Life is charmingly strange sometimes. For example, here are some seemingly disparate facts of my existence that converged recently and begat the interview that follows.
- For many years, I worked full-time at Seven Cycles, a custom bike builder whose factory is roughly 4.5 miles from my house. While there, I sold many, many bicycles, but also a particular gravel fork that Seven designed that would take wide tires AND had fender mounts. Builders liked to buy that fork, and so I got to know some of them, including Bill Davidson, whose shop in Seattle has been turning out fine custom frames for decades.
- A few years ago, I started doing a podcast with Stevil Kinevil, who I had had a loose correspondence with for ten or fifteen years but had never met until we started recording our conversations for fun and profit.
- Last year, Stevil blew out his knee skateboarding and required the intervention of a skilled orthopedist.
- Also last year, I agreed to go back to working part-time at Seven to help them with some sales and account management, and subsequently heard from a number of old friends, including Bill Davidson, who was still buying forks, but was winding up to retire, the good news being that he had identified someone who wanted to take over his workshop and continue the bike building there.
- Stevil’s original orthopedic consultations in Bellingham, WA, where he lives, proved less fruitful than he hoped, and a friend recommended a doctor down in Seattle to him.
- The bike builder taking over Bill Davidson’s shop was introduced to me as Christopher Wahl. Chris placed an order for some forks for upcoming builds for his nascent brand, whose name I didn’t properly register.
- Stevil reported to me that his new doctor was a wizard, and that he had a cogent plan of action to get back to his previous, adequate levels of movement and activity. This doctor’s name was Christopher Wahl.
- I texted Stevil. “I think I just sold some gravel forks to your orthopedist,” I said.
It took a while, addled as I am, to draw together these fine threads of coincidence, but finally I arrived, which is when I received a message in my inbox from Dr. Wahl, Chris, to introduce himself and his new bike company, Mischief Bikes. And so, I suggested we do a quick interview
The obvious question is, how did you come to found Mischief? It’s a long way from orthopedics to bike building.
The path isn’t as much of a stretch as you’d think, actually. Like a lot of people, I’m a serial obsessionist and have taken deep dives into a lot of different interests over the years, but cycling has been a constant one. I raced road a lot in high school and into college, then did a lot more mountain biking when I was in medical school and during my residency training in orthopaedics. Time on the bike and in the woods was a salvation of sorts, and I fell in with a bunch of ne’er-do-wells who were trying to emulate what Richie Schley and other freeride pioneers were doing on the North Shore in BC. We were building obstacles and problems in the Connecticut woods and pushing each other toward this trials-like riding, popping onto bigger and bigger stumps and rocks and taking bigger and bigger drops – all on hardtails with “downhill” (LOL 2.0”) tires – which is about the biggest the bikes could take. I taco’d a shit ton of rear wheels.
So fast forward to the end of my residency, and I’m applying to specialty fellowship training in both trauma surgery and sports medicine. I wanted to be a sports doc who took care of nasty injuries and complex problems. It’s funny, but in my application essay for sports fellowship at the Hospital for Special Surgery (which you know of in its previous iteration as the “Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled”) I wrote about my trail riding and wheel breaking and my aspirations to walk the divide between “sports” and “trauma” and closed by saying “And then I’m going to build a better bike.” I realize now how prescient that was.
Fast forward 22 years. I’m in a busy practice and (sadly?) I got everything I’d bargained for – nothing but complex problems, time-intensive revision surgeries, difficult conundrums in a system where doing that type of work isn’t valued by today’s ‘system.’ It’s news to no one that at present medicine is a little broken for both patients and physicians, and I’m literally working from 6am to 10pm every day and totally fried.
Then one day Apple sends me this “memory” on my iPhone. It’s a picture of me racing cyclocross from like 2015. 2015 me is fit. He looks happy. I’m like “what happened to that guy?” and I realize I need to make a change. For the first time I dare to ask myself “what would I do if I wasn’t an orthopaedic surgeon?” Something where I work with my hands, something involving bicycles, something creative. Bikes had always been that salvation, and bike building just seemed like the obvious choice. I decided I was going to build that better bike.
How did you find Bill Davidson?
Kismet. I knew that ‘building a bike’ and ‘being a builder’ are two totally different things, and I wanted to get some sort of immersive experience. Davidson has an incredible reputation in the Pacific Northwest, and he’s been building custom bikes in Seattle for 50 years, now exclusively in titanium. I literally cold called him.
