We all heard of this man, one of the geniuses behind the good ol rider
owned company TSI but not much to know about him other then his radd
nickname Thomcat. Travis Recently moved over to work beside him for TSI,
we were shooting the shit and travis told me how much crazy stuff he
see's and heres from thomcat. I couldnt just keep it for myself so i had
to ask travis to get a interview for us and kill er. So here it is! The
thomcat interview with geust interviewer Travis House.
When the big skateboarding boom in the 70’s… 1976 I
was 12 years old and I just got back to school in September and every kid had a
skateboard, those banana boards… all plastic banana boards like GT’s,
Continental’s… Things like that. A friend of mine had a Skateboarder Magazine
on the bus and I never seen anything like that before. I looked though the
magazine and saw Bonsai’s and G&S Fiber Flex… Some of the early boards in
the middle of the development that industry. I saw things like Bennett and
Tracker Trucks… Gull wings, you know. I subscribed to Skateboarder Magazine
right away…me and my brother would get that Skateboarder Magazine and my
brother was a better skater than I was…
You were the underdog?
Yeah I mean he was older than I was and he also had
more balls. We built a quarterpipe in the front yard and that’s all we did I
mean, I went to school and than I skated. I’d skate to school sometimes… We
lived on a mountain and I would sit down on my board and pretty much Luge down
the hill, 40mph using my army boots to slow me down.
Skateboarder magazine, it was all about Dogtown and
the development of the skateboard and everything back then because it wasn’t
all wooden skateboards… It was fiberglass, it was aluminum, it was plastic, it
was wood… It was all those elements and nobody really knew what the skateboard
was going to turn into… And it all turned into plywood pretty much (laughing) you know as a standard. Which
is basically what I’m trying to do with scooters, I’m trying to come up with
the standard that everything is based off of. No gimmicks or any kind of
“special features” other than what the standard is set to be, like the early
skateboards trying to guess what it’s going to be.
And now you ride a
scooter/what do you get from riding?
In the beginning what I got from it was fear,
straight fear (laughing) I got a
scooter and the first thing I did was fall down… I went over a hip and I fell
down, broke my thumb, injured my knee and the next day we were at CooterCon 7 limping
around, I couldn’t even walk… I mean after a while I started to develop more
confidence and KC would make me ride every day and I developed a rider
mentality that I think is necessary to run a scooter company. We would go to
different parks all the time, every day we would ride something. In the winter
we would snow scooter, we would always ride. Now I’m getting older and it’s not
as easy to do…
But you’re still progressing!
You’re still learning shit!
I can still do it but riding 3 different parks
in a day… I don’t know. One day me and KC ended up in Tualatin skatepark, it’s
like a baby park. I had the time of my life there though. Some kid comes up to
me and asks me if he could ride my scoter and I say “sure can I ride your
skateboard?” and I got on his skateboard and I realized right then and there
that it was just awful. It felt terrible to me, I mean after all these years
I’ve worshiped skateboarding… it wasn’t what it was suppose to be… I mean it’s
not like flowing the parks on a scooter. It really isn’t. You can flow the
parks way faster from bowl to bowl, you’re flying… I don’t know, I get high on
it, I really do. (laughter) Some days
are better than others, someday I’m not feeling it and I have no balls…
And some days you do the
back D!
(laugher)
yeah some days I feel like I’m 30 again!
I’ve heard you say this
before in describing TSI, what does it mean to have “respect” for the rider?
Well it’s about the “Razor” image you
know. Razor, Micro over in Europe… The image that scooters were just a toy. I
mean it just like skateboards. Skateboard were just a toy when I first started
skating, all plastic, all toys. The image evolved to a real hardcore sport, it
wasn’t a toy anymore. For scooters I wanted to portray the same thing. The
seriousness that this is real, this is a sport, this is to be taken seriously.
The exact opposite of a little kid riding around the park being called “gay”
and I’ve heard it. You ride by them and they yell out “Scooters are gay!” I
don’t know if it’s to get attention or whatever but it was my objective to
change that opinion. You can only do that with high quality products that
people like and that’s what I wanted to make, the scooters the professionals
would ride. I mean KC was a pro at the time going to Planet X games in
Australia, Japan and all over the US and there was competitions like CooterCon
going on and it was time to make a product that Professionals would ride.
