1993 Ibis Scorcher

Neat fixed gear bike made by Ibis in 1993. The production run consisted of 25 small, 25 large and 50 medium frames. The story below is from www.63xc.com and tells about the bike from the people who made it happen. There was a recent (March 2005) article in the USA Today with a sidebar highlighting the Ibis Scorcher. Value was listed (optimistically) as up to $3,000.

A decade ago, Ibis came up with an off road fixed gear bike they called the Scorcher. It was a bike from a parallel universe where they do things differently, all slender tubes and graceful down sloping bars. Ibis' reputation for innovation and quality sold out the entire edition in double quick time, and there the story seemed to stop.

Today, the idea of off road fixed gear is gaining a toehold in the market. The Ibis team have gone their separate ways, but they're all still active in the industry.

SN: I started Ibis after a trip to Crested Butte, Colorado. I was on a Cook Brothers Cruiser which I had modified with 18 gears and canti brakes. I met Joe Breeze, Charlie Cunningham, Gary Fisher, Charlie Kelly and a bunch of the other Marin folk. After I apprenticed with Joe and with Charlie C, I started Ibis in the spring of 81. The bikes were not really like Cunninghams or Breezers, but I took cues from both of them.

63xc.com: Ibis had a reputation for elegant, refined products with a sense of history and an unusually long lifespan. (I think I'm right in saying that the Bow-Ti is still in production somewhere.) That's a lot different from the industry's 'this year's model' philosophy. How come?

SN: We always made the best bikes we could, never worried about model years. If we found a way to improve a bike, we did it. We didn't follow marketing cycles with planned obsolescence, and we resisted the trends toward unproven super light tubing, the kind of things that maybe work fine on one-season race bikes. We made the bikes we wanted to ride, and we didn't want them to break. The industry is a lot different now, but I think we could maintain the same philosophy, the niche player thing, with a degree of success. People like Seven and Moots are doing it, and seem to be doing well.

63xc.com: How did you hook up with Wes Willits/Williams? Was he hired just for the Scorcher project, or did he do other work with the company?

SN: I met Wes in Crested Butte, on one of my trips out. He asked me for an apprenticeship. If memory serves me right, he came down in late 84 or early 85. I do remember it was winter when he got here (California), and he froze his ass off. Which might seem a little funny coming from 9000 feet in Colorado to temperate sea level California, but it's the moisture in the air here--it cuts through to your bones. He worked here for ten years, was incredibly talented, and ended up running all the production.

SN: It was Wes' idea. He was fiddling around with road bikes, converting them into fixed gear bikes, and sticking on the scorcher-style Torrington bars. He would get frames with significant clearance, then mount big 700C tires on them. Specialized Nimbus used to come in 43c which made the bike quite off-road-able--I certainly don't need to tell you that! He made me one, I really liked it, still have it in fact, and we decided to do the limited production run. We also did similar small-run projects with trials bikes, tandems, single speeds, 'cross bikes.

63xc.com: Even today, the Scorcher would be an offbeat project--and back then, pre-single speed, it was downright eccentric. Whatever possessed you?

SN: There were many offbeat things about Ibis. Remember, we were the guys who named a bike Hakkalugi. There was the Hand Job and the Toe Jam, the Cousin It, the Hot Unit, Wet Unit and Love Unit. We knew the Scorcher would be pretty far away from anything else out there, so we worked with our suppliers. They gave us good deals on the components, and we got them publicity. Because the bike was so unique, it got them a lot of press. We had magazine editors buying Scorchers because they were so cool, so different.

63xc.com: Someone told me the design of the Scorcher is based on an early Tour de France winning bike. Is that true?

SN: Maybe a better question for Wes. I just scored the L'Equipe three-volume set of 100 years of Tour history, and there's some similar bikes in there. But the scorchers were a little bit earlier, late 1800s, and I think that's where Wes got his inspiration from. For me, it was just intriguing to build a bike in that cool old-school style.

63xc.com: Many aspects of the Scorcher are unusual. The geometry is very laid-back, and the tubing looks slender by contemporary standards. Did you have to invest in special materials? Jigs? Constructional techniques?

