Spiritual eco-warrior? Half-naked singlespeed pioneer? Genius machinist who brought you the Cool Tool and Klean Kanteen? Or someone who offended a race organiser so badly they forklifted his team truck out of the arena? Robert, Bobby or Bob Seals is obviously all of these things and more.
Words As told to Hannah & Chipps Photography Singletrack
I have heard of Bob (or Robert, or Bobby) Seals, often in a context that makes me somewhat glad I’m only meeting him over a video call. Much of his reputation is of hard partying at a level I don’t think I’ve got the stamina for. For Chipps, our chat is a reunion of sorts – he’s met Bob Seals a couple of times, back in those party years. He first met him in 1995 at the first single speed (or One Speed as Bob calls it) worlds, where Chipps was one of the 16 racers.
Bob Seals: Right. That’s the one I put on at Big Bear. I still have the logo. Do you remember? [The UCI was] running the real world championships at the time.
Chipps: Yes, and you weren’t allowed to call anything in cycling ‘World’ Championships!
Bob: Right… because it’s not sanctioned through us and blah blah. I did an acronym. w h i r l e d … for ‘wasted hairy insanely retro league of enlightened degenerates’. The WHIRLED Champs.
We cover friends and acquaintances in common before Bob embarks on his first story. He is a willing teller of stories, and as we talk I get the feeling he’s flicking through an internal filing cabinet, deciding which tale to tell next. He starts somewhere in the middle, where the crazy really got ramped up.
Bob: Fiskars Gerber bought Cool Tool and of all the things to do, they came up to our ranch, which really was very funky, up and out of Chico (California). We had a meeting with all the lawyers, the head accountant and the CEO and there was a pig that weighed 300 pounds walking through the house. A chicken came in and laid its egg in a filing cabinet every day, while these guys were there, and they were just like ‘How did you do this, the two of you, out of this place?’ And so I tell them a story. And then we make the deal and they say ‘We’re going to draw up a contract, but we want to ask you one more thing.’ Can you imagine asking me this? ‘We want to pay you to go on the NORBA national tour one more time and be as crazy as you possibly can.’
Crazy took many forms, many involving states of undress. There were a lot of bodily fluids and solids. This particular tour of crazy wound up with a police escort from the Nationals in Mammoth.
Bob: …I was riding naked through the expo, and they didn’t like that and I got a police escort to the county line. It took two forklifts to get the bus out because I had big race trucks on each side, Specialized and KHS, and we’re in the middle, drinking beer… dancing girls… just raising hell. It was a protest… We paid a lot of money to park in those expos and the promoter built a cyclone fence around the expo and was charging people to get in. I go ‘screw that.’ I said ‘We’re gonna blow this thing wide open!’ So anyway, it wound up the next morning after the big party… I don’t even know what else we did but there were a couple of sheriffs, two or three Highway Patrol, armed park rangers… all ran me down the next morning to tell me I had to leave. ‘That’s going to be interesting. You got to tear down your cyclone fence and get a couple of forklifts because I’m three inches away from KHS and a foot away from Specialized on the other side. And how you’re going to get a 40-foot US school bus out of there?’
Chipps: And you were special enough they made the effort for you.
Bob: Well, they did it, they wanted me out so bad. Yeah. They actually did it. I think it’s hilarious.
But let’s back up, to the dawn of the Cool Tool that had led to this sponsored craziness. This was mountain biking’s first multi-tool.