Me: “Hello, this is a weird request. I’m an ortho surgeon. I think I’m pretty good with my hands and using tools, and I think I might want to learn how to become a builder, not just buy or build a bike. Wondering if you’d be open to me spending some time in your shop, maybe volunteer my time to help out and see what it’s all about.”
(Long silence)
Bill: “Well………why don’t you come by the shop, and we can chat?”
Me: (elated) “Wow! Thank you! I was expecting a hard no”
Bill: “I was expecting to give you one. But now I’m intrigued”
So, I start spending some weekends and the odd afternoon loitering and watching Bill work. We discuss the process, problem solve together, and I think Bill recognizes that I actually understand structures and mitering and angles and stress risers (probably because so much of that is inherent to my day job in ortho). Then after a few months, he asks me to go out for coffee. I’m pretty sure it’s ‘divorce day,’ and he’s gonna tell me he’s grown weary of his overage shop rat. But he asks me what my best-case scenario would be working with him building bikes. I tell him I’d be elated if he’d be willing to allow me to pay him some rent and some money for the use of the lathe, mills, jigs and tools and run a second brand out of the space (He did this for many years with Max Kullaway from 333Fab). “But maybe that works for me and not you. What’s your perfect scenario here?” I ask.
“I want you to just buy the whole business and I’m gonna teach you how to run it.”
So, in a relatively short time, I went from looking to learn to build bikes as a kind of a way to save my soul, to being offered an opportunity I’d never dreamed possible. My wife, Suzanne was 100% supportive with us cutting our income in half, and me spending a lot of the other half trying to make this business work.
What is the best piece of wisdom you’ve gotten from him?
There is so much…and mainly a culmination of little things that just resonate. I think first, it’s just that Bill lives in a way that just makes sense. He takes time to sit down and eat his lunch every day. If the weather is nice, he opens up the garage door to the shop and sits outside in the sun on a chair to do it. This is so foreign to the way I’ve lived for the past 22 years, and such a wakeup call.
From the standpoint of building, I think that we share a sensibility that no detail is too small to not accomplish with the aim of perfection. You would never know this by looking at the shop – it looks like post-apocalyptic Armageddon, but somehow everything has its place, and the bikes are jewels.
From the standpoint of business, Davidson is so good at building community – this is probably his most important bit of wisdom. He has people coming in for their 4th and 5th Davidsons. Each bike has successively more stack and easier step-through, and ultimately even built so motors can be installed.
A few weeks ago, someone called about their steel 333Fab bike Max Kullaway had built years ago and wondered if it had a crack. I told them to bring it by, and we’d have a look. There was a small crack in the weld between downtube and bottom bracket. So, I offered to fix it for them. They wanted to know how much I’d charge. I looked at Bill and he said, “up to you, you own the business”. I said, “I think we should just take care of it. It’s a custom bike, and that’s not something that should happen in 5 years.” The customer was shocked.
Bill later told me “I’d hoped you’d say that” and told me an anecdote about how he once took back a bike from a customer after it had been ridden for a year. The customer admitted to Bill that he just never got used to the fit of the bike. Bill just built the customer another bike for no charge – an act of good faith that resulted in multiple other bike orders from the customer, his wife, and many of their friends. It’s the kind of philosophy of business that is so rare today.
Who is building the bikes? Who is finishing them?
Everything is done as a collaboration for both Mischief and Davidson bikes, and all the work except painting is done in house. I look at the process and approach it much as I did surgical training. Bill is an amazing constructeur, but fortunately an equally exceptional teacher. He has a knack for knowing what things in what order need be mastered first and then where to go from there. For the Mischief bikes, I concentrated on gravel first, because I genuinely believe that it is a platform where titanium offers advantages over any other material available in the market, and the changes I made to Davidson’s workflow made the builds more complex, so I figured I’d learn more by working alongside Bill as we adjusted the workflow, created new jigs and tools, and did the troubleshooting. Also, I intentionally decided to build a small fleet of production bikes to have in the shop so that people could actually ride a Mischief before committing to buy a custom one.
First, this allows people to see how magical the ride is, which is a heavy lift in a world where everyone is conditioned to want carbon. Selfishly, however, building a fleet of bikes gave me a lot of repetition in the processes of designing the bikes, bending and mitering the tubing, machining the brake bosses and bearing surfaces, anodizing and blasting and finishing the frames.
