1994 Breezer Beamer: Downright Terrifying – Tasshi Dennis & John Watson | The Radavist | A group of individuals who share a love of cycling and the outdoors.

For this installment in our Vintage Bicycles category, Tasshi from Vintage MTB Workshop takes on this 1994 Breezer Beamer, which is without a doubt one of the kookiest moments in mountain bike design. Let’s check it out!

“Suspend the Rider, Not the Bike”

That was the mantra of a few mountain bike pioneers and innovators in the 1990s. After the success of Paul Turner’s RockShox and Doug Bradbury’s Manitou suspension forks in the late 1980s, it became clear to most people that the future of the mountain bike involved suspension – at least in front, but probably on both ends – eventually. But how?

Most of the early suspension innovators had come from a background in motorcycles, including Turner and Bradbury, but also Mert Lawwill (Lawwill), Horst Leitner (AMP Research), Bob Girvin (Pro-Flex), Dan Hanebrink (Hanebrink Cycles), and Robert Reisinger (Mountain Cycle and Pro Stop), among others. They were familiar with designing around the spades of evenly delivered horsepower and torque available on motorcycles, not the 1/4 average cyclical horsepower generated by a typical human being.

Other pioneers, including Joe Breeze, Tom Ritchey, and Otis Guy, saw the mountain bike as an efficient platform for pedaling, likely inspired by their road cycling origins. Any of that precious leg power lost to suspension motion and not available to propel the bike forward represented an unacceptable loss of efficiency. At the time, it was also considered a beneficial feature that air shocks and forks had a ton of stiction, meaning that it took significant initial force to get the suspension to activate and move.

If the bump was too small or the pedaling force too light, the suspension would behave like a rigid bike, and that was a good thing. The pedal-induced bob was kept under control with stiction. Suspension sag wasn’t considered relevant to mountain bikes at the time, and the negative spring wasn’t even a bike concept.

Keep in mind that full suspension travel was typically 50 to 60 mm, so you couldn’t afford to give much of that up and still have something left to absorb the bumps. Today, those numbers sound like the typical sag found on big trail and enduro bikes. But enough of all that “monkey motion,” as it was called.

Using Your Arms and Legs

Before this time, people routinely used their arms and legs out of the saddle to absorb impacts on fully rigid bikes. Dynamic riders still do this, even on the plushest of modern suspension platforms. It’s highly effective, with the body free to move up and down by more than a foot, leaving the rider much less fatigued after a long, rough ride.

That’s effectively what this 1994 Breezer Beamer bike is accomplishing: the rider is largely isolated from the impacts experienced by the bicycle at two of the three contact points, the handlebar and saddle. The rider can implement rebound control through their legs, which connect the saddle and pedals.

With less body fatigue, you should be able to ride faster for longer and remain in control and safer. But the question remains whether any of this truly helps the bike handle any better because the front and rear wheels are still rigidly connected to each other, and the bike alone tends to ricochet off-trail features.

The Beam and the Stem

The Softride suspension beam is comprised of a pair of carbon fiber leaf springs joined along their length by a soft rubber material. Acting in shear between the two carbon surfaces, this interface provides some level of damping to the vertical motion of the saddle perched on the end. However, the motion is still bouncy, even with the aforementioned rebound control provided by the rider’s legs.

To dial-in the fit to the rider, the saddle height is adjusted by the angle to which the beam is clamped to the frame, while the position and angle of the saddle on the beam is fully adjustable with a one-bolt clamp. Unlike a telescopic suspension or dropper seat post, the saddle angle varies during beam motion but is minimized to a degree by the long length of the beam.

With the beam holding the saddle, the frame doesn’t need to have a traditional seat tube except to hold the front derailleur. For a time, Softride also offered a retrofit beam kit for traditional diamond frames. As side benefits, the rear brake cable routing is a straight path, and the beam can accommodate a rare unique saddle bag capable of fitting a full size Silca Impero pump.

By contrast, the Softride suspension stem is a folding parallelogram, so the handlebar maintains its orientation throughout its motion. The spring mechanism is a simple steel coil with pre-load adjustment but no rebound control. The last production version of this stem had a small piston damper mounted on the side that must have been a dramatic improvement.