SN: Everything except the bars was pretty available. We used Tange road tubing in what were then common road sizes. The bike wasn't really that laid back. I forget the head and seat angles, but they were probably 72/73 or something close. The bikes were TIG welded, so we didn't need lugs. It wasn't really much of a stretch for us to build.

63xc.com: How did you source the parts--the unusually slender cranks and so on? And--sorry if you've heard this one--where did you get those bars?

SN: We manufactured the bars, using a talented local machinist/fabricator for the tube bending. The components were a pain in the rear to find, but, with a bit of digging, we found them all.

63xc.com: I know of five Scorchers on the road for sure, and have possible sightings of two more. That's an unusual survival rate, given that you only built 100 in the first place. Any comments on the longevity of the bike?

SN: I have never heard of a broken one. Not to say there aren't any, I've just never heard of one. I'd be willing to bet that most of them are still rideable. You see them on eBay occasionally.

63xc.com: Now that more and more builders and riders are interested in taking fixed gear bikes off road, how does it feel to have been ahead of your time?

SN: I think all these things are cyclic. Most cool stuff has been done before, in some way, shape or form. I could name a few examples of things we did that came around again later. And probably will again. I don't feel we were big innovators. But we were having fun, following our hearts, being passionate and real about what we did. Sure, we had to sell stuff to pay the rent, but we really believed in what we were doing, and people recognized that.

SN: In 2000, Ibis was taken over by terrorists, or you could say evildoers. The Ibis is a beautiful bird in flight, but the new owners crashed it straight into the ground.

WW: In 1981 I read a book called 'King of the Road' by Andrew Ritchey, which had come out a few years before. It mentioned scorchers, and the type of people that rode them, back in the late 19th century.

WW: Well, at that time there were pedestrians and there were people on horses. These people coming through on bikes, they were a terror.

WW: Yeah, they were so-called because they scorched through crowds of pedestrians...

63xc.com: It sounds like they quite enjoyed what we in this country would call winding people up?

WW: Precisely. It's just like us big wheelers know about the 26" wheels, that we feel so far superior to the other person, we can do circles around them...

63xc.com: What about the design of these early scorcher bikes? Was there a particular design that was associated with them?

WW: Well, I'd been riding lightweight bikes off road since 1972. The design of the Ibis Scorcher followed that of a Motobecane that I built up in 1982. I built it out of junk, and I still have it on my wall.

63xc.com: Now, that's the same kind of a deal as the one that Bob Poor rides, isn't it?

WW: Mine is 6lbs. They're not road frames, they're touring frames from the 60s and 70s.

63xc.com: I guess we'd use the terminology a bit differently in this country. What I mean is, it was never designed as an off road bicycle.

WW: Well, the French had rougher roads, as you know. The offset on the French forks was two and a half inches, whereas the British was two. My first ride on this thing was on a single track trail called the Lower Loop, in 1982.

63xc.com: And that's in Crested Butte, the epicenter of Colorado mountain biking?

63xc.com: So when you look at the Motobecane, and you compare it with your own Scorcher design, what are the things you changed from that original shape?

WW: Well, I put a sloping top tube in it. We used double-butted and thinner tubing, so we got a 3 1/2 or 4lb frame. And it only fit a 45c tire.

63xc.com: I hadn't realized it was so light... I should tell you that my own scorcher, as you would say, is a Hopper from the 1950s. The frame weighs just under eight pounds. It's plain gauge 531.

WW: And they ride great! Those heavy frames ride great! They absorb all the shock, they don't transmit it. I've got a couple of frames in front of my shop right now that are scorchable. One is an old Schwinn Japanese 70s touring bike with lugs, and it probably weighs 6lb. There's nothing better than that for this application.

63xc.com: So, a scorchable frame would be probably... 60s or 70s, older, heavier, with big clearances...

WW: It would probably be built for a 27" rim. We'd put 700c wheels on there with big tires, and we'd fit fenders... mudguards, is that what you guys call them?

WW: People see me riding one of these things and they think I'm some Brit guy, you know...