Bob: Did you hear the story of the birth of Cool Tool? I don’t know if I ever told it… we were riding all the trails, many of which I built around Bidwell Park up out of Chico, and I was hosting a few just wild and crazy races up on our acreage out of Chico. And we had great turnouts. We’d have over a hundred contestants. We had miles of singletrack… kegs of beer, bands playing naked, you name it… at the end of one of these races… somebody would sweep the trails… I’d hold the stuff up and say ‘Whose is this’ and most of it was reclaimed. There was this red under-the-seat bag left, that weighed over two pounds because eventually I put it on a scale. And I didn’t look inside it, but nobody claimed it. I sat it on my desk in my house, and it sat there until the winter after that summer. I had a mobile welding business; I didn’t have any jobs lined up and I sit at my desk one day and I looked over at that red bag and I go ‘What the hell is in that?’ I dumped it on my desk, out poured a set of Allens, a crescent wrench with a six-inch handle, a chain breaker, a couple of different screwdrivers with handles and shafts. And I ploughed through it all… and I go ‘This is ridiculous…’ Nobody’s claimed this thing in six months… I picked it all up, went to my shop, and got out a mini grinder. Started cutting everything off of every tool that had no function… I had no intentions of making a product. None. Zero. I was converting this guy’s junk into a tool that I could carry with me when I mountain biked. And so I chopped up the Allens, welded one size on one end and one size on the other end, blah blah blah. Made the whole thing. Put it in… I think in an old inner tube under my seat.
We’d be riding, somebody would break something and say ‘Anybody got this…’ I go ‘I got it!’ and I’d pass it up the line… and they go ‘That’s cool, Bob.’ That happened three or four times. Then guys started paying me, brought me the tools to chop up and make them one of those. And so that was the birth of Cool Tool… A few months later I go ‘Maybe I should make a product here.’ So I went to a local patent guy and did several patents on it. We had patents for the crescent wrench and I had the IUD (Internal Utilitarian Device) they went in your seatpost. It was a chain breaker, a screwdriver and 10mm wrench. They never sold. I don’t know why to this day. They’d be perfect to what bikes have evolved into now…
So that’s how it started and then it’s a whole ’nother story of how we found a factory…
Every time you use a multitool, you owe a little something to Bob Seals for that first Cool Tool. But that’s not the end of his contribution to mountain biking.
Bob: We weren’t making bikes yet, that hadn’t happened yet, and we were being sponsored by Brent Trimble, you remember? The fibreglass bike? He sponsored my team the very first year of Cool Tool. So I knew early on that we didn’t have a lot of money and the way I was going to promote it was being a little crazy… I’m going to have a race team and that’s how we’re going to do it. I’m not going to buy ads in magazines… so we kept going to these races. These were kind of local NorCal races… we made our way to some of the Nationals events. Every time we went to a race, I had a Trimble fully geared up and every time we went to a race somebody robbed a pedal, a shifter, or a brake lever, or they needed some cables. I’d go to the van. There was my bike. But this was missing and I couldn’t race and I go ‘This shit has to stop!’
So we went to the very first Sea Otter… we have a booth there for Cool Tool and everybody’s going to race. And I signed up in the Masters with my Trimble… The evening before, everybody’s out pre-riding the course and stuff… The back of the van had a big bike rack across the back, and there’s my bike… and the whole headset was out and the handlebars just hanging down with the cables holding it. Somebody needed a headset. Again! I had a friend with me who didn’t even ride. His name was Marty. I said ‘Marty get in the van!’ We went down into Monterey, which is close by, and I said ‘There’s a Toys ‘R’ Us, go in there. They got bicycles.’ We went in Toys ‘R’ Us. They had a clunker one-speed Schwinn with fenders… the seat said ‘super soft awe’ on it. I bought a pink basket… the thing weighed about 80lbs with all the stuff on it. Took it back to the motel room to get the toolbox. Now the team was coming in. We’re all 15 of us in one room in a hotel because that was our budget. ‘What’s going on?’ ‘Take everything off this bike… everything! Strip it down to just pedals and kick-back brake and away we go. And I also went and bought a Speedo. I don’t even know why, I just said ‘I’m gonna race in the Speedo. This is it!’ I said ‘Now I got a bike none of you guys are gonna mess with!’ That was the idea.