How far does it go when
you say Handmade? I know the FlowMasters had to be.
Yeah right here in my garage, on my table saw. I
made thousands of them, all hand cut right here and I sent them over to a guy
who welds in his garage and he would weld them as fast as I would cut ‘em. We
had my whole family in the garage… My daughter, my wife, my daughters friends
were all drilling holes and putting in pop nuts and sanding decks. I mean it
was all hand made, everything was… Well minus the headtube itself obviously,
got that done at a local machine shop
You make profit at that
point, did you pay yourself?
(laughter) no I was just trying to build capital, the
first year was great. I was basically turning around the money and putting it
in to doing larger production runs, I was trying to satisfy the need for an
aftermarket deck… but the second year after all the competition came on the
market sales started to drop and by the end of the second years our sales
didn’t exist anymore and we had to do something to save the company. The
FlowMaster wasn’t it anymore, the Scepter bar wasn’t taking off and Thom Cat
forks never really was a big seller.
So in comes the flight
deck?
Yeah it was the deck that KC had designed back in the
very beginning, before I ever met him he has this design for a really curvy
deck, I mean it had concave on the top, concave on the side, concave on the
bottom and it was like there wasn’t one straight line involved with the deck…
That was something I had to hand draw with paper and pencil and work out all
the angles and everything. I mean
it drove my Engineer crazy when he was trying to design the CAD program for the
extrusion because it wasn’t something you would normally do on a CAD program…
But we did, we designed that crazy wild deck and I know I was trying to
guessimate what the weight was and I kinda wanted it to be a little lighter
than the FlowMaster but not too light and that was my big mistake back then, I
made it too thick and when it come out I was kinda disappointed
The walls too thick?
Yeah the walls, I made it all 1/8th” thick ‘cause that’s what
the flowmaster was 1/8th Aluminum tubing with an 1/8th
deck plate so the Flight was 1/8th also. I did it although I didn’t
have the money at the time to invest into the Flight, we were pretty much flat
broke at the time. I went to the machine shop that I was going to for the
headtubes because I was going to do a couple of Thom Cat forks and I wanted to
see if he had any parts left over. He asked how business was and I told him it
really sucked at the time and he wanted to know what the problem was and I told
him it was competition, everyone has extruded decks now and our product wasn’t
desirable anymore and we needed an extrusion die which I told him costs $5000.
He volunteered to loan us the $5000 but he would
need to hold the title to our vehicles. So I signed over the TSI van and KC
signed over his Nissan 240 and we borrowed the 5 grand for the flight deck. I
have to just say this and I haven’t said to anyone before but I guess I just
wanna go on record on saying I’m really sorry about the Flight deck. Sometimes
things turn out and sometimes things don’t… I mean it was enough to keep us
going but it wasn’t what I wanted it to be and anyone who bought it I mean I’m
sorry how heavy it was or if the concave was too much… I take things personally
when it comes to a product being released and I’m not happy with it. I had to
pay back that $5000 and it ended up with me being $2500 in the hole. I had used
the credit I had with our extrusion guys to establish a Net30 program where
basically they’ll run the extrusions and I have 30 days to pay them back and
that’s when I ordered the Threshold Extrusion in hopes the Threshold would pay
off the Flight deck and that’s what ended up happening.
That’s what a lot of people don’t know about TSI, we
never really did make any money, I mean not until just recently have we been
able to actually start growing because of the hardships we had. We don’t have a
bank behind us, We’ve never got a business loan, I don’t have credit cards… I
did it all with my own money and my own hands cause I knew there was no way I
was gonna give up.
Lets talk about the
creation of the Threshold cause it’s no secret that it’s got a foothold now
Well when we were doing the FlowMaster Hep sent me a
drawing that he did in SketchUp, it was basically a FlowMaster but with wide
dropouts, wide rails. Rectangles instead of squares and I thought to myself
“well that’s gonna be too heavy” ya know? The FlowMaster was too heavy already.