A key aspect of this design is eliminating any play in the pivots that would cause the handlebar to rock from side to side. With any play, the disconnected, loosey-goosey feel could result in a critical loss of control.

So Much Purple

Joe Breeze chose a paint scheme that mimics the classy 1930s Schwinn Excelsior cruiser bikes that were the starting point for the early mountain bike klunkers of Marin County, California. A cream colored headtube was paired with a main color that was available in a rich metallic red, green, purple, or black. As is common with a purple painted frame, it is an inviting platform for a 1990s 3D-violet, purple anodized parts build.

Although not every possible part on this bike is purple, it is probably verging on too much of a good thing. Adjacent parts of the same color lack contrast, and visually, the components tend to blend and lose form. Another difficulty that becomes visually apparent, especially as a bike ages, is the variation in the shades of the anodizing. Depending on the anodizing process and the quality of the dyes, some parts retain their color better than others, and the result is a patchwork of purple. Parts that receive more sun also tend to fade more.

A Lack of Durability

In the mid-1990s, many people became enthralled with the prospect of assembling an all-made-in-USA bicycle that included all of the components besides the frame. In many instances, this zeal overlooked durability and function, and the result was a lot of poor shifting performance and broken parts. Replacing investment casting and forging processes that align metal grain structure with homogenous billet materials shaped with a CNC machine was a recipe for a lot of scrape metal.

Spokes pulled apart hub flanges, crankarms snapped, and seatpost split open. Although a lot of parts today still have crisp machined surfaces, the blank material often starts out with a forging. As cool as the CNC-billet machined parts from Kooka, Avid, and Ringlé look on this Beamer, they had a horrible reputation for failing. Kooka eventually offered a crankset with forged arms that held up much better.

Beyond the inferior manufacturing technique, parts like the 94-gram Kooka Racha brake levers were poorly designed, with thin cross sections and miniscule hardware. The Racha levers that came with this bike were removed because they weren’t up to the task of off-road riding and stopping the bike.

The Kooka clamp-on anti-chain suck plate, while adding to the purple theme with a pleasing shape, is undersized and held with such small hardware that it is incapable of stopping a chain. In use, it shifted and started to jam up the chainrings.

Photo: Kathy Dennis

A Unique Ride

Unique might be a generous term regarding the Beamer because the ride can also be more fittingly described as downright terrifying.

First, the rider’s weight preloads the beam and causes the saddle to sink by a couple of inches. If you are particular about your saddle height because you have knee issues or like to maximize your spin, this may not be the bike for you. The preload means that rather than having a dropper post at your command, you have a saddle that follows you up when you stand.

It’s disconcerting to have the saddle “right there” in technical terrain. Never mind that when you first straddle the bike, you realize that the “top tube” beam is very high and touching your crotch. Underway, you can get into something of a pedaling rhythm as you bounce along.

The stem really does absorb trail impacts effectively, both big and small. There is no stiction with a coil spring, so the action is very compliant. But without any damping control, the rebound is sudden and feels like the bike is punching back at the rider. On a series of closely spaced bumps like washboard corrugations, brake bumps, or a rock garden, the rider’s vision can go blurry, and the bike can become uncontrollable.

Suspension for a Modern Gravel Bike?

Modern gravel bikes, if they have any suspension system at all, typically don’t need complicated linkages like a mountain bike because of the limited range of motion. Big hits usually aren’t part of a typical riding experience, and minimizing weight is more important.

Aside from a few suspension fork options, seat stays with subber bumpers, saddles with cushions, suspension stems, suspension seat posts, and compliant frame designs all seem to be the preferred approach. Primarily, what these features address is rider comfort so you can go faster for longer. That’s just like this 1994 Breezer Beamer, which is mostly about suspending the rider, not the bike.

As for the 1990s candy paint schemes and anodized parts, perhaps that’s another matter. Sure, Paul Component Engineering and other boutique companies offer an array of anodized colors, including purple, but by-and-large the paint schemes for modern frames tend to be solid colors and flat earth tones that blend in better with nature.

Right down to the spokes, modern components tend to be finished black to blend better with carbon. Although the ride of this Breezer might be rather bouncy, if you want to turn some heads on a ride or in a race, a bike with some 1990s flare can’t be beat!

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