POLE BICYCLE CO.

Meet the man behind the Machine – the ‘superbike’ from Finnish brand Pole

In 2013, Leo Kokkonen left his well-paid job as an industrial designer to co-found Pole Bicycle Company, whose aim was to take geometry to the extreme. Their Evolink full-suspension bikes applied this stretchedout philosophy to every discipline. Now, Pole have a new vision. The Machine takes long and slack geometry even further – the large size has a 1,340mm wheelbase – but that’s not all that makes it stand out.

Pole wanted to design a bike that was lighter, stiffer and had more rear wheel travel than their aluminium 29er, the Evolink 140. “The Evolink 140 is a very fast enduro bike, but was initially designed to be a trail bike,” Leo explains. “I realised right away that, by increasing the travel and modifying the suspension, I could make our bike go even faster.”

The obvious way to achieve this was with carbon fibre but, after several years of development, Leo decided to scrap the project after visiting a bike factory in China. “The waste management of the resins, carbon-cutting waste and quality control were unclear,” Leo told us. “We think aluminium is a more reliable material than carbon fibre – and I wanted to do something different to challenge the status quo.” As a result, the Machine is made of aluminium, but not as we know it.

Pole use 7075-T6 alloy, which is considerably stronger than the commonly used 6061-T6. There’s just one problem with 7075 – it can’t be reliably welded. This led Pole to a different process, derived from aerospace applications, which involves CNC machining billets of alloy to form the two halves of the mainframe. These are then pressed together, held in place with bolts and glued down the centreline of the frame.

The CNC machines remove material from the preshaped billets in small strips, like a 3D-printer in reverse. Yeah, that sounds a bit wasteful to us too, and aluminium production takes a huge amount of energy to extract the metal from its ore. But, according to Pole, the process isn’t as environmentally damaging as the alternatives. “All of our cutting chips are recycled and used again in new products,” Leo says. “Carbon fibre bikes can never be recycled and used to build a new bicycle again, but aluminium can be recycled an infinite number of times.”

To find out how the Machine rides, check out our First Ride in last month’s mag.