Over the last year or so we’ve been pretty impressed with the quantity of new goodies coming out of the Pro Taper camp. They completely re-tooled their high-end bars with the Evo model, launched their Pro Taper sprocket line with the Rockstar Energy Suzuki and Xyience/MDK/Honda crews, and now they’ve also revamped their triple clamp offering. Not a bad few months.
Stopping by the Pro Taper offices this week, Pro Taper’s Brand Manager, Erick “Big E” Bartoldus ran us through what’s new in the Pro Taper lineup. “We want to make products that make sense,” he explained, “With all this new stuff that that’s coming out in ’07, the thinking behind it is, it has to have a reason for being.”
Pro Taper Sprockets
At the ’06 U.S. Open we got our first look at the Pro Taper sprockets, mounted up on the rear of Kelly Smith’s Suzuki RM-Z250 As Big E told us, “With the sprockets, what we wanted to do was bring a better product to the party. In the last four or five years, nobody’s really addressed the advent of four-strokes, and that they have a lot more torque to the rear wheel. What we wanted to do was come in and build a sprocket that’s really built to handle the torque going to the rear wheel.”
“One of the key things we’ve done is moved the mud groove back off the face of the front tooth. That increases the integrity of the drive tooth as much as possible. The mud grooves actually alternate, too, so there’s not two on each tooth, which takes up all that tooth surface. By doing that, I think we’ve added up to 44% more tooth surface than the leading brand.”
Continuing, Big E told the tale of the construction that goes into each sprocket. “A lot of sprockets are stamped and the CNC’d, or they’re cut on a hobbing machine, where they cut 20 or 50 at a time. It’s not as accurate as it could be. Through our testing we found out at that a lot of sprockets out there aren’t even close to being round. Some are better than others, some are worse. It costs a lot more to make them one at a time, but that’s kind of our thing. You can be assured that this sprocket, made in Germany, is completely round.”
When we mentioned how unusual it was to hear that a product was made somewhere other than the orient, Big E told us, “It’s definitely more expensive to have it produced there. It’s the same thing as with the Evo bars. We want to make sure that whoever’s making out product…when we put the Pro Taper label on it, it’s as good as it can be.”
“Some of the mechanics and race teams, they’ve been running our sprockets all year. I’ve watched these guys just freak out at how much rounder the sprocket is. Basically, I’ve watched them take a sprocket off and put ours on and you can tell the difference in the chain hopping. Those guys are saying that’s horsepower-robbing, it wears chains and sprockets a lot faster, so what we’ve done is a real benefit, not only to the race teams, but to the average consumer because the stuff’s going to last a lot longer.”
“The rear sprockets are constructed from 7075 Aluminum that’s been heat-treated to T6, but one of the things I’ve learned just through all the different stuff that we do here…not all 7075 is created equal. Just because it’s 7075 doesn’t mean that it’s good, raw material. This is good virgin material. Our factory that’s making our stuff in Germany is anal about precision and tolerances. That’s important to us, too, because we want to make sure we’re getting a product that’s superior to anything out there. Making stuff in Europe is not easy to bring to America. But it’s something that had to be done. We can’t just go to Asia and make sprockets like some of our competition’s doing. We want to have a superior product that any of the team managers can say, ‘This is a superior product, we’ll use this.’”
 | While Pro Taper's front sprockets look different from everything out there, they're definitely easy to spot. |
“What we’ve done is basically create a sprocket that’s going to last up to three times longer…that’s what we’re seeing. As I look at the MDK team, they rotate out wheels on Vuillemin’s bike, but he’s basically got the same sprockets that he started with when we gave them to him. They’re just blown away because they had no idea that that would ever happen.”
According to Big E, the front sprockets are also made in Germany, from casehardened chromoly steel. They feature the same rigid manufacturing tolerances as the rear sprockets, as well as lightening holes, mud grooves, and…one very bright silver finish that makes them instantly identifiable. “There’s no rule that a front sprocket has to be raw, unfinished steel. It’s so funny how people are used to a particular look. I knew we were going to get that feedback, because it’s different. This is a special cadmium finish that resists corrosion. After you wash your bike and the sprocket’s orange, is that cool? It’s not. So that’s our thinking with the silver. It really finishes the sprocket off nicely, and there’s a laser-burned logo on the tooth, as well as a laser-etched part number. It’s superior quality, and like the Evo bar, when people see the front sprocket, they’ll know it’s a Pro Taper front sprocket, because they can see it from a mile away.”