63xc.com: The Ibis Scorcher has a couple of features that look really distinctive. The handlebars, for instance. Where did you get the idea?

WW: That's what they did back in the day, back in 1895. I just copied what they were doing.

WW: That was my own deal. After years of having too short a position with those bars on modern stems, the 30° by 165mm stem has become my standard. I've probably made a hundred of those stems.

63xc.com: I know from exchanging emails with Bob Poor that there's a little subculture there. I hadn't realized that it was 100 riders. You have quite a community going. How many of 'em are riding Ibis Scorchers?

WW: I was there nine years. It was just three of us for three years, then six of us for a couple of years, and then we went through like 50 people real fast. We were up to 25 employees and 6000 sq ft.

63xc.com: But I've been able to track down seven via the Internet, which suggests that most of 'em are probably still on the road. They seem to have a long lifespan.

WW: My own one, which I built after the fact, I've repainted four times. It just goes on and on. It's beautiful.

63xc.com: I was surprised that there's no special Scorcher page on the Willits Brand site. Any intention of putting them back into production?

WW: Well, they're not big sellers. I sell mostly touring bikes, what I call Safeties. People that buy scorchers don't want to spend $1000 or $2000 dollars, they want to spend $100.

WW: Well, if I had people banging on the door for fixed gear bikes, I'd sell 'em.

The entire batch of Scorchers went out the door in late 1993 or early 1994. They weren't any more difficult to build than any of our other bikes and required no special jigs or fixtures that I can recall, although the Tange tubing was a bit harder to weld than usual. I needed a fair amount of practice before I felt confident enough to weld a bike together. Meanwhile, I blew quite a few holes in that thin tubing. However, I'm still riding a frame from that time that has held together through ten years of abuse, so I must have done something right.

The raw tubes would be divided up into top tubes, down tubes, seat tubes, then mitered accordingly, taking into account where the butting would go. The frame jig would be set with the correct geometry, the BB shell and head tube clamped in, and the seat tube would be the first one on. After cutting one tube and checking the miter fit, I would cut all the seat tubes. Top and down tubes were done the same way: one tube for fit, then cut the rest. We had a milling machine set up with a hole saw and a clamping fixture for mitering the three main tubes. It was generally more efficient to do batches, and, since the Scorchers were made in three different sizes, this method worked especially well. As you know, we made 25 each of small and large, and 50 mediums.

The chain stays and seat stays were next. Again, no special fixtures. Dropout ends were cut to match the internal diameter of the chain stay, then welded into place. Once the dropouts were welded into the mitered ends of the chain stays, I would bend and crimp the stays before taking them to a mitering fixture for fitting to the BB shell. Both stays were clamped at once, so we could do them both at the same time with a hole saw that was the same diameter as the shell. We had another fixture for mitering seat stays, but they were cut to match the seat tube diameter. I remember days where all I did was miter stays--fortunately, not every day!

Most of the shop machine tools were ancient. The story I heard is that they were purchased from the east coast and shipped west. The hand-cranked horizontal milling machine that we used for the chain stays required brute strength to work. This thing built muscle! There was a huge J&L lathe that I loved to operate. It was way overkill for the shop, but man was it impressive. I think it weighed something like two and a half tons!

Once all the tubes and stays had been mitered, they were all de-burred, then cleaned and weld-prepped inside and out. We'd clamp them in a frame jig, tack them together, one by one, then pass them on to Wes. Wes did the majority of the welding at the time, and in fact I believe he welded all the Scorchers. Rob Roberson did a final braze on the dropouts and any other fittings that needed it. Then, after a final finish and paint prep, they'd get painted by Erica before assembly.

Of course there were other folks working on other parts of the process. I wasn't around for the final assembly, so I don't know who made the cranks or the hubs. The bars were designed after a bar made by Torrington, a company who were active in the 30s through 50s--tho' Wes could probably give you more information on that.