The name of the gravel line is mrdr, which is a double entendre for a group of crows (part of the mischief iconography and spirit) and secretly a tribute to Davidson’s help (Mr. Davidson / Dr. Wahl). After getting to the point where I could pretty much do everything solo (about 12 gravel bikes in), I designed and set out to build a road model (the Muginn). Again (selfishly), same process. I pushed Davidson to do things he hadn’t before, like using tapered head tube, so I could learn how we have to re-machine tools for the fixture and change the workflow to accommodate that. After building a run of production and a few custom road bikes, I’m on to Mischief’s third platform: building a true randonneur bike – which I think is the forbear to all-road and gravel, and for the Pacific Northwest, probably the bike everyone needs but doesn’t quite realize they need (yet). I think the changes are both keeping Bill interested, and from a learning standpoint for me, the experience and repetition is like an amazing apprenticeship in both frame building and machining tools to build.
The effort is truly collaborative, however, and I also must give due credit to Mark (who is our master mechanic who’s been with Davidson for 20 years) and our welder, Jon. We bring Mark in early in the process to optimize the frame build to the components a client selects, so that tubing runs, stops, bosses and everything else will work optimally. Jon, our welder is amazing. He straddles the aerospace industry (he has aerospace certification for titanium welding) and is a total bike geek, so he absolutely ‘gets it’ and knows how to keep the frames true and straight as an arrow welding and is so meticulous about avoiding corruption and contamination in his welds. The guy stacks dimes like I’ve never seen. I do the anodizing and blasting as well in house. The only thing we’ve outsourced is the production of our 3D-printed frame components and our paint, which is done locally by Brandon Waterman at Stunt Doubles. That’s also a collaboration as I keep pushing Brandon to try stuff he hasn’t, and we’re both benefitting.
How did you identify and evaluate the new aspects, like shaped tubing, 3D printed parts, etc., that would make Mischief different from Davidson?
All the changes have been related to form following function. As a longtime rider in road, gravel and mountain, I definitely have a lot of opinions about the bikes I’ve loved and those I haven’t. The first bike I built with Davidson, truth be told, was a road bike. It was an experiment of sorts because I wanted to try and drill down on what it was about titanium that made it unique, so I built the exact facsimile of my road bike with respect to geometry and the component build. The irony is that when I got on it, I LOVED it, but still can’t exactly put words to the ride. It is no less stiff than my monocoque carbon frame (can’t hammer the wheel into the brake pads) but seems to carry momentum. It almost feels like the bike is giving energy back, not just translating it to the wheel. Hard to explain but I’ll never ride my carbon bike again I don’t think.
But to answer the question, geometry largely drove the differences between the Davidsons and the Mischiefs. I don’t like the way a lot of commercial gravel bikes ride, they have a barge-like quality that feels sluggish compared to road. So the mrdr has more of a roadie geometry in that the chainstays are short and stiff. This of course creates a “real estate” problem between a fat tire, a chainring, and a 1” thick stiff chainstay – so we had to have a yoke designed to allow the geo to happen. We also, for both the road and gravel platforms had to put a bend in the seat tube (7° for the Muginn and 13° for the mrdr to get the geo to work and keep the tire off the seat tube.
Davidson largely was building exceptional “all-road” bikes, but he utilizes longer chainstays and a generally less performance-specific geometry. I’m trying to build to an optimized version of the bikes and geometries I most love to ride. I hope others do as well. So far, the feedback has been really positive. With the randonneur (which I ironically dubbed the “ordinary” because I think it’ll actually be extraordinary) I dove into old issues of Bicycle Quarterly and books and magazines on the 650B-specific builds by the likes of Rene Herse and Alex Singer as the starting point for the geo. I’ll build the first one and then see what we need to change. That’s the beauty of custom building each bike.
What have been the biggest challenges in establishing Mischief?
Invisibility. Davidson has too much class to be a big self-promoter. He’s fortunate to have built a reputation at a time when it was possible to build and market a product with a lot less noise and industry competition and no need to navigate social media to get traction. Back in the 1970’s to the early 1990’s, a custom built or small brand steel frameset represented the pinnacle of the industry, and most big bike builders couldn’t compete for that market. Now, many customers don’t even realize it is possible to get a truly custom bicycle.
Titanium entered the bicycle market at a weird time, too. It was big for a hot minute because it had such an amazing strength-to-weight advantage over steel, but the material is expensive and for the most part had to be hand-built, which made the cost almost unobtainable for anyone but the really motivated, patient and affluent. Then carbon came along, and the big industry manufacturers were able to create light bikes at a fraction of the cost. At the same time, those large companies were way better suited to gain exposure to the consumer and effectively alter the trajectory of the market. They strongly influence the consumer’s desires (whether or not they’re actually that good for the consumer).