Besides that I didn’t have a way to do it at the time, I didn’t have a way to
make that deck. I always thought about that drawing and I was into the Flight
deck like 2 months when I realized there was no way I could make money with
that deck so I drew two rectangles with concave and I said, that’s it. That’s
what I want to go get. I got an estimate on it but through advise from other
people they said ‘you’ve got to really give the flight a chance’ ya know? You
gotta try to make that money back on the excursion to pay back that loan. So we
ran the flight deck for a full year and I knew after that I was done.
I needed to get the Threshold released. I flew Hep Greg out to SD6 and
he came back up Oregon after the competition and we sat down and I showed him
the design and we said okay ‘lets do it.’ This is what we have to do, this is
the only thing that we can do to save the company. If we didn’t we would have
been out of business. It was January when I made the 5” wide threshold
Prototype in my garage and I sent that over to Hep and he finally got to test
it out, he thought it was amazing and it was something we really needed to do
so I ordered the excursion for the Thresholds.
4.5” wide right?
Yeah because 4.5 was the most common
size at the time. When we were doing the FlowMasters the 4.5 deck plate was the
most common, plus 5” on a fully boxed extrusion can scrape on turns with 110mm
wheels. It might be fine with 125mm though. It would still probably be too
heavy, a 5” Thresh would probably be a 4lb deck and there isn’t much you can do
to lighten it up without reducing the strength.
So when we finally got it released we used the T plates from our
original FlowMasters. I had a box of those still left over, we used the
headtubes from the Flight decks and some leftover downtube material so all I
needed to do was to replace the deck extrusion itself and use the old stock
from the garage. I was so excited leading up to the Threshold because it was
actually something I wanted to ride. I stepped on a district deck and I liked
the way it felt, I mean to be honest. It had a good feel to it… but I wanted to
come up with something just a little better than the district.
.
Alright Matt, we’ll
finish it off here with the big one, whats your dream for TSI?
Growth. One word right now is growth. When your building a company you
have to build a strong foundation before you can build up. That’s what I like
to tell myself is what I’ve been doing this whole time is building a foundation
and now I can start growing up. A company is people, it’s all about finding the
right people, right now, growing at the right pace and making the right
decisions to sustain our own company like a family. That’s it, I wanna make
enough to sustain us to supply the sport but I’m not out to take over the
world. I don’t want 100% of all the sales ya know? I just want to have the best
product that I can and people can realized that TSI is the company that
provides that. This sport could blow up and become huge or it can die away but
either way I want to have a sustainable company that will survive it because I
am here to do this for the rest of my life… Or til I retire… In which case
you’ll have to take over (laughter).
Which brings me to giving back to
riders, I know that means a lot to you
That’s the part that hurts me the most, because I
can’t take care of my riders like the big companies can. I can’t send people to
France, I can’t send people to Australia ya know? I don’t have the funding, I
don’t have the volume or money it takes to take care of riders like the big
companies can and that’s what saddens me is that I can’t do that. It’s really a
goal with all this because I feel so guilty, really guilty about running this
company and sponsoring riders and kinda stringing them along and say in’ “hey
follow us we’re gonna get somewhere” and ya know, it’s taken a long time just
to get where we’re at right now but now the threshold is taking off, I’m able
to take care of riders a little more. I offered to fly guys to CooterCon and
I’m hoping by the SD comp I can fly some riders out there and get our team
together. I mean that’s my ultimate goal when we talk about growing the
company, It’s growing the company enough to where I can take care of my riders
because they have been reppin’ us for so long. They deserve it, they’ve been
working their ass off
Blood Sweat and Tears…
Yeah exactly and it’s not like their getting a pay cheque.
for saying the things that they say like the other companies, ya know? They
just believe in what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. That’s all! I donno,
sometimes I feel like there's not enough companies doing what we’re doing. It’s
about taking care of the riders, employees, people who have believed in me this
whole time, that’s what keeps me going because I owe it to ‘em, I owe it to
everybody… and then after everybody’s taken care of , then I’m gonna take care
of myself.
Thanks Matt
-Travis House
