as still be functional. And then because it’s an unusual feature still for a metal bike, you always get people saying we’ve just made the bike harder to work on. To that we say, “How many of you have needed to service a Chris King headset before?” You just don’t need to touch them.’
Another point in Moots’ defence is that this bike sells for well into five figures. Chances are the type of customer that buys it won’t baulk at a slightly higher service bill every few years.
‘Once we got over the complications the result has been worth it,’ says Bradley. ‘Having a bike that looks so clean goes a long way to reinforcing the CRD’s pure road credentials.’
Something else that does this is the CRD’s tyre clearance, which is limited to 30mm.
‘With metal bikes people just expect big tyre clearances,’ says Bradley. ‘But there is so much more to it than just making the tyre fit between the chainstays. Big tyres mean adjusted seat tube angles and chainstay lengths. They’re run at lower pressures, which changes their contact patch. That affects handling, so then we need to look into fork rake and head tube angle… it’s a can of worms. A strict limit on tyre size contributes to the CRD riding superbly on the road.’
That’s fair enough, but to stand still is to fall behind, so Bradley accepts that aspect of the CRD will need another look sooner rather than later.
‘We aren’t ever afraid to push forward,’ says Bradley. ‘We’ll keep tinkering with the internal routing solutions as well – I’d like a compatible Moots titanium stem for the CRD, to extend the bike’s character. That said, this is still the best version of the clean, pure road design we’ve made. It’s the first disc road bike that captures where we got to with the Vamoots RSL rim brake bike – which was peak Moots design – but with better braking, cleaner lines and more comfort. As road titanium goes, you can’t really ask for more.’
The spec
Model: Moots Vamoots CRD
Price: Frame capsule £9,800, full build approx £16,700
Weight: 7.9kg (56cm)
Groupset: Sram Red AXS
Wheels: Zipp 353 NSW
Finishing kit: Enve SES AR bars, Enve In-Route Aero Road stem, Moots Cinch seatpost, WTB Gravelier saddle, Panaracer Agilest TLR 30mm tyres
Contact: moots.com
Meeting Mr Moots
How the company got its name
The headbadge of every Moots bike includes a cartoon image of an alligator. This is Mr Moots and his story is central to the foundation of the American bike company that bears his name.
When he was a child in Wisconsin, Kent Eriksen had a small rubber eraser shaped like an alligator. One day on the school bus, it was taken from him by some bullies who poked a hole in its head with a pencil. Afterwards, when he got it back, Kent squeezed the eraser’s head and it made a noise that he thought sounded like ‘moots’. He named it Mr Moots and it went everywhere with him.
Later, during the ’70s, Eriksen travelled around the States, riding his bike, and ended up in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where he eventually settled down and opened his own bike shop. From there he took a framebuilding course, and once Eriksen had built his first frame he felt he needed a name for it. His eye alighted on his tatty old eraser and, 43 years later, Mr Moots is still resplendent on every frame the company produces.
Eriksen is no longer at the helm of Moots, having stepped away from the business in 1995, but his ethos of hand-crafting robust, elegant, deceptively simple-looking titanium frames remains in place. Over the years, Moots has resisted the temptation to move into carbon fibre or to increase production through mass manufacturing techniques, and it’s this dedication to its roots that ensures Moots’ reputation remains in place.
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