So I went out the next day. At that time I was still a very good runner. I’m the guy that beat off the Sheriff’s posse in a 20-mile race. In the ’70s, that’s a whole other story – ‘Man versus Beast.’ Yeah, that Sheriff’s posse on a horse and this long-haired hippie beat him. And so I was still that kind of guy. And the course was really hilly and rolly, it just goes straight up. And then down. And then straight up and down. I won the race in my class because I could outrun everybody on their bikes going up these steep roller coaster inclines. There wasn’t a lot of flat where they could outpace me. And then everybody went just kind of nuts. ‘Woah, Bobby, like he won on the funky bike!’
I went to a couple more races. The bottom bracket on those stock bikes is about seven inches off the ground and it’s got a one-piece crank and you can’t put a good set of forks on. I go ‘What if?’ I have my welding shop, that’s always where I made stuff and I was a welder, and so I said ‘We need to change this bike, so it’ll take a good set of forks. And take a good set of cranks. And so the chainstays are the right length… with adjustable dropouts, the works.’ So I went down to a bike shop, Pullins Cyclery in Chico. I said ‘Hey, you got any old junk mountain bikes?’ He goes back to something in the dumpster. He reappears with whatever there was. Probably a first-year Bridgestone mountain bike frame. I took it home… we put the cruiser in a vice in my shop by the bottom bracket. There’s no jig, right? That hadn’t happened yet. To keep somewhat of some kind of geometry then, what I did was, I chopped out the downtube of the Bridgestone and brazed in the curved Schwinn one. Then I chopped out the straight top tube of the Bridgestone because the bottom tube kind of held it together and I put the curved tube of the Schwinn. Brazed them in, put the ‘beauty’ tubes on that go all the way down, brazed them in. Then I have some Ritchey forks, now I can take a beautiful one-inch headset. All the components could now be high-tech. And I had a high bottom bracket.
And what happened? I couldn’t keep my team off the bike. They loved it. Everywhere I went they’d be on my bike, bunny jumping, pre-riding the courses, going on the downhills. I could never get my freaking bike again. So I got so pissed off I thought ‘I’m gonna build bikes.’ So I bought a cheap jig, and that was the birth of Retrotec.
The next chapter
The first Sea Otter was in 1991. Calibrating and plotting the timeline a little, he was already racing Masters by then, and had already invented the Cool Tool – and then followed it up with the launch of Retrotec, a bike company that continues today under the stewardship of Curtis Inglis. That might be enough inventing for one lifetime, but Bob wasn’t done. Isn’t done, even now, at the age of nearly 80. Having already invented the first stainless steel bottle – the ‘Klean Kanteen’ – in 2004, as a response to seeing how wasteful plastic bottles are, he’s recently created a further development of that. ‘Beverage Safe’, his latest venture, adds a mirror finish to the inside of a stainless steel bottle, preventing it from reacting with the contents. If you’ve ever found that your drink tastes a little metallic in a stainless steel bottle, Robert (as he tends to call himself these days) thinks this is the answer. He’s reviving a little of the madness marketing of the past.
Bob: Water bottles have evolved… they’re not water bottles anymore. They’re like beverage containers and anything acid is pulling out these undesirable metals. It reacts with the acid and you’re tasting the outgassing basically… it’s all pretty interesting. There’s a video up (on the Beverage Safe website) and it’s hilarious. I’m the Metal Wizard. We’re going to do a whole series and I wear a wizard hat, in a butterfly jacket and it’s informative but crazy funny. We’re gonna do the whole spiel like that.
You might think that with a few successful inventions under your belt and a nice property in Santa Cruz, California, it would be time to put your feet up and enjoy the fruits of your work – or perhaps resume partying hard until you burn out. But Bob – or Bobby, or Robert – is a serial re-inventor. The Madonna of the bike world, perhaps. Or maybe more of a polymath, like da Vinci. Retrotec, Cool Tool and Klean Kanteen are just some of the strings to his bow. He also spent time building solar-powered sound systems (the sale of one of which helped fund the first Klean Kanteens), plays in bands, makes art, teaches young people welding skills, and helps run a nonprofit dedicated to connecting young people with nature. It’s the latter things that really bring him joy. I wonder if all these elements are phases of the life of Bob Seals, or all connected.
