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The Super Trainer was designed and developed by Larry Papadopoulos, a lifelong machinist from Corvallis, Oregon.
The company's initials stand for Bicycle Components Inc., reflecting
his initial plan to manufacture bicycle parts. But it turned out to be
easier to make money in the high-tech industry. BCI thrived in the
1990s making aluminum components for four clients. On the side,
Papadopoulos dabbled in bike components, none of which found a mass
market.
An avid cycling enthusiast, Larry
founded BCI Manufacturing in 1989 to bring his many bicycle product
ideas into the market. Once the tech boom hit the Northwest in the
early 1990s, Larry retooled his shop to serve several major clients in
the high-tech industry with high-quality, precision CNC’d aluminum
parts. Although making these parts was his main source of revenue,
Larry continued to develop his bike component ideas on the side.
With
success in his parts making business, Larry was finally able to devote
more time to his ideas in the year 2000. He enlisted his mechanical
engineer, Jennifer Hole to help draw up some plans for a bicycle
treadmill. Along with Jennifer, Larry got Troy Tucker, an accomplished
cyclist with the Trek/VW/Bike Gallery regional team. Troy assisted the
project as a guinea pig and brought his insights as an elite cyclist to
the company.
Motivated by the
long, dark and wet Pacific Northwest winters Larry and his team spent
nearly three years designing, fabricated, testing and developing the
treadmill. The goal was to develop a treadmill for bicycles that would
allow for completely free movement and mimic the sensation of being on
an open road indoors.
In 2003 the
team, now called Inside Ride Inc., trucked their creation (The Super
Trainer) to Las Vegas for the 2003 Interbike bicycle industry trade
show. In a far corner of the show, Larry, his wife Joanne, and Troy set
up a table and talked to anyone that would listen. The bicycle industry
was amazed at what they saw and the Super Trainer was covered in nearly
every major cycling magazine.
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A Message from Inside Ride
| It's been a long process, but the United States Patent and Trademark Office has granted us a patent (No. 7,604,575) for the floating roller design!
Foreign patents are pending.
For those not familiar with patents, this essentially means the US Patent Office has determined that the floating rollers have not been previously known anywhere in the world. When you consider how many people there are on planet Earth, it's a major accomplishment to come up with something truly "new".
The Patent Office checks far and wide for anything and everything that has been built, or even just described, to ride a bike on (you would be surprised how many devices have been thought of...and how few of them actually work ). Patents serve an important function because without them there is no reliable way to buy or sell ideas, or to prevent others from stealing your inventions. Therefore, when it issues, you must protect your patent or you risk losing the ability to defend it.
Keeping this in mind, WE ARE OBLIGATED TO INFORM EVERYONE THAT IT IS NOT LEGAL TO BUILD YOUR OWN SET OF EMOTION ROLLERS WITHOUT OUR PERMISSION. EVEN FOR YOUR PERSONAL USE.
That may sound a little heavy handed, but as the floating rollers have become more popular, we're seeing more homemade rollers showing up on the Internet. That's pretty blatant and leads us to believe that these folks are just having a good time, but are ill-informed about the rules. Just to be clear...it's not that we are worried about losing sales to the D.I.Y. crowd. In fact, home-built rollers have made believers out of many who were at first skeptics, and when they realized the practical limits of homemade rollers, they bought the real thing. Our aim is simply to comply with the requirements set forth by the patent office. Nothing Personal
On a similar topic, we would like to announce that we have licensed, to ELITE of Italy, the rights to manufacture a similar E-motion roller for sale worldwide except USA and Canada. The agreement stipulates that once Elite has brought their roller to market, we will no longer sell our version outside of North America. This arrangement suits us well because we were too busy making rollers for USA and Canada and could barely handle the additional International customers. Besides, the shipping of individual rollers overseas can be expensive. We feel the partnership with Elite will better serve customers outside North America. | | |
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