Now that they’ve found a home in the sprocket market, we couldn’t resist asking Big E if they’d ever do their own chain as well. “Maybe sometime in the next couple years we might even think about doing chain, but right now it’s not on the horizon for us. Why would we just relabel a DID or an RK chain? That chain’s some of the best stuff you can get.”
Triple Clamps
While we’d primarily gone to the Pro Taper headquarters to talk about the sprockets, the big surprise to us were their new triple clamps. Big E began the discussion of how they were created by showing off two large blanks…unmachined parts that had been cold-forged. Big E described the differences between the various construction methods like this. “Going up the ladder of strength factors, there’s vacuum-formed, which is what the OE manufacturers use. Then there’s billet, and cold forging. The best way I can describe cold forging against billet is, billet’s like a 2 x 4…all the grain in the aluminum runs one way. With cold forging, it’s a superior way to form metal. You’re basically taking 20 tons of pressure and smashing a piece of metal into the shape you want. All the grains are compacted and it refines the grain structure. It costs a lot to make forging dies to do that, but again, we wanted to bring something to the party, and I hope that the average consumer can appreciate what we’ve done.”
 | These pieces are straight out of the cold-forging dies, before being machined. It's amazing how much weight they shed, since at this point they're pretty heavy. |
We like the clean look and design that went into the 6061 aluminum clamps, and they retain the rubber-mounted design with fore/aft adjustment, like Pro Taper’s previous effort. Big E added, “We’ve kept our rubber-mounted damping system. The red elastomers are firm, the yellow’s medium, and the blue is softer. We also include solid aluminum pieces, for the guy who wants to transform it into a solid mount. Some guys don’t like the rubber-mounted system, and we’ve tried to create something that’s easy for the consumers to swallow, as well as the dealers.”
 | Here's the complete Pro Taper kit, like you'd find it at your dealer's. It includes everything you need to quickly and easily bolt on to your bike, including step-by-step instructions. |
Besides the fore-aft adjustment for the bars, Pro Taper also now offers riser kits with different height adjustment…10mm or 20mm. “They come with a separate set of D-bolts, because obviously you’ll need longer ones. So we make those, and you have the fore-aft adjustability that we built into our last set of clamps, but now you have up and down, too. So you don’t have to buy a whole new mount system. You can buy these for $29.95. And then for the guy who wants to go back to the 80s and still run a 7/8-inch bar, we make a 7/8-inch bar liner kit which pops right into the clamp system, and he can go back to 7/8 without changing the whole mount system. We assume that a guy buying this set of clamps is going to want oversized bars, but the option is there for him.”
 | We like the smoothly contoured design. As far as we're concerned, the fewer sharp corners, the better. |
Rather than merely radiusing the bar clamp, Pro Taper added a wider bell mouth shape on the outer half of the clamps. “That’s something we learned from seeing bars come back and with working with the race teams. That way when the bar is flexing, it’s not banging into the face of the clamp, causing a stress riser.” Pro Taper also brought back the Accu-Trax name for their one-piece top clamp.
There are also a bevy of other details, like nice radiuses where the clamps meet the fork, the use of Grade 8 10mm bolts throughout, and making sure you have everything you need, including a new lower bearing and race. They’re making clamps for all the Japanese bikes (“We feel that the consumer for a KTM is really driven for KTM product.”) and offering stock offsets, as well as an additional offset for each brand. The finish is a satin black with laser-etched logos and marking guides. All logos are chemically applied decals, and last but not least, it’s 439.95 for the complete set.
Contact:
Pro Taper
232 Granite St., Ste. 101
Corona, CA 92879
(951) 736-5369
www.protaper.com
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4/13/2007 11:46am
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