There seem to be lots of problems in the bicycle industry. Let’s remember that it isn’t run like aerospace. Safety and tolerances aren’t the priority - low cost is.
Smaller bike brands spec a frame and a manufacturer in China builds it. A small brand is going to depend on the manufacturer’s expertise. At every step of the way, things are done at minimal cost. Product managers would balk at an extra $25 of manufacturing cost to make the BB perfectly straight every time because through the supply chain that $25 keeps getting marked up and then they can’t hit the final price target.
Big brands like Giant who own their factories generally do better. Small brands like Look and Time who make their own frames also do better. Colnago went the extra mile and designed an expensive BB386 bottom bracket with screw in metal cups. You can press in cups and mostly be problem free.
There have also been fundamental design problems - like designing a carbon shell BB such that bearings are meant to be pressed in directly. It’s no wonder people wear out the bores in their carbon BBs and then end up with a ruined frame unless they can fit an expensive and heavy Hambini style BB to save their frame. Ideas like this were just stupid to begin with.
And why did we go down the press fit road? Because product managers thought they could save some money per frame by not having to thread BB shells. they tried to tell us that it was so they could design wider bottom brackets but really it was a cost saving measure. It backfired and the install problems, creaks, and solutions were punted down stream on to shops and consumers. They put it on us to buy $100-200 bottom bracket solutions and then add back 100 grams to our preciously “light weight” frames. Press fit can work fine on a metal frame.
So we are finally getting threads again because at least some makers like Trek and Specialized were tired of dealing with the complaints and after sale problems. It will be interesting to see if lower tier brands follow along.
A thread about BB standards? My eyes can’t gloss over anymore, a dissertation on what’s wrong with the bike industry is expected and deserved, and it’s all been said a million times.
But T47? 30mm cranks, no adapters, threaded, no fuss BS tolerance issues. I installed my first T47 on my Hakka MX. I can’t come up with one drawback. I think it’s here to stay, even superior to BSA if 30mm cranks are your thing.
That’s my contribution. I would gravitate towards any bike with that standard. Thank you Chris King.
The idea that safety and tolerances are sacrificed for low cost. Keeping costs low are important for any product that is manufactured, regardless of the industry. But tolerances, let alone safety, being sacrificed for it? Never in my experience.
Almost every company relies on the expertise of the manufacturer, albeit to different levels. But you see that from small companies to large companies, and vice versa. As for the imaginary $25 to make a “BB perfectly straight”, it depends on the frame. $25 added to the cost of an S-Works frame is a helluva lot different than $25 added to the cost of an Allez. But if an added cost in manufacturing is truly required, then there are plenty of other options to deal with the added cost…anything form revising the spec to adjusting the final price. Again, most product managers worth their salt understand the real world implications of going with crappy tolerances. That is not to say trade-offs aren’t made…but to portray them as the standard way of doing business is misleading, IMO.
The bike biz was using threaded shells for many years before pressfit came along…and no one was really complaining about the costs involved. Therefore, the implication that PF was all about saving costs is not accurate. There ARE merits to the PF concept…but unfortunately, as time has shown, there are drawbacks to it, as well. Sometimes these things are not borne out for a period of time (Biopace, anyone?) Over time, the necessary tolerances for PF have shown to be exceedingly difficult to adhere to…this is one of those things that may not show up until there is a sufficient amount of product in the marketplace. And even then, there is a tendency to think you can “fix” it…driven by inertia, stubbornness, component agreements, etc. Sometimes you are successful…other times not, which only prolongs the cycle until things are rectified.
Some of the “big brands” that own their own manufacturing (or perhaps more accurately, are partially owned by a factory) are the ones struggling the most with the PF issue. Specialized (owned 49% by Merida) is a prime culprit in this.
At the end of the day, PF was a concept that sounded good on paper, but once executed on a significantly large scale, failed in the marketplace. There isn’t anything sinister behind it, no desire to lower manufacturing costs vs. safety or tolerances.
I was not implying that bikes aren’t safe just that bicycle carbon fiber manufacturing isn’t at the level of aerospace. But it does really seem that they sacrifice quality or tolerances to meet price points. And I don’t expect them to get to the level of aerospace because we can’t afford $20K frames.
If you have insider knowledge, please tell us why the Hambini or Luescher videos on youtube reveal so much substandard manufacturing? Bicycles seem to be made to a good enough standard or whatever they can get away with.
How is it ever cool that bottom bracket bores on two sides of a carbon bottom bracket are ever not in alignment or that bores aren’t perfectly round? BB faces are not square to each other. Lately we’ve seen people have been having disk brake problems because disk brake mounts are not faced from factories. The way I see it, it’s just another instance of saving $10 of labor on every frame by not facing the mounts. Good enough for a lot of customers but a big PITA for a few customers and we’ll let the shop sort it out.
I’m cautious of Hambini, my guess is he gets the worst of the worst frames that no one else can fix, and there is bound to be a few frames that slip QC occasionally.
On an unrelated note, this podcast me be of interest to you guys. James Huang talks to the guy who runs the Factor frame factory in Taiwan, and he dishes a lot of info, including other companies, because his factory makes stuff for many companies. Including discussions about how companies could pay a little more to get better tolerances, but chose not to due to cost. https://cyclingtips.com/2020/03/nerd-alert-podcast-peek-behind-the-carbon-curtain/
I don’t think anyone was arguing safety. But not sticking to tolerances leads to higher wear and other maintenance problems. Plus, it seems quite evident that tolerances are a huge problem. (On my road bike’s carbon frame, too.) If the industry moves to press-fit BBs, it better has the chops to do it right.
