It is the winter of 1980-1981, and Scot Nicol is feathering the end of a bronze rod along the joint between two steel tubes in a garage in Mill Valley, California, north of San Francisco. He is holding the rod in his left hand while, with his right, he keeps a blue flame about six inches away from where the steel and the rod meet, causing the bronze to melt and fuse the tubes together. Watching him is Joe Breeze, who together with Charlie Cunningham are acting as mentors to the young Nicol toward the end of his apprenticeship in mountain bike building.

Nicol is in a good spot. Not only are Breeze and Cunningham masters of the craft, but each has been pivotal in the early development of the mountain bike. In 1977, Breeze began building his own bikes in Marin County, bikes that he called “Breezers.” Each frame was made of 4130 cro-moly steel and, collectively, they were the first off-road bicycles ever made. Two years later, Cunningham was the first to build aluminum off-road frames.

While apprenticing under Breeze and Cunningham, Nicol is also living with Steve Potts, an original “Repack” Downhill racer, an early incarnation of today’s downhill mountain biking. Potts and Cunningham, along with builder Mark Slate, would later go on to co-found Wilderness Trail Bikes, a key innovator in bike components.

Every day on his way to work with Breeze and Cunningham, Nicol rides from Potts’ house over Mt. Tamplais—terrain that many consider to be the birthplace of the sport—to the garage in Mill Valley, and back.

But it is Breeze and Cunningham who will have the greatest effect on Nicol. Although they are both early masters of bike construction, they each have a very different approach to bike building. Breeze looks to tradition, and excels in detailed craftsmanship and doing things the way they’ve always been done; Cunningham questions everything in a constant effort to improve every detail of his bikes.

When Nicol goes on to found Ibis Cycles later in 1981, his approach to bike building is a marriage of Breeze’s and Cunningham’s styles. His Ibis frames are fillet-brazed steel (like the Breezers) but with a shorter wheelbase and more compact frame (like Cunningham’s aluminum bikes). The result is a bike that feels more light and agile, a theme that is reflected in the company’s name.

“Traditionally, a lot of bikes were named after birds,” Nicol says. “I had an Audubon bird encyclopedia that had a beautiful photograph of an Ibis, and I named it Ibis because I liked the look of the bird.”

As a wading bird similar to a heron or an egret, a walking ibis resembles something like a football on toothpicks, but Nicol is quick to note, “We prefer to think of it more in its flying mode.”

Early on, Ibis made clear that it was not afraid of risk. In 1988, Ibis built four frames out of NASA-grade carbon fiber, which Nicol, channeling Cunningham, calls “a great experiment.” The carbon was so expensive that each tube cost hundreds of dollars.

“Most of that material ends up in space,” says Nicol. “We were definitely pushing the envelope, [and] the technology we had wasn’t quite developed. The manufacturing technique [eventually] changed to build bicycles.”

Six years later, Nicol would write a seven-part series for VeloNews called “Metallurgy for Cyclists,” whose fifth installment was titled “Carbon Fiber Boasts Tremendous Potential.”

Along the way, Ibis found humor in the rest of the industry’s high-minded seriousness. (Biking is first of all fun, remember?) So Ibis gave their bikes names like the “Moron,” a response to Columbus’ “Genius” and Ritchey’s “Logic”—both steel frames with more material on the ends—and the “Hakkalügi,” to Kona’s “Haleakala.” (If you don’t get it right away, just say “Hakkalügi” out loud a few times.)

Then came the turn: in 2000, for reasons he prefers not to discus, Nicol sold the company. Ibis’ new ownership, which came from the biotech industry, claimed it would show the cycling world “how to run a company.”

Twenty months later, Ibis was bankrupt.

Its headstone read: 1981-2002.

Nicol, however, would have it read 1981-2000, since he doesn’t consider the 20 months after the sale to count. Those new owners were “just impostors,” he says.

Fast forward to 2002, and Hans Heim, who had just left Santa Cruz Bicycles, calls Nicol to ask about the future of Ibis. Near the end of his time at Santa Cruz, Heim had been thinking up a new way of developing bicycles: instead of working primarily on mechanics and then dressing up the frame, he wanted to build bikes by emphasizing industrial design throughout. But Heim was no longer involved in a bike company, so had nowhere to try out his new ideas. All he knew calling Nicol was that he had always loved the Ibis brand, that he wanted it to come back, and that a new Ibis could potentially be the brand he was looking for.

