All hail professor Rockshox...

Professor Castro explains the inner workings of a brake reservoir.

Last month SRAM Technical University—“STU”—opened its doors to a rag-tag bunch of bike industry media types for an abbreviated version of the four-day, product-intensive training program SRAM has offered bike shops since the 2004 products were introduced in 2003.

The goal of the course is to bring those on the front lines—local shop mechanics—up to speed on SRAM’s ever-evolving family of brands: Avid, RockShox, SRAM and Truvativ.

The classroom is set at RockShox and Avid’s research and design facility in Colorado Springs, where instructors Hercules Castro and Jim Mathis instruct about 160 shop personnel every year in the off-season.

Although RockShox hasn’t manufactured suspension forks on this continent for years, the Colorado facility continues to serve as a brain trust for the Avid and RockShox brands. (SRAM components and Truvativ are headquartered in Chicago and San Luis Obispo, California, respectively.)

Castro and Mathis share office space with product managers and engineers who are already working on 2009 products, so they’re fully versed on the product categories they cover in the class.

The regular classes include a few mornings of sit-down classroom time devoted to drive train, shifting, suspension and brake theory. Then students get down and dirty tearing apart the latest generation of products. The workshop has enough fully-outfitted work stations to handles classes of 16 at a time.

A list of shops that have gone through the STU program can be found HERE. STU is open only to professional bike shop employees, but as part of an effort to simplify its service protocols SRAM has posted extensive tech documents HERE.

The fun part: a complete tear-down of the new Avid Code brake.