Singletrack

Final holes are drilled, post moulding.
Hand masked and painted frames are a thing of beauty.
Baking hot.
Down at the ovens, we got to see ‘our’ frame put into its stillhot
mould, hooked up to the air lines for the bladders and,
with the top lifted into place by two burly guys, sent off to sit
sandwiched between two massive heated plates for an hour
and a half.
Once the frame comes out of the mould, it then needs
the flash trimming off, and the cable ports and pivots drilling
and machining. Kili Flyers are made in two pieces, so a
further process is needed to socket the two halves together
before more carbon wrapping and another small bake to
permanently join the two halves. Now I’ve seen this join, I
still can’t find it on a painted frame – such is the smoothness
of the finished join and paint job.
We got to see some finished frames, ready on racks. They
just happened to be 2017 race season Mysts for the Madison/
Saracen downhill team. The next time we’d see them would be
at a World Cup race, travelling at speed.
Taiwan travels.
Our journey wasn’t complete; we needed to follow the Kili
and Ariel frames to Taiwan, where they get painted and
assembled into complete bikes and shipped to the UK.
Arriving in Taiwan by plane, we took a bullet train
to Taichung, a city with huge bike connections. A short
drive out of the bright, bustling city and we were into the
Taiwanese countryside. With a lot of countryside set aside
for rice paddies, growing right up to the steep-sided, wooded
mountains, it was a lot more rural than I was expecting.
Every now and again there’d be a small village and a few
low factories. My guides filled me in – there was the place
to get great steel hardtails made, over there was the factory
that makes handlebars for this company and that company.
It seemed refreshingly more like the collection of small
workshops you might see in northern Italy than the urban
Asian Bladerunner bustle I was expecting.
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