Aug 28, 2020
14 days of quarantine – complete!
As you can imagine, Dave, our Technical Lead, was itching to leave his quarantine hotel room and make his way to the factory in Taichung.
Dave checked out of the quarantine hotel last Sunday and headed straight out in 38 degree heat to travel to Taichung, where he’ll be spending the rest of his trip.
Over the past few days, he’s been preparing everything for final assembly…
FIRST STOP: THE FRAME FACTORY
What you may not realise is that there are multiple factories involved in making the FLIT-16. Parts are moved between the factories in Taichung as they as transformed from raw materials to finished bikes.
Dave’s first visit: the frame factory, where he was able to capture some of the final main frames as they finshed welding and were sent off for heat treatment.
NEXT: THE WAREHOUSE
The warehouse is where our frame parts, along with components from other suppliers, are sent when they’re ready to be assembled into finished bikes (which happens in a separate assembly factory).
Because the factories are so busy at the moment, there is an unusually long waiting time. To speed things up, we are first putting some parts together in the warehouse into ‘sub-assemblies’. These will then be sent to the assembly factory to be put together into finished bikes, and prepared for shipping – Dave explains below.
NEXT STOP: THE PAINT FACTORY
You’ll have noticed in the video above that the frame parts are still in their shiny silver state.
Today, Dave headed over to the paint factory, where the colourful part happens!
Here, he was making sure that everything was prepared for painting (which begins next week)… so we’ll be sharing footage with you as Maya Blue, Blaze Orange and Marengo Grey finished parts emerge, ready for final assembly.
AND FINALLY… ASSEMBLY
After three years spent developing the FLIT-16, it’s going to be a special moment seeing our first full fleet assembled into finished bikes.
We’re very excited to take you behind the scenes as it happens!
DELIVERY
We know that you’re all eagerly anticipating the arrival of your ebike, which is why we’re working hard to finalise a delivery date.
We’re on track for your bikes to be on the boat in September. However, as we’re sure you are aware, international shipping is very unpredictable at the moment.
We’re doing what we can to get the shortest shipping time possible, and Dave’s priority is to finalise the details with our shipping provider.
We will let you know as soon as we have a date.
As always, if you have any questions about our latest update, please feel free to get in touch!
