Just one mile down the road from the Art’s Cyclery warehouse is a company that Art’s has maintained a great relationship with since its inception. That company is Lezyne. Well known for their sleek design and engineering acumen, we wanted to give our customers an inside look at their office and where their fine products are born. Not surprisingly, their office is just as sleek as their products. From the frosted glass cubicles to the ridiculously over engineered conference table, everything at Lezyne is slick.
Terry Cooke is the engineering manager at Lezyne and is spearheading their expanding line of lights. Here he is doing his best impression of a young Tom Ritchey.
Head design engineer Terry Cooke led us through the tour and took time to do a sit down interview with us that will be posted to the blog soon. Terry’s experience working at NASA, Cal Poly, and on the blockbuster film Avatar has been put to use designing Lezyne’s newest light offerings that are aimed at taking on the big boys in the light category. Interestingly, some of our friends that graduated from Cal Poly were taught by Professor Cooke including an engineer or two at SRAM. Mechatronics was Terry’s class at Cal Poly where he taught students to build artificially intelligent robots. It’s pretty heady stuff, but Terry makes it look easy. Ten engineers work under Terry designing everything including the company’s many offerings in the tool, pump, and bottle cage categories.
Some people say that Lezyne products are over engineered, and Terry enthusiastically agrees. Their bottle cages are a great example. We saw a bottle cage testing rig that consisted of a concrete filled bottle with an eye bolt attached to the bottom of it. This stupid heavy bottle is then placed in a bottle cage before being loaded with weights hooked to the bottle’s eye bolt until the cage fails. Their carbon cage had no problem handling 130lbs. It took around 200lbs to finally create a crack. We witnessed an underwater demo of their new Mega light (1000 lumens) that is to be released soon. After two hours the light was still going strong at a one meter depth. With any luck your night rides won’t involve that much water.
Take a look at the photos we took on the tour and keep an eye out for the video interview with Terry to follow.
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- This cage looks like it is barely straining with 130lbs hanging from it! You will definitely not lose a bottle with one of these.
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- This carbon bottle cage is being torture tested with 130lbs of concrete hanging from it. The scale is damaged an no longer accurate and is just being used as a spacer for hooking weight to. Lezyne knows what these things weigh.
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- The employees at Lezyne really ride their bikes and often with us. Here are some of their rides that they use to get to work or go for a spin at lunch.
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- Lezyne’s granite surface plate ensures accurate measurement of components and the microscope to the right is for final inspection.
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- These bottles once held the material used by the rapid prototype machine to print new prototypes. Lezyne has been busy lately.
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- This is where prototypes are printed up in plastic for evaluation. It allows Lezyne to iterate their designs quickly and stay on the cutting edge.
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- This integrating sphere costs $50,000. It can tell how many lumens are really coming out of a light. You can be sure that Lezyne’s lights really put out the claimed lumens. MTBR actually borrows Lezyne’s equipment for their light testing. Needless to say, Lezyne has data on all the lights on the market and it is available on their website.
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- This is where the magic happens on the CNC machine. The folks at Lezyne clearly have a great sense of humor with their safety warning.
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- There are more Lezyne pumps in their warehouse than you can shake a stick at.
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- Terry loves playing with the prototype lights and controlling them with his computer. Just look at that smile.
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- Terry Cooke is the engineering manager at Lezyne and is spearheading their expanding line of lights. Here he is doing his best impression of a young Tom Ritchey.
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- At Lezyne there is no excuse for skipping the lunch ride with the shower available.
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- Lezyne’s office is slick no matter what standard you compare it to.
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- It isn’t all glass and aluminum at Lezyne with some beautiful wood accents to be found as well.
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- Lezyne has one serious espresso machine.
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- Lezyne really takes care of their employees with this killer kitchen. How many company break rooms look like this?
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- This is the crux of the Lezyne table with all its fabricated glory.
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- This amazing fabricated aluminum legged table was found in Lezyne’s conference room.
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- There are more than a few big name athletes working with Lezyne including Mark Cavendish, Cedric Gracia, George Hincapie, Sabrina Jonnier, Geoff Kabush, and Danny MacAskill.
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- Lezyne’s media room is just as slick and well organized as the rest of the office and contains samples of every product they make.