I’m confused with where the problem is
-qa allows too many frames through as they should be more selective? This sounds like something the aerospace industry can deal with but sounds like this would drive up the cost of bikes by having many frames that have to get trashed
Or
-the way they lay out the carbon to make a frame is bad?
Carbon seems inherently much harder then metals to be precise. A metal can be faced easily by having the part have a bit extra material knowing it will be ground down to the exact shape and size. You can’t just grind down carbon
I am under the impression that you actually don’t have to choose either or, and that with refined production methods you can meet the tolerances for a given price. What is more, if you produce a feature that requires a certain tight tolerance, but don’t check for it, this is a failure of good engineering.
The lay up seems to play a role, especially when it is geared towards lightness as you then have less material, which can change shape more easily during the production process.
Also many metal parts don’t adhere to tolerances well (see e. g. Hambini’s complaints about SRAM cranks).
I think you design a manufacturing process where 99.9% of bottom brackets are square with the bores the correct size in the first place. The manufacturing should be so hit and miss that frames need to be rejected.
Unlike most of the industry, Colnago came up with their threadfit system (bonded in sleeve, threaded, and replaceable cups) in order to provide a precise press fit system. IMO, this is an example of a higher level of design, engineering, and a higher manufacturing cost. Unfortunately, this is the exception, not the rule in the bicycle industry.
A good bit I remember from my six sigma training days (ugh, shoot me, what a joke this was in a software shop) is you can’t inspect-in quality. Ie, yes, you can inspect every part, but if that’s your full qa-game-plan, you’ve lost. You’ll have so much money lost in bad parts and retooling you’ll be too tempted to just stop inspecting. Better to figure out your manufacturing process so that in-spec parts are the norm and bad parts are rare. This of course assumes you care about quality.
But the safety part was literally the first line in AJ’s post…
And it is not a question of “stickingi to tolerances”. That makes it sound like the y are inspecting frames that are questionable and saying “meh, good enough…let it go.”
There are times when you believe you can hold tolerances, but it is not until after product is in the field that you find out it didn’t meet tolerances. Moreover, you can hit tolerances but later come to realize that those tolerances weren’t sufficient
It is worth remembering that not every PF BB is an issue…so through development, pre-production and even production, you can think everything is OK based on testing. It is when large quantities of product get in the field that issues arise.
Jeez…I can’t believe I am sitting here sounding like I am defending PF. I’m not…I think it sucks. I went through two first-gen Venge frames that creaked mercilessly. But the descriptions and motivations described above were simply wrong, based on my experience.
It is also worth noting that the variances in tolerances around a PF system cannot be so minute that what seems to pass QA upon manufacturing (and riders just fine for a given period of time) only becomes apparent later.
Again, sometimes it takes time and real world experience to expose these things.
Perhaps, but at least I don’t think it is a safety issue.
It seems to me that not enough inspecting is done in the first place. Measuring whether a BB is within tolerances is something that should be detectable by automated testing.
(A buddy of mine interned at Nicolai when we were students. They make bespoke mountain bike aluminum frames and have a reputation for high quality. The stories I heard made me wonder how professional manufacturing really is. On the other hand, the bikes held up. Nicolai frames aren’t known for being light, they’re known for progressive geometry and being sturdy.)
I still think this is unacceptable, doubly so when you have bought an expensive bike. You can say that some problems only crop up afterwards, true. But creaking BBs are extremely hard to diagnose (even good bike shops don’t necessarily have the necessary equipment). And even if you do, customers will likely lose that battle, unless it is a really egregious case.
For instance, I bought my bike second-hand from someone who bought it online. Japanese distributors are particularly anal about bikes and equipment being bought through official channels, so I’d have to turn to the online retailer. (Even though my road bike is only three, four years old, one of the BB bearings is already shot. And I spend most of my time indoors, so grit and grime are less of an issue.)
I think you are misinterpreting my posts and my intent…I am not saying PF BB’s are good or that there aren’t problems.
My point was simply that the motivations behind their development was not lower cost or cheaper frames, nor were the tolerance issues that were revealed shrugged off or ignored early on.
I am only trying to provide some context on how a design can move from concept to production, even though it may ultimately be a bad idea. Bad intentions are rarely at the heart of it, especially in the bike business. Those product guys are bike geeks at their core…they don’t want to make crappy products. They want to make cool bike that people want to buy…and they want to ride those same bikes. Unfortunately, sometimes bad designs sometimes take awhile to reveal themselves…and even when they do, the first course of action is often “OK, how do we fix this?” vs. scrapping everything.
Thanks for that podcast link - it made good listening and also helped with the Factor backstory (I was one of those who wondered where they had suddenly appeared from!).
I’d have loved more specifics on which firms make their own bikes (over and above Giant and Factor) and especially which firms might have rejected proposed improvements on a cost basis.
Same here. After reading all of the issues with the top manufacturers, my next one will likely be from a manufacturer that has tight control over their production. Ideally in house.
There really aren’t any…as noted above, Merida has a 49% ownership stake in Specialized, but beyond that, most factories are contract work, producing frames for other brands / distributors.
We discussed that pod in a thread shortly after it came out…,I know Rob (and have bought frames from him) and he is one of the smartest guys in the biz. However, I think he simplified things a bit for the sake of brevity in the podcast.
