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  • Another bike industry question-carbon tooling costs
  • RustyNissanPrairie
    Full Member

    Following on from the YT/Santa Cruz margins question!

    Does the cost of carbon fibre tooling have an effect on companies like Santa Cruz following the geometry market or is it more they watch and follow trends? Is the tooling that expensive per frame made that they have to run them till the end of a scheduled life before scrapping them or would they ditch them tomorrow and go with the latest trend in geometry if needed?

    Reason for the discussion was Cotic and their recent geometry changes to their range of bikes which would be easier to initiate (hello factory-can you cut the steel tubes longer and weld at a slacker angle sorta thing). Would people like Santa Cruz ditch an entire set of tools to follow a trend or would the costs be that prohibitive that they would run them out even if a market changed and left them behind a little?

    The above discussion ignores the marketing campaigns and the general size of a company and that a larger company would turn like an oil tanker compared to a one man in a shed type company but was focused on the cost of tooling Vs the ease and speed required to adapt steel or aluminium based production.

    We were quite pissed at this point so may have been discussing absolute crap!

    hols2
    Free Member

    Keep in mind that it takes months of work to get something from the drawing board to the showroom. You have to build prototypes, test them, refine them, tool up for production, test the production versions and refine if necessary, produce frames, assemble them, and then ship them. Demand is seasonal, so you will want your factory to be retooling when demand is low and then start production in time to have stock on hand for the peak season. A custom frame manufacturer can change things at will, but mass production is much less flexible.

    tdog
    Free Member

    It never ceases to amaze me the time that they somehow find to design and produce new looking models.

    across not only one brand of bike but countless.

    incredible really when you think about it

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    dovebiker
    Full Member

    Product development cycles are in the region of 2 years – the cost of tooling is fairly minor when you consider the overall costs e.g. engineering time, development and test, production and marketing. You can make development tooling in resin, production will be alloy – costs in the region of tens of thousands per tool. Once in production, carbon manufacture is a semi-skilled job for lay-up etc whereas welding is a skilled job – so the cost of labour offsets the cheaper materials. Chinese manufacturers are now off-shoring work to places like Vietnam because labour costs are cheaper – factory-gate prices for carbon frames are pretty low.

    mikewsmith
    Free Member

    When they were talking about the 29r V10 SC said they had some carbon manufacturing in house now to speed up prototyping, Intense went for the weld it in Alu version to speed up dev.

    Unless it’s not selling then they will probably keep making them.

    When you look at dev they all seem to have the models in rotation so once you launch model A, model B is in tweak or replace so the life of any of them isn’t that long.

    Despite there being the magic numbers for those that like that sort of thing the majority of riders are fairly happy with conservative changes and be happy that a good bike is a good bike.

    andyl
    Free Member

    My understanding is that steel is the easiest to re-jig as you say,

    Aluminium depends on the level of hydroforming I guess but like steel tubes there are standard sections of hydroformed tubes available – eg a big US high end brand might have the same down tube as a small UK producer as they both buy it off the shelf from the same supplier. They will have the specs for the tubes and use it in their CAD and FEA models.

    Carbon is very different as it needs re-tooling. Over the years there has been various concepts around reconfigurable carbon tooling. The easiest is ones that use bonded metal junctions eg Robot Bike Co with their 3D printed titanium lugs (everything about their frames is very special though, it’s just very easy for them to do a custom frame). You can also get carbon junctions which do need tooling but that is easier than retooling for a whole frame.

    While tooling does take development when you have a basic process that works it should be straightforward to make next years model with some minor changes without too much stress but they still need testing and there is always risk. If you change the frame layout a lot you will definitely have more work to do.

    The tooling itself is generally metal closed moulds with an internal bladder, the tooling will have a finite life depending on the material and there is a trade off with tool life vs machining cost when considering the material you want to use as well as thermal performance (CTE, max temp etc). Sometimes you can re-machine the tool – eg if they decide a down tubes needs to be larger or fit internal sections to reduce cross sections but changing angles etc is not going to be easy. Depending on how modular your tools are you could design sections to be swapped out too but doing so might cost more than just making a whole new much simpler tool.

    Ideally your tooling would last as long as you need, it will be depreciated off through the runs. You may of course need to budget for multiple tools due to life, production volume etc (as well as the obvious different sizes).

    You can of course use quick and dirty cheap tooling initially and then build full production tooling. The former will need more labour and probably more consumables as well as a high risk of going wrong.

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