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Current lead times: Unpainted bikes: 7 weeks. Painted bikes: 9 weeks.

U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix

Tag: Just-in-Time

The Big Ideas – The 5 Elements of Customization

The Big Ideas, as a series, is about this whole bike building project we embarked on in 1997 and the foundational ideas that make what we do possible. The first installment was about Single-Piece Flow (SPF). The second installment was about Just-in-Time manufacturing (JIT).

This week we explore the 5 Elements of Customization.

It is all well and good to tell someone you can build their ultimate bike, but if they don’t have the vocabulary to tell you what that bike should look like, you’re no closer to that bike existing than you were before you met them. The 5 Elements give riders a useful way to think about customization.

The 5 Elements are the language of Single-Piece Flow on the bike shop floor.

Ryan working in SolidWorks

1) Fit & Geometry – Think of the upper half of the bike, the points where you touch the bike, saddle height, set back, reach, bar height. These are the angles and centimeters that address different riders’ size, proportions, age, style and health (injuries). We address these, at the shop, through a bike fitting, and then follow up with body measurements that allow us to consider that fit in terms of your new frame’s geometry.

2) Handling and Performance – Think of the lower half of the bike. This is where we fine tune for rider weight, comfort, handling and riding conditions. Bottom bracket drop, fork rake, chainstay length, all these things affect how the bike feels. If you tell us you want your bike to be stable or quick handling, we can produce those characteristics through fine tuning of handling and performance features.

titanium lugs and carbon tubes

3) Tubing & Materials – We work in steel, titanium, and Ti/carbon mix. We start from the beginning when designing a bike for you, choosing a material that speaks to the kind of riding you do, then we go further, picking a tube set, in that material(s), that matches your specific preferences for stiffness and/or comfort, then we go further still, refining your rider-specific tube set through tube butting processes to accomplish the most personalized on-bike experience available from any custom builder, anywhere.

4) Options – Brake types, rack and fender mounts, decal colors and placement, paint, cable-routing, couplers, chain or belt drive component optimization, the configurations and permutations are close to infinite. This is how you dial the bike in. This is how you meet ALL your goals for your new bike, without compromise.

paint and decal choices

5)The Future – This is how we make our design as durable as our materials. We plan for the rider’s aspirations. Racing? Touring? Commuting? How does the bike age with the rider’s body? Is it adaptable? How do we keep the bike useful for the rest of the rider’s life?

You don’t have to be a bike designer to collaborate with us on the design of your new bike. You just need to be able to express your preferences in simple terms and let us map them onto the 5 Elements of Customization.

The Big Ideas – Just-In-Time Manufacturing

The Big Ideas, as a series, is about this whole bike building project we embarked on in 1997 and the foundational ideas that make what we do possible. The first installment was about Single-Piece Flow (SPF).

This week we’ll talk about Just-in-Time manufacturing (JIT).

JIT is the idea that our own manufacturing inventory only arrives exactly when we need it to, that a rider ordering a bike actually triggers the process of the bike’s component parts beginning to move toward the bike builder’s work space. This is the method that supports the madness of Single-Piece Flow, and the myriad complications of building fully custom bikes on a short timeline.

We make it work by doing a lot of forecasting. After crafting 30,000 bikes, one-at-a-time, by-hand, we have a lot of data to crunch, so we do our best to see the future, the materials we’ll need to build the bikes our riders will want.

Another thing we do is keep all of our materials in their rawest form. All of our titanium tube stock, for example, is straight-gauge. If we need to build a butted frame, we butt the raw tubes to suit the order. We achieve three things this way. First, we reduce the amount of inventory we need to keep on hand. Second, we maintain control over the refinement of the materials, so that we’re refining them for their specific rider, rather than just turning out generic tubesets. And third, we maintain a tighter control over the quality of our materials. Smaller lots of tubing are easier to inspect. The best materials make the best bikes. This turns out to be a big deal.

Less inventory also narrows our  focus on process and adds a sense of urgency to every build. To succeed with JIT, we need to clearly define each design before we start to build. We need to solve the design challenges in advance, because our system depends on having a very low amount of material waste. Our ability to build the next bike literally depends on getting the bike in front of us right. That’s good pressure, and it produces great bikes.

Streamlining processes and tightening inventory makes US, craft manufacturing possible. This is how you can get a fully-custom, US-made bike for the same price as a high-end, Asian-made production bike (where labor and materials costs are a fraction of our costs). In a world filled with batch-made products, Just-in-Time manufacturing as a way to bring craft-made bikes to market is, for us, a very big idea.