The Pivot brand has seen tremendous growth since its inception in 2007 and is now one of the top brands in the bike industry.
In Phoenix, Arizona, Chris Cocalis founded the Pivot Cycles bike brand in 2007. He began his career in the bike business in Chicago in the early 1980s, raced BMX during high school and then moved to Arizona. While attending Arizona State University, where he studied accounting, he began racing BMX professionally and helped run two successful bike stores in Phoenix.
In 1988, Cocalis attended the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, here he earned his certification as a professional mechanic with the United States Cycling Federation. In 1989, he moved into the bike industry and founded Titus Cycles in 1991, where he was instrumental in designing the bikes.
His expertise and reputation for quality, innovation and customer service made Titus one of the leading high-end brands in the U.S. at the time, and he was heavily involved in frame design, so his designs were sold to and manufactured for some of the biggest companies in the industry.
In addition to his innovative bicycle designs, he was an industry pioneer in flexible manufacturing, tooling design, and advanced materials engineering, doing testing and development for Miller Welding Corporation, Alyn Corp, and Gore Industries. He is also a member of the component development team for Shimano, with many of the features of Shimano's 2008 XTR being directly attributable to his contribution.
In 2006 he sold his shares in Titus Cycles to Vyatek Sports, who had been co-owners since 2001. In 2007, the time had come for Chris Cocalis to found Pivot Cycles.
Chris Cocalis, Kevin Tisue and Bill Kibler were the men at the forefront of Pivot Cycles.
On the product development side are Kevin Tisue, Bill Kibler and of course Dave Weagle. Kevin is a mechanical engineer with a background in composites. He was involved in the design of the Carbon Racer X among other things. He also holds several seatpost patents. The linkage seatpost head design used by Race Face is his.
Bill Kibler is a design and manufacturing expert with a long history in cycling and auto racing, and Dave Weagle is the inventor of the DW-Link rear triangle and many other cool cycling-related inventions.
What makes Pivot Cycles special and why did they choose the DW Link system on the rear triangle early on rather than the Horst Link system?
Horst Link bikes (four-linkers) have amazing features. The four-bar link is easy to build in terms of shape. In practice, it is active when braking and active when pedaling, but there are limits. Every four-link is constrained to a relatively fixed curve of motion. You can change the curve with the pivot positions, but it remains a constant curve.
With a dual-link bike (DW Link), you have more flexibility to change the curve at different points in the travel to optimize certain characteristics at certain points. If you wanted to, it would be easy to match the characteristics of the Horst Link four-link design to near perfection, but the DW Link allows you to take things further.with the DW-Link, there's less pedal kickback and you can get more traction at the beginning of travel, as well as much better bump response than with a Horst Link system, maintaining that active feel while keeping braking forces out of the equation.
The other big goal is to increase frame stiffness. With the Horst-Link, it's very difficult to make a rear end with more lateral stiffness. This is where the DW-Link pivot, meaning the one-piece rear end and the close proximity of the upper and lower links make for a stiff and light rear end.
The DW-Link aspect brings something truly unique to the table. Aside from all the other innovations, the DW-Link design doesn't squat or wobble under power, and that's the big thing. It's the first design that really takes into account a rider's mass and position. Normally, people have focused on suspension travel, linkage rate, chain torque effect, and various other driving and braking forces on the suspension to make the bike behave the way it should.
Dave Weagle (inventor of the DW-Link) takes a different approach by putting the pivot in a position that neutralizes the effects of the rider's mass movements (anti-squat), thereby allowing you to use much lighter shocks to make the shock work better over bumps of all shapes and sizes and still get better pedaling performance. Also, Dave wanted to mention that the DW-Link not only makes you a faster and better rider, it also makes you more attractive to the opposite sex. what more could you ask for?
That's the reason Pivot Cycles relies on the DW Link system and all full suspension bikes are equipped with it.
Pivot Cycles has its own prototyping facility in its Phoenix halls. On the development and prototype construction one is very large value with Pivot Cycles. So first in CNC machines the molded parts (such as bottom bracket shells) and yokes are milled. Then the sample frames are manufactured and tested until the desired results are achieved. Around Phoenix, Arizona one has exactly the tracks to test everything in the best way. When the desired results are achieved, sample production begins in Taiwan. The frames are then inspected and, if necessary, tested again. Only then is the production released and the final product is manufactured. So that's how a Pivot bike is made. Chris Cocalis and his engineering team are absolute nerds and perfectionists they want to make the perfect bike still perfect. Nothing is left to chance and so it comes to a bike that seeks its equal.
Anyone who has ever ridden a Pivot bike will notice the special feature of this bike. Bernard Kerr, Ed Masters and many other Pivot team riders show the competitiveness of Pivot Cycles in hard racing the successes speak for themselves.