The atmosphere in the shop was always fun. We were all there due to our passion for bicycles. Scot has an offbeat sense of humor, so we were almost encouraged to express ourselves in an eccentric fashion. Basically we could be ourselves as long as we got the job done, were safe, and treated each other fairly. Of course there were conflicts, but that is just the nature of life. Ibis was the best job I ever had. You think the shop floor photos were wild? You should have seen the bathroom! Clean, but wow, talk about decorations! Road signs, newspaper articles and headlines, jokes... A visitor would stay in the bathroom just to read the walls.

Ibis Scorcher: More Bike Than You'll Ever Need! By Chris Kostman

Originally published in Bicycle Guide, November/December 1993 and later in Wire Donkey 'Zine, Vol.11, No.128, October 30, 1998.

I have to admit I was skeptical as I drove up to Sebastopol to pick up this bike. Was this single speed, fixed gear bike with but one brake just a glorified beach cruiser? Considering the $975 price tag and that I'd once read that "this type of bike is for people who are far hipper than people currently are," I wondered whether this was just some here today, gone tomorrow, trendoid bike for the fredly wanna-be's with cash to burn. But I kept an open mind, remembering that Scot Nicol and the gang at Ibis have never given us a bum steer.

Upon arrival, I was given two choices: a "small, medium, or large" size bike and a color choice of "black, black, or perhaps black." I easily opted for the medium, but agonized over the color, finally choosing black. That decided, it was off to the parking lot for a riding lesson from Wes Williams, the guru behind this bike as well as Ibis' jewel-like titanium stems and "the chopper from hell."

The bike fit much like the clunkers I'd ridden while living and working in Pakistan as an archaeologist at the Indus Valley site of Harappa. But that made sense as those bikes were also based on a turn-of-the-century design. The difference with this bike is that only 100 will be made, by hand, and that it's got a fixed-gear.

Wes and I played follow the leader as he led me in laps around the parking lot, diving in and out of S-curve after S-curve, cutting the apex off of each corner so that the pedals wouldn't hit pavement. Unweighting the back wheel in order to forcibly lock it up and launch into a skid came relatively easily, thankfully, since Wes noted that "my life would depend on it."

Back home, it seemed weird to don a complete set of cycling duds and hit the road on a bike that seemed to lack everything that makes up "a real bike." But a real bike it had to be, I reasoned with myself, as I hit the road with my friend Russ Gelardi, a 48 year old lithographer and charter member of the Marin County Fat Heads. Russ and I noted that that the Ibis-made Crescent Moon handlebars, which form a droopy arc reminiscent of a turn of the century moustache, put me in a position so upright that I could do two very important things: see and be seen. The Scorcher may have a 100 year old design, but its attitude and style are timeless. I felt like a stud riding this retro bike and Russ at least admitted that I didn't look funny.

It's a slow grind up Broadway and Tunnel Approach and into the hills above Berkeley, forcing two riding options. With a single 70 inch gear to use, I'd either have to stand up and hammer, or stay seated, ride at a more normal pace, and turn the cranks over at an excruciatingly slow rate. I opted for the latter, a climbing style closely akin to doing leg presses, one leg at a time. Counting my revs, Russ noted my cadence was 35 as we headed into the hills. My heart rate cruised along at 160 bpm, high but far below my max of 212, and my legs agreed that I was definitely getting a great muscle workout. I kept repeating the Ibis mantra, "derailleurs are for failures," in my head as the grade got steeper.

Later, descending Redwood Road, I wound the Scorcher out for all it's worth, reeling in a couple of riders. Pegging 35 and my feet going round so fast that I thought I might bounce right off of the bike, Russ and I dusted the other two. Later we'd use an equation to calculate that I'd be spinning at 173 rpms. One thing's for sure: I've never gotten such a workout nor gasped for air like that on a downhill! My heart must have been pegging 190.

Despite my soap boxing, Russ won't ride trails on his skinny tires, so we split up as I headed into Redwood Park for a little dirt action. I just barely cleaned the first major climb, turning over the pedals at about 20 rpm's, and wishing I had less than 60 traction-robbing pounds of air in the 700X41C Specialized Nimbus tires. Bombing downhill, some important observations surfaced, like the fact that a fixed-gear means that I can't coast when going over bumps and that I can't coast when jumping and getting air! This put a new twist on things, to put it mildly! Avoiding contact with boulders, tree stumps, and other deadly objects ain't that easy when your feet are going round like an airborne Carl Lewis doing the long jump!

