A Company You Should Know, But Possibly Don’t: Evil Bikes / e.thirteen

While e.thirteen chainguides are gaining popularity, the real jewel of this New England company—Evil Bikes—is still overlooked. Street riding icon Chris Donahue rides one, so does Nigel Quarless and countless other ripping street riders. But the average Joe has never heard of the company. We tracked down Evil’s business director, John Pentecost, and found out why.

BIKE: How long have you guys been in business?

Imperial frame

EVIL: Dave Weagle had the idea for Evil Bikes. That will be four years ago this winter. About two years ago we noticed a demand for durable original-equipment (OE) chainguides for bike suppliers and started e.thirteen components. That’s really been taking off.

BIKE: Is that the same Weagle that created the patented dw-link suspension design?

EVIL: The same one.

BIKE: People rave about that dw-link. Are you guys ever going to sell a bike with that design?

EVIL: It’s honestly one of the best riding full suspension designs out there; but we’re keeping our frame side small and nichey. We’re never gonna put out anything mainstream. We’ll never do a thousand frames or anything. Our main focus is selling e.thirteen components. And since most of those are sold to bike manufacturers, we don’t want to compete with them for frame sales. So we really don’t want our frames getting too popular.

BIKE: How many frames are you selling per year?

EVIL: We put out a couple hundred.

Soveriegn's dropout

BIKE: What’s new for 2005?

EVIL: We have a lot of street frames and all-mountain hardtails. One steel bike is coming soon—the Sovereign. It’ll be Reynolds 853 steel and retail for about $800. Nemesis Project is building them in California.

BIKE: Are any of the frames made in Maine?

EVIL: No, we outsource all the production. Cycles Devinci makes our Imperials and Imperial SLs and the D.O.Cs are made overseas. Our headquarters is in Portland, Maine, and Dave [Weagle] designs the stuff and sets up the manufacturing from his home in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

BIKE: Tons of riders compete on your frames. Do you have a team?

EVIL:We have an eight-rider team with Nigel Quarless and Chris Donahue doing their own things, but riding our frames. Everyone involved with the company rides a lot. It’s a really tight-knit, family-type atmosphere here. We’re just guys who ride bikes and happen to have great products.

The Soveriegn

BIKE: What’s going on with e.thirteen?

EVIL: We’ve been having a good go of it lately; e.thirteen sales have been going up between a couple hundred and a thousand percent each year. This year we’ll sell 7,000 to 10,000 chainguides—one company ordered a couple thousand. The OE scene is really taking off.

For 2005, we’re going to have chainrings, stems, pedals, saddles, handlebars and rims for downhill and freeride. The pedals are computer modeled for the best pin placement and they should be ready by Interbike. They’ll be different, like all our stuff. With all our components, though, we’re always fighting with manufacturers. They don’t get it, just because they’ve never seen it before. It’s a tricky situation, it’s almost like we’re too far from the norm.