There are a few memorable failures. (1) Early on at Co-Motion we made a mountain bike frame with elevated chainstays for a local guy, remember the Nishiki Alien. We used Tange Prestige MTB tubing, nice and light, this must have been '89-'90. He loved the ride, nice and complient until the seat tube broke between the E-stays and the bb shell. Of course it had a 3 color candy fade paint job as well. So we made a 10" long sleeve that we brazed on, sent it back to the painter and got him going again. Yes it broke again so we ended up building him a traditional hardtail. We were broke at the time but our pride made us replace it, plus it was our fault for saying yes.
(2) Another lesson I learned the hard way was when Moots built the MX Divide full suspension bike. I was responsible for outsourcing the aluminum swingarm. We had done prototype with SAPA, previously Anodizing Inc, when I got the call that they were stopping all bike products. So I started working with Zen manufacturing. Things went well, we had good results from testing and were ready to go to production. Last minute I decided to move one of the welded on zip tie cable guides on the drive side chainstay 1 inch closer to the weld at the yoke. We had a batch made and started shipping frames. Didn’t take long for chainstays to crack. Ended up moving the weld on back, recalling all the swingarms and replacing them with the ones that did not break.
There are more. I learned a lot from testing over the years and from fixing frames made before I arrived at Moots
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