Still, the prospect of tackling the world with a fixed-gear bike was getting to be more awesome and somehow more appealing, I thought to myself as I wound past hikers, equestrians, and recreational trail bikers. The bike is unusual looking, so most everyone looked at me like I was kinda weird, reminding me of when I'm off-road on my Ibis Uncle Fester tandem or my Bridgestone road bike.

The next day, those 30 miles felt more like 130 miles at racing intensity! Talk about more bang for your buck, literally. Hooked and humbled, I realized that the Scorcher is just what I need to improve my form, spin, power, leg speed, and talent. And now since that fateful ride, that collision with 100 year old technology, or lack thereof, I won't ride anything else for my daily 10 to 20 miles of "town biking," nor will I miss at least one weekly "real ride" over hill and trail on it. There's just too much to be learned.

Side Bar:

A hundred years ago, cyclists weren't sissies like today. With only one gear and not even one brake, not to mention no suspension or paved roads, they rode better than most do today. A few examples: In 1897, John George of Philadelphia rode 32,479 miles and John Noble rode 253 centuries in one year! The Ibis Scorcher takes its name from the renegade, rules-be-damned cyclists (proto-mountain bikers?) of this era that were scorned by pedestrians and "traditional cyclists" alike. The scorchers, while held in low regard, however, were immortalized in poetry:

I am the scorcher!
Please observe
The curve
That appertains to my spine!
With head ducked low
I go
Over man and beast, and woe
Unto the thing
That fails to scamper when I ting-a-ling!
Let people jaw
And go to law
To try to check my gait,
If that's their game!
I hate
To kill folks
But I will do it, just the same.
I guess
Unless
They clear the tracks for me;
Because, you see,
I am the Scorcher, full of zeal,
And just the thing I look like on the wheel.

Purists are hot for Scorchers

By Sal Ruibal, USA TODAY

When it comes to totally impractical art on two wheels, the Ibis Scorcher is the Holy Grail of cult bikes.

Only 100 of these black-only, one-speed, no-brakes bicycles were made in 1993 by now-defunct Ibis of Sonoma County, Calif., but their scarcity and achingly simple lines have made the Scorcher a Mona Lisa with spokes.

Designed by legendary builder Wes Williams to mirror late-1800s racing bikes created by the pre-flight Wright Brothers, the Ibis Scorcher has a fixed-gear drivetrain, which means the pedals move constantly — no coasting. If you want to stop, you apply reverse pressure to the pedals. Some owners have added a front brake for safety purposes, but true believers liken that to adding arms to Venus de Milo.

"When you ride a Scorcher, you join a special club that nobody knows exists, except you maybe, somewhere deep in your soul," says Ibis founder Scot Nicol, who doesn't own one of his masterpieces. "The Scorcher was a pure cycling experience and nothing else."

The original 100 Ibis Scorchers were priced at $975 and sold out. Few have been offered for resale: A Web search showed only three on the market with an average price of $3,000. Considering the value of ultimate bike-cult coolness, that's a bar

Frame		Tange Cro-Moly

Fork		Chrome plated Cro-Moly

Rear Shock		NA

Rims		Weinmann 4019 Polished Alloy

Hubs		SR sealed

Spokes		Stainless steel

Tires		Specialized Nimbus 700 x 41c

Pedals		SR Sp-100, Ale clips, Lapize Straps

Crank		Suntour Cyclone 7000 53T ring

Chain		1/2 x 3/32

Rear Cogs		21T

Bottom Bracket		SR Suntour

Front Derailleur		NA

Rear Derailleur		NA

Shifters		NA

Handlebars		Custom to replicate an old Torrington design

Stem		IBIS

Headset		Tange Vantage

Brake set		Royal Gran Compe 500 Front only

Brake levers		Dia-Compe Touring Style

Saddle		Brooks B-17 w/ Small Copper Rivets

Seat Post		Alloy

Colors		Ivory Black

Size		Large

Serial #		2710