Building the “Fall Risk”

Dreaming of the Fall Risk kept me going during the three months I was in and out of UNMH. Long nights in my hospital bed recovering from my amputation were often spent longing to be out there shredding again, and I’d already been noodling for months about trying my hand at a full-suspension design.

The name for it came naturally. The first time I was able to go anywhere after I was discharged was to a follow-up appointment with my surgeon. While checking in at the front desk, clearly wobbly on my crutches, a receptionist looking at her computer screen asked “Are you steady on your feet today?” I paused, unsure how to answer. She then looked up at me, down at my …foot, and put a bright colored bracelet on my wrist that read "FALL RISK." Thank god for a dark sense of humor.

My life sure had fucking changed. Instead of enjoying the sunshine on my skin and the wind in my hair on a bike ride, I was stuck being a fall risk in the hospital. During my recovery I made up my mind: it was time to chase my dream and build a full suspension.

After countless hours in CAD and suspension analysis programs, I finally had my design. 170mm of travel up front with 158mm of travel in the rear combined with a very aggressive geometry made for the first design of the "FALL RISK."

With the design nailed down it was then a matter of figuring out how to build it. This task consisted of a lot of sitting and staring at a wall trying to envision the construction process. What needed to be machined first and what needed to be brazed before bearings could be pressed in were very important details that shaped the entire fabrication process.

Once the order of operations were settled, it was time to figure out how to jig the design. For that I jumped back into CAD and determined how to pick up all the important points of the suspension design via my fixturing table.

With the points settled, I designed some simple laser cut plates to interact with the holes in the fixture table and turned down some standoffs on the lathe to support the frame. Brazing the front triangle together was like any other frame until it came to the pivot point and shock eyelet. That's when the jig on the fixture table came in.

Once those points were accurately located it was easy to braze in the machined and laser cut pieces I designed. Once brazed together the front triangle made its way back into the normal frame jig where the rear triangle was constructed. And just like that, we have a full suspension ready to rip!