Originally Posted by bulgie

The crew grew to maybe 6 people making the production bikes at the peak. Then when alu, ti, and cabron nibbled away market share from steel, it dwindled, but 3 or 4 guys most years I'd say. From faulty memory; ask Bill or Bob if you want more accurate personnel numbers. By the time I left in '94, there was just one guy besides me in the frameshop, him making all the production bikes and me on the customs. Though the numbers trended up, plateaued and trended down smoothly, there was some churn all during that time, with people coming and going. There wasn't one single person other than me who was there the whole time '84 to '94 but a couple with longer tenured include Rick Gnehm (who I also worked with later at Match) and Will Meyers. Frank Kaplan was Bill's first employee, even before he moved the frameshop to Seattle. He overlapped with me in the Seattle shop for a short while, a year maybe, during which time he was sort of the shop foreman, in charge of a lot of the day-to-day stuff. He worked on early Disco and Challenge frames, up through probably '85. Don't make me try to remember everyone else who hung around for shorter times, at least 10 maybe 15 people.

As with most production bikes, no one made a whole frame from start to finish. The rest of the crew (other than me) made batches of around 5 to 20 of a single model and frame size at a time, so you'd do that operation that number of times then move onto the next operation, with several people working in tandem. There was a bit of specialization, with one guy assembling tubes/lugs into the jig and tacking, another guy brasing lugs, another on alignment or machining and so forth. But for the most part, everyone but the low guy on the totem pole could do all the operations and got to switch around, so it wasn't as repetitive as regular factory work. Not much burnout; when people left it was most often for a better-paying job. One guy went to work for SR-Suntour, one guy went to work for Shimano, one guy became a sales rep, one went to college etc. Rick Gnehm gave it a go as a one-man framebuilder for a while, making Banana Boy frames, mostly for local racers, later joining Match where I also ended up after a stint at Ti Cycles.

Oops I'm getting off-topic. What was the question again?