… or is the Gyro going carbon?
Do Orange need to produce a carbon bike to survive. I have a couple of pals bought Specialised full carbon bike for less than my Five. There are probably a load more carbon bikes for cheaper too. Orange have cut down the amount of different bikes they make now. I love Orange bikes and the brand (my mate used to weld up the bikes when it all started), I just hope, well I don’t know…

I can see the Gyro being discontinued and possibly replaced by something more XC focused for a 29er. A carbon one would make sense for XC weight weenies as well.

Do a little research and find out the cost of design, mould prep, and tooling costs for Carbon and the lead in times (2 years?), then test prototypes, it can only be done overseas (labour costs), therefore loses one of Oranges unique selling points ie made in UK.
Then after all that which wheel size 26, 27.5 or 29 you going to pick as one mould size doesn’t fit all?
Not that easy

Maybe they will bring in a 27.5 bike so they hit all niches?

I know from a reliable source that orange have no plans to produce carbon bikes any time soon

Whether Orange keep the Gtro and/or Five29 in their lineup presumably depends on how well they sell. They are a business after all.

Whether there continues to be a market for a folded Aluminium single pivot bike, only time will tell, but I don’t think Orange could change even if they wanted to. That’s what they make and what they’ll continue to make until people stop buying them I reckon.

Always curious about that… Orange sometimes seem like they’re stuck with the folded-alu designs, the Blood was brilliant but didn’t seem to appeal to either Orange fans or non-fans frinstance. But on the other hand, most Oranges sold are taiwanese hardtails.

(I’d love to see the profit/loss for the company, I’d not be surprised if they’re essentially an importer with a sideline in making frames)

There’s no reason at all that you couldn’t produce carbon frames in the UK. But, while we have skilled carbon workers what we don’t really have is carbon production line workers, so it’d make more sense to go to where the skill already exists. Not a wages cost thing (it’s a small part of the overall price), just practicality.

There is a piece about Orange in this month’s WMB, which contains a couple of interesting “facts”

1. The Five and Alpine are apparently their “most successful current bikes” although it doesn’t say how they are defining success.

2. The frames are actually made by a local company (P. Bairstow Ltd) and Orange only accounts for about a quarter of that companies work. So, Orange don’t really make any bikes, they buy them in, some from the Far East and some from a local company.

I thought that P. Bairstow Ltd pressed the sheet for them? Can’t see the gyro being phased out they have sold loads including one to me that i had to wait 2 months for.

P Bairstow is the Wade family business, Steve and his dad retired as directors a couple of years ago and now it’s run by the nephew. So no, they don’t just buy in bikes from some local company.

Why would a 140mm travel bike with a 66.6 degree HA that builds up to almost 33lb signal the demise of a 110mm bike with a 69 degree HA bike that builds up to 30lb?

The Alpine didn’t signal the demise of the Five? Trek’s Fuel EX wasn’t killed off by the Remedy, The Enduro and Stumpjumber coexist just fine…

Thanks, that wasn’t really clear from the WMB article which stated that “today a quarter of Bairstow’s work comes from Orange and its demand for folded and welded sheet aluminium famed”, which makes it sound as though they make the frames for Orange.

Foooook

I have just ordered a non carbon (alumnium) 110mm travel 29er full suspension bike (not Orange Gyro)

Will this be my demise… 🙁

the technology isn’t quite there to make filing cabinets out of carbon fibre

Do Orange need to produce a carbon bike to survive. I have a couple of pals bought Specialised full carbon bike for less than my Five.

Presumably if they cannot make a aluminium bike for less than a carbon bike then the cost of there carbon bikes would be stratospheric.

Interesting.

I’d love to see a carbon Five, but it’s not going to happen.

Giro and Five29 are suitably different to coexist in theory but given that the vast majority of Orange FS bikes are sold to clueless punters *cough* I’m not sure there’s actually enough between them for both bikes to survive in the long term.3

But on the other hand, most Oranges sold are taiwanese hardtails.

If that’s the case why have they dropped most of the shipped in bikes over the last year or two (P7, R8, G series, etc) but increased the amount of hand built ones? Maybe profit margin I guess if you’re right.

Looking forward to testing the five29 with a view to changing my current 5. Can’t see why they’d drop the Gyro unless it doesn’t sell. I was suprised to see the Blood and ST4 fall by the wayside although you don’t see many about so that tells it’s own story.

Shame about the ST4 as it was a real ripper, didn’t make sense alongside the Five to most punters I guess, but in riding it did.

Gyro isn’t an ST4 replacement officially, but the ST4 essentially ‘made way’ for the Gyro.

WTF is it with Carbon anyway – is anyone producing carbon framed Moto GP/Superbikes…..for that matter is anyone producing carbon framed Motorcross bikes? Nooooo,

The problem is not that CF is too stiff, but that the feedback it provides differs so completely from conventional aluminium. The property most often quoted is hysteresis, which in this instance, refers to the rate at which absorbed energy is returned. One of the benefits of CF is the fact that it can be made to damp vibration, its hysteresis meaning that the energy absorbed from an input (such as striking a bump) is released in a much more controlled fashion. Tap an aluminium tube and it rings like a bell; tap a CF tube and it emits a dull thud.

This is a property that Ducati had hoped would help them solve the problem of chatter (or extreme vibration over bumps) but it had an unintended side effect. Just as with the original attempts at using carbon fiber for chassis, starting with the Cagiva back in 1990, the damping also removes some of the feel from the front end. When used to build swingarms – as Aprilia had been doing for their 250cc racers for several years – this damping helps remove unwanted vibration, but at the front of the bike, that vibration also contains valuable information. As Guy Coulon once explained to me on the subject of unconventional front suspension systems, what is required of a racing motorcycle is that the information from the tarmac should pass directly into the rider’s brain with as little interference or loss of data as possible. Any system which removes or alters that information means that the rider has to learn to interpret the feedback almost from scratch. All of the experience gained in his many years of racing is of little value in interpreting what he is feeling.

This is what caused the Cagiva to fail back in the early 1990s. The riders, brought up on a generation of steel and aluminium chassis, simply could not understand the feedback they were receiving from the machine. And this seems to be at least one part of the problem with the Ducati Desmosedici: the carbon fiber subframe connecting the front forks to the front of the engine may be damping the vibrations too much, reducing the amount of information traveling from the front tire up into the rider’s brain. Alternatively, it may be returning too much information, providing more feedback than most riders are used to receiving. Filtering out this new (and not necessarily useful) information may be what is confusing the riders about the feel.

As we said earlier, the underlying problem of the Ducati is the difficulty the riders have in getting the front tire up to temperature. The stiffness of the CF chassis may not be the problem here, but the feedback from the chassis could make it harder for the riders to push the tire hard enough to start working.

So is the choice of carbon fiber the main cause of Ducati’s problems? Looking at the theoretical benefits of the material it is hard to say that it is. There could be an issue where the feel of a CF chassis is sufficiently different to traditional aluminium that it is hard for riders with many years’ experience of metal frames to interpret and understand. But with Rossi known more for his adaptability than for his rigid adherence to a single style, this does not seem like an insurmountable candidate. So let us examine the next candidate.

http://www.motomatters.com/analysis/2011/08/08/the_trouble_with_the_ducati_desmosedici_.html

It’s funny that a review of the new V10 mentioned a lack of front end feel.

Basically I don’r get what all this fuss is about carbon, people seem to look at a perfectly good bike and then ask for it in carbon assuming it will be much better. Maybe someone can enlighten me.