This week we’re celebrating because Dave’s visa to go to Taiwan for his manufacturing inspection trip on August 7th has been granted!
It’s currently extremely difficult to enter Taiwan, which continues to see very low numbers of COVID-19 cases. One of the only ways to do so is a special visa for manufacturing inspection.
The final two steps are that Dave must return a negative COVID-19 test within 3 days of his flight, and then must quarantine in a Taipei hotel for two weeks upon arrival.
After this is done, we expect Dave to be able to head to the factory on August 24th to oversee final assembly, and the loading of your ebikes onto the ship for ocean freight to the UK.
We’re looking forward to keeping you updated on his trip.
WELDING THE FRONT FORKS
Since our last update, welding of the frame parts has continued… as you can imagine there’s lots of welding to do! This week, we began welding the front forks. Below are some photos from the factory.
PREPARING FOR THE NEXT STAGES
So what are the next stages of manufacture? Once the front forks have been welded, we’ll begin welding the front frames and steerer. Then welding is complete!
The next stage will be heat treatment of all of the welded parts. Heat treatment brings the metal back to its solid solution state, relaxing internal stresses that develop during welding.
We then perform an alignment process while the parts are in a softer state to make sure that everything is properly aligned before sending the parts back to the oven for a final round of heat treatment that makes them much stronger.
At the moment, we are testing the alignment rig before we begin the process.
After the first round of heat treatment and alignment, a second round of heat treatment is performed.
Then we’re ready to start preparing the parts for painting and assembly!
As always, if you have any questions about our latest update, please feel free to get in touch!
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