Initially, Nicol didn’t want back in. But Heim kept calling, and Nicol eventually agreed. After arriving at a deal with the attorneys who owned the trademarks, Heim also brought aboard Tom Morgan from Giant, and Roxy Lo, an Industrial Designer working at Pottery Barn, to form Ibis 2.0.

Before re-introducing themselves to the bicycling world, however, Heim tried to decide where bicycle design—and thus the bicycle market—was going to be in two years. What he came away with were the “Three Innovations” for the new Ibis (which Nicol also calls the “Leaps of Faith” or the “Three Gambles”). Those innovations led to the creation of the Ibis Mojo, which marked the re-launch of Ibis when it was unveiled at Interbike in 2005.

Monocoque means “a structure in which the shell bears most of the stress,” or, in other words, a structure with few or no joints. With Ibis 2.0, Heim was pushing away from what he called the “Tyranny of Tubes.”

As Nicol explains, “We would not be subjected any more to round or straight tubes. We wanted to build a bike with an organic, gorgeous shape. We were going to fight uphill for carbon monocoque.”

To draw up these organic shapes, Lo was given a page with a few strategically placed points on it, representing the head tube, seat tube, bottom bracket, suspension linkage points, and axles. Then she was told to “connect the dots.” Nineteen hundred hours of CAD time later, they had the shape of the Mojo.

The third innovation came with Heim’s prediction on suspension. He had told Nicol from the outset that Dave Weagle’s dw-link system was a big improvement on previous systems. Not only that, but that long-travel suspension would become increasingly more accepted as legitimate for a cross country bike, due to the efficiency of the dw-link while climbing. “[And this is] back when few people considered suspension bikes acceptable for any cross country applications,” says Nicol.

These Three Innovations and the Mojo—the first-ever monocoque carbon fiber all-mountain full-suspension bike—were gambles for Ibis. And considering that they re-entered the cycling world with this bike, they had based the success of the company on it.

Though the technology for building bikes out of carbon fiber had advanced, the biggest concern with the Mojo’s monocoque carbon fiber frame was still the material itself—that it would blow apart when a rock hit it, exposing riders to dangerous, shattered fibers.

Ibis offered a “crash replacement” warranty, and noted that carbon is often easier and less expensive to replace than aluminum, titanium, or steel. But the Mojo held together, and the market began to accept the durability of the material.

Ibis then introduced an updated version of the Mojo, the SL (or “super lightweight”), which added titanium and more carbon to the frame, then the Mojo HD (with 20mm more rear-wheel travel, bringing it to 160mm, and a frame reinforcement that made it massively stiff). And later, the Mojo SL-R, which uses an entirely new monocoque molding technology. Each iteration, designed to suit different riders’ needs, built upon the original time the company poured into the Mojo.

“Because we took three years to develop the original Mojo, we set the bar really high,” says Nicol. “We don’t have model years, we just have models. We just make sure the bikes are right when they come out. [And name-wise], I think the continuity is good, so if it’s not broke [we] don’t fix it.”

They’re still a small company (11 employees), and Nicol says that this time, they plan to stay that way, with no plans to sell.

In addition to the Mojo line, Nicol and company offer the Silk SL, their carbon road bike; the new Hakkalügi, their carbon cyclocross bike; and will soon begin selling their Ripley carbon full-suspension 29er.

In many ways, the bottom line for Ibis is what its founder discovered in Mill Valley 31 years ago: maintain excellent craftsmanship and don’t be afraid of new materials, appearances, or building techniques.

“Having to change over to monocoque construction,” says Nicol, “that really allowed us to change our game artistically. We’re getting out of triangles and into organic shapes.”

Then Nicol adds: “And by the way, there’s nothing wrong with triangles. They’re all over our bike. They just have to be a little more swoopy.”

Like an Ibis in flight.

This piece was originally published in  Blister Gear Review  on July 3, 2012. This is a revised version.