I think we see this now with what’s happening in the industry motivated to sell, sell, sell, obsolete, redesign and sell more. While no doubt electronic shifting and hydraulic braking have some benefits, they are technologies that solved issues that weren’t huge problems and have created problems that never existed before. I like to joke that I can get any rim brake to stop my wheel in the rain, it’s getting my tire to stick to the wet pavement that is the rate limiting step. You see components that are almost built to become obsolete, bikes that have become difficult to service for the average consumer, geometries that mimic the bikes ridden by highly trained, flexible and 23-year-old professionals. I don’t know that an ill-fit bike, no matter how light, is ever going to produce a contented rider. At the same time big corporations are buying shops or selling direct-to-consumer and putting brick and mortar shops out of business, so finding qualified people to fix the bikes, particularly bikes bought online, is getting more difficult.
Also, titanium has the disadvantage of “looking like” a steel bike. This may be part of the push for internal routing and other things a lot of small builders are adopting. It is sometimes a heavy lift to get someone to consider trying a titanium bike, but those who do are always blown away. It’s quiet, it’s smooth, and in most cases the same weight or even lighter than carbon.
Where I have hope, however, is that I’m not the only person who feels this way. Commercial bikes are not unique or precious. They’re not really customizable. They’re not built to last more than one industry tech cycle. The biggest favor industry is doing for the small builders is that now their bikes are even more expensive. It used to be that a custom or top-tier bespoke Italian racing bike was an order of magnitude more expensive than a big industry bike. Now it’s common to see people everywhere riding $14k bicycles that are built in overseas factory molds. At some point people will realize they can have a bike that’s completely bespoke, just as light, and rides better at the same price or less. And it’ll come with a builder who supports the product over the long run.
Is there one bike that symbolizes everything Mischief is about? Describe it.
I’ve spoken a lot about the Mischief bikes already. If there’s a bike that symbolizes everything about the company, it would be a Spooky Darkside XC mountain bike I had back in the 1990s. For those who don’t know, the original Spooky company was started by a bunch of Straight Edge punks in Connecticut, just a few miles from Cannondale’s headquarters at the time. Those guys recognized that the big companies weren’t really building bikes that were good for the kind of riding they were doing in the woods, so they sold T-shirts and stickers to earn capital and started building wildly different bikes like the Darkside (XC), the Metalhead (dirt jumper/DS), and the Project X (a dedicated downhill bike). Those bikes were unlike anything else out there. I purchased a secondhand Darkside and rode it on everything through those med school and residency years. Got me through a lot in those med training years. I got it so scraped up that I once visited the factory to see if they’d repaint it. Those guys were amazing, gave me a tour and said they’d be happy to repaint the bike, and also repaint the metallic blue Marzocchi Bomber fork as well. “What color?” the guy asked. “I dunno,” I said. “Black was good. Surprise me.”
Two weeks later they call me to pick up the bike. It was black. But they’d painted the head tube metallic blue to match the fork with flames fading back across the top and down tubes. Totally over the top. I cracked the frame launching it off something a couple years later. Spooky had shuttered or was in the process of shuttering at that time or was under new ownership. I cried a little.
But that bike…what it meant, what it represented, how the brand got its start, the loud punk music playing in their factory, and the genuine craft and pride that went into it represent all I could ever hope for Mischief.
7) What is the process for a customer who wants to order a Mischief?
Easiest question ever. It all starts with a sit down and discussion about how the person rides, what bikes they love and don’t, and why, and what matters most to them. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different components and tech and try to educate them a little, if necessary, about stack and reach and trail and how the bikes are built. We take some measurements and move from there.
We also try to keep a small production run of gravel and road bikes on hand for people to try so they can feel the platform, because the obvious question is “how do I know if I’ll like a custom bike if it doesn’t exist yet?” Finally, we discuss different build philosophies we have from GzeroF (latest tech, electronic shifting/hydraulic), the Service Course (hybrid build with mechanical derailleurs but hydraulic brakes) to the Zombie build (mechanical shifting, caliper or cable actuated disc brakes – the bike everyone will ask to borrow when the grid goes down). If the customer loves one of the production bikes and just wants to ride away, they can. If they want something different, whether it be geometry, finish, components or fit, we’ll build them a custom. Whatever will make them ride more.
Check out Mischief Handbuilt Bicycles for more info.
Wow. Great article. Thank you.