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Our frames are built in a frame shop in Taichung, Taiwan. The identity of the frame shop is a carefully guarded secret. Their client list is a who's who of steel bicycle frames. The owner of the shop is a close friend of lug mogul Alan Kerr, owner of Long Shen. Long Shen delivers to the frame shop nearly every day. Fresh frame components, still warm from the casting ovens, are moved quickly into production. Such ties are common in the Taiwanese bicycle industry. Large companies and small collaborate very closely. The size of a company doesn't matter. Quality is the name of the game. The tubing used in our frames is drawn by a company called ECO. ECO is the world's largest producer of tubing for bicycles. They make a lot of double butted steel tubing. ECO is a subsidiary of a larger company called Founderland. Founderland makes the machines that draw the tubes. In the past twenty years Founderland has refined those machines to the point where today they can literary produce tubes to -any - specification. We spec double butted tubes for our frames. Both ends of the tubes have a thick-walled section and a tapered section. We work with an engineer at the frame shop who takes our frame designs and translates them into tubing specifications, including a 'butt profile'. He looks, for example, at the top tube for a 58cm Model P and determines that it needs a thick section that's 37mm long and a tapered section that's 42mm long. Then he takes those numbers and sends them to ECO where they're used to program a machine that draws and butts the tubing. The result of this process is tubes that are drawn specifically for that model in that size. If we order five different sizes of a frame, the frame shop will spec five different tops tubes with five different butt profiles. And ECO will draw each one to spec. Call a custom framebuilder and ask him how he decides what the profile of a given butt should be. Then ask him how he accomplishes it. Custom builders take stock tubes from the tubing suppliers and trim them to make them right length. No other frame tubing producer in the world has process control that can match ECO's. It may look like ordinary steel tubing, but it's the product of a couple of decades of attention focused on making superb bicycle tubes. In the case of our Model P frames, after the tubes and stays are drawn they're sent to a heat treating shop where they're put through a process that increases their strength. Heat treated tubes can be spec'd with thinner walls to save a bit of weight. The fork blades that we use are not heat treated. Fork blades flex a lot in use and they're bent during construction, so they need to retain their ductility. Steel fork blades are never heat treated. That's why Reynolds still makes 531 fork blades and matches them to even their most exotic heat treated frame tubes and stays. Like the tubes and stays, ECO can control the wall thickness and butting of the fork blades very precisely as well. We use this precise control to our advantage by fussing over the fork blades. A lot. The blades of a fork are different from other tubes in a frameset. They don't connect to any other tubes. They're the only elements of a frameset that have a 'free range of motion'. The fork is therefore a natural shock absorber. We follow Goldilocks' rubric and tweak them until they're just right. If you're used to riding bikes with cantilever or V-brakes, you'll find our forks to be refreshingly supple. Forks with brazed-on brake mounts are usually built with thick walls that can resist brake mount failure. A fine point, to be sure, but one that you'll pay attention to if you spend a lot of time on a bike. When the tubes, stays and fork blades finally arrive at the frame shop, they're assembled and brazed using frame and fork components like lugs and dropouts that come exclusively from Long Shen. In the case of the Model P, we use Kirk Pacenti's head and seat lugs. After brazing, the frames and forks are aligned and then machined. The head tube is faced (squared) and sized for a headset. The bottom bracket shell is faced and the threads are chased. And the fork is machined for a crown race. We do this prep for a couple of reasons: so that the do-it-yourselfer doesn't have to -and- because modern bike shops don't have the tools to do it anyway. Then it's off to the paint shop where the frames are primed, painted, decaled and clear coated. Some of our frames are given a very high quality powder coating instead of paint. It costs a bit more, and it isn't as fancy, but it's durable and doesn't release a lot of toxic solvents into the atmosphere. Then it's into the box, into the global shipping system and after a quick stop at our warehouse, straight into your hands. We're constantly asked why our frames are 'cheap' compared to others. The answers are simple: We have a very short supply chain. We deal directly with the frame shop. And we do our own engineering and logistics, functions that most other companies pay an agency to handle. The result of all of this work and attention to detail is, in our humble opinion, the best bicycle frameset value of all time. Modern materials that are assembled using modern practices render frames and forks that simply could not have been produced until recently. If you think our frames cost too little then just send us the extra money and we'll find a good use for it. Otherwise, we suggest that you relax and let the good times roll. |