Manufacturing update: painting

Sep 5, 2020

Here comes the colour! This week, we’ve been painting your ebike frames.

Dave, our Technical Lead, has been busy travelling between the frame, paint, and assembly factories in Taiwan, preparing everything for the final steps of manufacturing. Because we want to show you as much of what’s going on behind the scenes as possible while there’s so much activity, we’ll be updating you weekly for the remainder of Dave’s trip.

FROM THE FRAME FACTORY TO THE PAINT FACTORY

Dave’s week began back at the frame factory, where he was quality checking each main frame before they were sent to the paint factory to become Blaze Orange, Maya Blue or Marengo Grey parts!

Before we paint anything, the parts have to be masked to make sure that paint doesn’t get into unwanted areas.

The painting process involves three stages: first a phosphate primer is applied, to ensure that the paint sticks to the metal. Next, the colour is applied and baked, and then the FLIT logo decal is carefully placed onto the frame before the final top coat is applied. This top coat contains a matting agent which gives the frames their distinctive finish.

NEXT: ASSEMBLY

There are a few different assembly stages before we have finished ebikes. Whilst frame parts are being painted, we’ll be assembling other parts like the wheels, batteries and clamp handles in preparation.

Once painting is complete, the frame parts will be sent to the warehouse, where we will assemble them into the ‘sub-assemblies’ that we mentioned in last week’s update.

From there, they’ll go to the assembly factory to be put together into complete ebikes, and for the final round of quality control before shipping.

TIMELINES

We’re really happy with the frames coming out of the factory and are excited to put them together. However, we do have some bad news about one of our components that will hold up shipping.

This week, the company which supplies a number of our electrical components sent us motor controllers (the “brains” of the electrical system) with cables of the wrong length.

We have a couple of ways to fix this problem, and Dave is talking to suppliers in Taiwan to figure out which solution will be fastest without affecting quality. However, given the long lead times on ebike components, we estimate that we’ll need about a month to receive the required parts, install them on hundreds of ebikes, and then book a new shipping date from Taiwan.

We anticipate that delivery of your ebike will be late October.

The absolute priority for our team right now is to bring this timeline down without compromising on the quality of the product that you receive.

We sincerely apologise for the delay, especially so close to delivery. Getting people on bikes that they enjoy riding is what motivates us as a team, so delays like this frustrate us immensely.

We will update you on progress with this fix next week.

If you have any questions or concerns about your order please feel free to get in touch.

Shopping Basket
Scroll to Top