There are countless choices, and thousands of products, made by the cycling industry each year. Some of them are minor refinements of something that’s come before; some are kooky and doomed to failure; some are genuinely revolutionary, moving the industry forward and forcing other companies into imitation or iteration. And behind each of those products are people dreaming it into being: working out the physics and the engineering behind it, pouring their heart and soul into it.
With companies needing to sell these products to justify their continued existence, it’s hard to capture such a process in real time: there are too many competing priorities and commercial incentives to allow a truly unvarnished look behind the curtain. But I’ve often wondered about the way that a product comes into existence and the people behind it. Do they remember it fondly? With the remove of time, do they see it in a different light to how it was back then?
As it turns out, the perfect case study was right under my nose: a proprietary brake part invented by Cannondale for its mountain bikes of the early 1990s. Mostly forgotten today, this innovation – the Force 40 Plus system – is a small, carefully engineered device that, for the short term of its existence, gave Cannondale a genuine edge against its rivals. But then the market changed: V-brakes came along, followed by disc brakes. In the evolutionary blink of an eye, the Force 40 design (and cantilever brakes more generally) have been consigned to the scrap bin of bicycle history.
So what can we learn from this one old product about the development of new products, about industry attitudes to innovation and obsolescence, and how it perceives the need to keep customers supported as the product offering evolves?
Quite a lot, as it turns out.
The Force 40 brake system entered my life on a 30-year-old hardtail I bought third-hand (at least) as an urban runaround. I’ve worked on my share of older bikes, but I’d never seen anything like its brakes before: a sprung widget mounted at the crown of the fork and the rear brake bridge that held both a straddle cable and the brake cable on its run down to the cantilever brakes. Pull the lever and one side of the brakes pivot the Force 40 widget, activating the other side of the brake.
Luckily, Cannondale has a community of avid collectors who had archived a PDF to explain how to work on the Force 40. At first, it seemed wildly convoluted: the brake’s spring tension needed to be set to different levels on one side to the other, and the Force 40 module itself needed to be oriented just so. It was both fickle and fiddly. But the more I worked on it, the more I began to appreciate it for what it was and what it did: improve the brake force of the typical cantilever system by a claimed 40%, while simultaneously incorporating a cable stop, opening up possibilities for the wild suspension designs that were a hallmark of that era’s innovation.
Even when I hamfistedly broke a tiny part of the Force 40 and found myself scouring the internet for obscure brake parts from several decades ago to repair it, I couldn’t help but admire its simultaneous complexity and simplicity. Someone at Cannondale had clearly laboured over this, come up with a solution that was a genuine improvement, and for what? A couple of years as a selling point, before progress marched on and left it as a dusty obscurity?
So I set out to understand what I could about the Force 40 system – not in and of itself, necessarily, but as an avatar for all of the other products that the bicycle industry has invented and left behind. The weird quirks that make working on older bikes – heck, even newer bikes – such a simultaneously fascinating and frustrating lottery, and the questions that linger years down the road.
The Force 40 system came into the world in two formats: an original design comprising a brass roller (US Patent # 5,099,958; March 31, 1992) and a more sophisticated version a year later (US Patent # 5,228,542; July 20, 1993). It was initially the brainchild of Chris D’Aluisio, an illustrious engineer probably best known nowadays for his association with Specialized; his name is immortalised in that company’s D’Aluisio Smart Weld (DSW) aluminium technology, as used on most of Specialized’s high-end alloy framesets over the past decade. (The lead engineer of the second patent, refining D’Aluisio’s Force 40, was Christoph Mack, who is no longer active in the cycling industry.)
Years before his illustrious time with Specialized, however, the high-achieving D’Aluisio was working for Cannondale – he is remembered by former colleague Murray Washburn as “a pretty legendary character in Cannondale history” with involvement in many of the company’s innovative designs of the era. Headshok, Lefty suspension, the Super V frame: all of those came from the mind of Chris D’Aluisio.
The Force 40 brake system isn’t nearly as eye-grabbing as the single-sided Lefty fork, but its development did help usher in some of D’Aluisio’s bigger innovations. At the core of its genesis were the inherent limitations of the system the market had accepted – “cantilever brakes were what the industry was using at the time, and they kinda sucked,” Washburn told Escape Collective. “The design basically robbed power – you got less force at the pads than you applied at the lever.”
That’s where D’Aluisio came in with a “solution … to make bikes better. The Force 40 was a result of not having a cable stop mounting area for cantilever style brakes,” D’Aluisio explained in an email to Escape Collective. “So, it was a packaging problem that we turned into a feature: 40% more power.”