Bob: They’re all me and I have to go clear back as a child. I can’t even remember when my dad first put the acetylene torch in my hand. We didn’t have all this high-tech like my shop now – MIG welders and plasma cutters and all that stuff. My nonprofit [Mother Nature’s temple.org] is what I’m really into… there’s a lot of art on there and I’m passionate about that. And up to half of this new company is going to go to that nonprofit… We have boats; we take kids out on the ocean to see whales and they come here and camp. That’s the only salvation is bringing kids into nature. I teach them welding and art as well when they’re here. So it’s fun and it’s educational. All of those things that you mentioned are me and I think at this point in my life, I really enjoy teaching and sharing my skills and teaching young people the value of having basic fundamental skills, be that metalworking, carpentry, mechanics because that stuff is just disappearing.
Bob: I’m just starting to book for spring and summer… they do archery, hike, camp and most of them go into the workshop in small groups and you cut out a starfish or a seahorse with a plasma cutter and then we have fun because that’s how I teach… And I love doing that. I just finished a lecture at the university here in Santa Cruz on the way I approach 3D forming – cold forming – and make all my whales and otters and stuff… I really like teaching; it’s a time in my life where I want to share my skills that I learned from my father, pass those on. I’m very serious about that.
It seems like a far cry from all the wildness of the early ’90s, yet at the same time, it’s all connected. Robert has come full circle, from childhood learning from his father to passing skills on to the youth in Santa Cruz. It’s here, in the Californian hippie surf town, that Robert feels like everything in his life has really come together.
Bob: It’s like this place never stopped. It’s like there’s still a lot of hippies running around. It’s just we got older, there are grey-haired ponytails walking up and down the street, a man’s playing a guitar with a rabbit on his head. Pacific Avenue is just weird as hell… The music scene is real strong. I get to play [music] all the time. I play surf and Hawaiian music now. And the art scene is… I’ve never done so much art, and my art sells for the first time in my life. I’m back to my old hippie music, a lot of protest music… [In the past] I would wind up in a lot of venues trying to survive. You had to play in bars and I was playing this protest hippie music with my rock band. And we played a few places that… they’re throwing beer bottles at you. And because you’re in a place called the Ace of Diamonds Country and Western Bar in downtown Portland and you’re playing hippie music protesting the Vietnam War… it’s in the wrong environment. When I lived here, my music started to change… and my art started to change, into this whole marine theme. And now I write all my own music… and I go out and play for the tourists. I avoid organised venues. I don’t play in bars. I’ll go play where the surfers are coming by and the tourists are there. For the first time in my life the art and the music – it only took almost 80 years – but they’re all the same theme. And it feels really good. Nobody’s throwing beer bottles anymore.
That’s why I am where I am with the ocean, then my nonprofit; got a boat to take kids out and we got deeper and deeper into that and we do camping on our land here. I made five miles of trails. I love building trails. I did it all my life. I used to work for the Forest Service before mountain biking and then built, I don’t know how many miles of trails around the Chico system, that still exist. I love building trails. It’s a passion. It’s like… you build a trail, it’s like something that’s shared forever. Music you play a song. It’s kind of gone. It’s like wind – it is wind, the voice is air. But a trail is a gift that you can give to mankind and it’s used over and over and over and over, in a very, for me, spiritual way.
It might be the high jinks and antics that have been the focus of what media attention Robert Seals has had over the years, but there’s clearly more depth and intelligence to him than the drunken fancy dress headlines might suggest. With such a storied lifetime, Robert Seals might just be the human equivalent of a trail, giving to the world, over and over.