In the early nineties, when many downhillers were still doing without suspension, Wolfgang Ebersbach was already fully involved: "I had the very first Rockshox, serial number 70, a black part with pink stickers," he remembers. The problem: the oil leaked out after just two weeks. It wasn't until 1995, when downhill really took off, that the first usable fork arrived. This was the Rockshox "Boxxer". The rare piece cost 1,600 marks, and Ebersbach was a student. A circumstance that drove him into self-building. With parts from a moped fork, a handful of custom-made milled parts from the neighbourhood and a real pioneering spirit. His fork already had 15 centimetres of suspension travel when many of the competition still had to make do with less than half that.
A head start through technology, which he was happy to buy: "When I had about 20 orders together, I had the forks built. Others milled and turned them, but I assembled them. Just to be on the safe side." Engineering student Wolfgang Ebersbach's fork business grew steadily until, after producing around 200 forks, the end of his studies was in sight. It should also have been the end of his fork manufacturing business. But while others were increasingly grey-faced as they shuttled between coffee machines and photocopiers before their final exams, Wolfgang Ebersbach drew a bold line under the student phase of his life: he built the ultimate downhill fork, called the "Eberminator". Upside-down construction, thirty centimetres of suspension travel. A monster with enormous absorption capacity, built just to please its designer.
Nevertheless, deep inside the massive tubes, an ingenious part was waiting to be discovered. When Ebersbach took his prototype to the nearby workshop of chassis tinkerer Peter Denk, the idea and vision immediately came together to form a critical mass: "Eber came in with his self-built fork," recalls Denk. "He had a detail problem with the damping or something. One fork leg had a rotating wheel on top. I asked him what that was supposed to be? He said that the fork would otherwise be too long uphill - he didn't realise what a great invention he had!"
But Denk quickly convinced him of this. Because the "Drehrädle", which made Ebersbach's monster fork rideable uphill, was the best suspension travel adjustment to date: each turn screwed the spring stop more or less deep into the steel springs. The adjustment wheel turned a chopper into a rideable bike. And it not only shortened the fork, but also allowed it to be shortened to the same suspension height as the set height. "That was of course endlessly tempting for the manufacturers," recalls Wolfgang Ebersbach, "especially as it is so simple that it doesn't require a single part other than a regulator for the spring preload." Nevertheless, it took another three years before the "Drehrädle" from Baden became the US "U-Turn".
It took Ebersbach and Denk three years to realise that ever longer suspension travel had to be tamed somehow. Three years in which Denk and Ebersbach secured internationally watertight patents for around 200,000 euros. By the time the three years were up, they had reached an agreement with Rockshox regarding the licence. In 2001, the first "Psylo" forks with "Eberminator" genes came onto the market. They were the first of many, many thousands of height-adjustable steel spring forks. And every time a U-Turn fork went over the counter somewhere in the world and filled the dealer's till, a little money trickled down to the Freiburg area.
However, none of the parties involved are able to elicit exact quantities or even amounts. Is the annual licence fee enough for a new bike, a car or even a house? No comment - except for this: "We're all still working," says Wolfgang Ebersbach. However, the 37-year-old is no longer in the bike business. As a salaried electrical engineer, he tests electronic components. His mountain bikes are back to what they were in his student days: intensively used sports and fun equipment.