Cannondale’s rare position in the industry at the time – as a company making its own frames and suspension in-house – allowed it to independently create the Force 40 system without having to wait for anyone else to catch up. “We have a history of looking at problems differently and coming up with unique solutions,” Washburn says. “That kind of pivot was something we could do without waiting for the whole industry to buy in.” D’Aluisio, the inventor of the design, remembers Force 40 not so much for what it did to the brakes itself (although there’s that, too) but for the groundwork it laid for the future. “The Force 40 did solve our problem, and without it we would not have been able to go forward with the rear suspension as we had it,” he says.
In the end, the Force 40 widget had a pretty short tenure in the company’s catalogues – not because of anything that was inherently wrong with it (although D’Aluisio remembers its “squishy lever feel, and not much pad to rim retraction”), but because of the market adopting something else shortly thereafter. “When the V (Wies) brakes came out, we were stoked because it did what Force 40 did, without the proprietary giblets,” Washburn says. Within a matter of years, cantilever brakes were gone from the company’s mountain bike range (they’d stick around in cyclocross for more than a decade longer, before also disappearing in favour of disc brakes).
Between D’Aluisio and Washburn – one former Cannondale employee, another current one – there’s a remarkable degree of overlap in their approach to their creations. Past inventions are remembered fondly, but not with sentimentality: “I do think back, but not with nostalgia, more as a reminder of all the different problem-solving techniques that are themselves very personal,” D’Aluisio explains. “Every innovation has its own story. It can start by finding a problem no one knows they have. This is the difference between evolution and innovation. I think I can remember almost the exact moment and thought that led to a lot of the projects I’m most proud of. Super V, Lefty, Smart Weld, Future Shock, ‘Rider First’ … I could go on …”
Washburn views it similarly. “It reminds us of the times in which they came to be, and the pride and excitement we had bringing them to life. [But] as soon as we create something better, or the industry catches up with standards that render our innovations unnecessary, we move on without second thought.” One example he cites is the company’s Asymmetric Integration (Ai) offset rear end – a different dishing on the rear wheel of Cannondale’s fatter-tyred bikes to eke out more clearance, made redundant by Boost spacing and 55 mm chain lines.
There’s an interesting tension in that: the desire to push something new and the passion in bringing it to life, with the simultaneous understanding that as soon as something better comes along it will be killed off. For those that sentimentalise their bikes, that feels a bit brutal – and for those left with superseded, unsupported tech, there are practical considerations at play, too. But the duality of that mentality from the bike industry means that things do get better, rather than staying stuck in a time capsule.
“Our whole philosophy can be summed up with ‘does it make cycling better’? If we think the answer is yes, then we do it. If the industry pivots and comes up with something better, we adopt that and move on to the next thing,” Washburn says; no point digging your heels in when the tide has turned in another direction. “We don’t do things just to be different and contrarian. We do things because we think it’s a better way.” For superseded technology, Cannondale “strive[s] to stock parts for at least five years after we’ve discontinued something,” with a lifetime frame and fork warranty for the original owner.
For the engineers of the cycling world, there’s a professional necessity in progress: to continue evolving the product offering of their employers, to keep pushing their own work forward, and to try to continue to perfect the perfect invention that is the bicycle. There’s passion in that, just as there is passion for what has gone before, and speaking to D’Alusio and Washburn it feels far less brutal than the churn and burn it can look like from the outside, without any of the cynical push to sell new product for the sake of it, because it comes from a place of love.
“Certain products just stick with you, for whatever reason. They burrow a little nest into your heart and stay there, reminding you of a time, or a place, or a vibe,” Washburn reminisces, before rattling off a list of his collection of old bikes (among them a pair of CAAD9 road bikes, a CAAD9 CX bike, a Slate, and an F29 hardtail). “They’re nowhere near as fast or refined as the new bikes, and whenever I ride them, I sing the praises of progress, but I love each of them in a way that’s hard to explain,” he says.
Working on my ancient Cannondale and its quirky, long-superseded brakes, Washburn’s thoughts echo my own. These Force 40 canti brakes are better than any canti brake I’ve used before, but realistically, they’re no better than the V brakes that came after them, and conspicuously worse than today’s disc brakes. None of that makes me appreciate the bike any less; almost the opposite, as it has found a new life and a new purpose, not as a top-of-the-line mountain bike but as a joyful little town bike.
There’s a place and a time for a product; for everything from the fanciest race bike to the obscure 30-year-old brake enhancer. Evolution doesn’t have to mean extinction.
Did we do a good job with this story?