Exploring the Hidden Bike Empire of Portugal

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This is Triangles, a massive building that houses an automated factory that has the capacity to manufacture 250,000 bicycles a year. Not too far away is Miranda, another nondescript building that manufactures crank sets for ebikes all over Europe. This is ROI. And as it turns out, a lot of the same machinery that produces sinks can also be used to make rims and wheels. Lots of them. ROI, according to some industry websites, supplies 3 million rims and 400,000 wheels per year. All of these companies are within a half to an hour’s drive from each other. And amazingly, this isn’t in Asia, but it’s in Portugal in an area known as Bike Valley. So, we traveled to Portugal to tour interesting bike shops and visit bike builders from small to establish. But what we didn’t realize was that Portugal was one of the largest manufacturers of bikes in the EU. But why? Why was there such a cluster of bike manufacturing? And how did it all begin? Before we learned the modern story from the bike innovation center, we took a detour to go back in time and visit Vadmiro. Vadmiro is the oldest working frame builder in Portugal. He was born in 1946 in the small town of Ovar. He joined the cycling federation to race in 1965 and was a contemporary of Eddie Marks. There’s still a picture from his racing days hanging in the showroom. After a few seasons, Valmera turned from racing to start a bike building business instead. We visited him at his showroom and workshop in Ovar, not too far from where he was born, just south of Porto. Over his almost 50-year career, he has built with steel, aluminum, and even carbon. He he was completely self-taught, even teaching himself how to make molds and layer carbon fiber. And this was like long before YouTube. His machine shop looks like the stuff of dreams. At the height of his career, he was building bikes for Portugal’s most elite cycling teams, producing up to 400 frames a month. In the 80s, with globalization, bike manufacturing started to move over to Asia, and things slowed down. These days, most of his work is in carbon repairs. There are stacks and stacks of boxes of carbon bikes to fix, but out of all the materials he has worked with, you still find steel the best. What’s his favorite bike that he’s ever built? All of them. I got that. This was an interesting peak into Portugal’s bike building past, which now looks very different from its future. Hey there everybody. Sorry for the interruption, but we are trying to get to the maid show in Portland, and we need your help. It’s an expensive trip and because of that, we weren’t originally planning on going, but we want to be there, film it, bring the content to you guys. So, so if you want to help us out, please consider joining us on Patreon or picking up some merch. Uh, it’ll help pay for the flights and lodging and food and just make it so that we don’t go into the red uh just to film made. Okay, back to the video. To see where it was heading, we went to the Bike Innovation Center, a government-f funed project to give the businesses and factories in Portugal an advantage by giving them the tools to study and innovate in bicycle manufacturing to shift from just supplying frames and parts to actually developing new technologies and techniques. This this area here has a long heritage in terms of uh bike production. It starts from bikes, motorbikes. 20 25 years ago it changed to uh bicycles because the industry changes the the the market changes a little bit also. So we are seeing a lot of production that came from Asia in terms of motorbikes. So the so the industry needs to adapt through new products. The knowhow already exists because someone that can and know how to develop a bike motor bike can also develop a bicycle. So it’s complicated. Yeah. Here is the center of everything we like to call it this way. You are seeing that is a very large space. Yeah. Still a lot of empty spaces here but all of the R&D will be done here. Yeah. So mainly the the center has four areas of fativity materials uh industrial processes and production technologies. Yeah. And product development. We have an area for uh prototyping. We prototype to study the process and to optimize the processes. We have conventional systems here like CNC machining. Yeah. Touring, welding, different types of welding. For instance, we have here the system that is the updated version of the system that is used in triangles. Okay. The company that welds uh the frames in a totally automatic process. We have the updated version here. So, MIG TIG a mag and looking to the future to additive fabrication that give us the possibility to print very large parts. So, with 300 mm plus 4 400 mm on height so it’s a large part. Two main advantages in terms of sustainability because it uses less gas to produce. So, we don’t need to energize the chamber each time that we change the parts. So it’s very important for the industry because we are validating technology that can be used that should be used to the industry. So we are anticipating that and the other the other point is you can synize directly uh 6061 alloy that is the most important part for the bike industry. So when you uh do all the testing on the processes the idea is to do the research share the resources and then the companies the the brands you work with like take it back to their factories or they they don’t manufacture the stuff here. This is we don’t we will not manufacture anything. wheel prototype. Okay. And we can validate the process. So it’s kind of like a creative sandbox. Yes. Yes. For uh if I develop a new frame, yeah, I can develop the frame, modulate, simulate, and choose a material. Then I can weld it. Yeah. I can even do the heat treatment process, right? To validate the process. So in the end, I will give the complete set of instructions to industrializate the product. So we’ll give the full solution, but the next step is in the industry. Okay. We have a very advanced system. We can we can enter here. Here we have a same microscope. Oh wow. A very high-end one that is very useful to evaluate topography and morphology of samples. We are seeing morphology of the sample. For instance, if I’m looking to a fracture area, yeah, we can identify the origin of that fracture. But in this system, we have also a super spectrometer. we can have a very high resolution to in the terms of deteical determination and we can also do uh study and and determine very light elements like lithium normally it’s not possible in a system like this in Portugal we don’t have anything similar to this so it’s very useful when you have thinking in batteries for the bikes we can also use this to study the crystalallography of materials is what we are seeing here right taking in consider ation the the the boundaries of the the grounds and the dimension and the orientation we can confirm if the heat treatment for instance is what should be done or not. So to to know if the mechanical properties of the product of the material will be aligned to what should be needed in the end it will give an idea about if it is okay or not correct but not give us enough information to understand what is the problem if I if I do some hardness measurements yeah yeah I see a very low hardness in that point okay this is not okay according to what we need but the origin only when we are looking to here we can know okay so that’s more like a trial error. Yeah, that’s like past fail. But this tells you the reason why. Yes. And the reason why that we install here is a a tomographic system. So a CT scan system, right, that you can you can use to for instance to understand the porosity of a sample, the damination in the carbon fiber frame or something like that. So it will be a large system and it is interesting because we can have in the same system resolution and power. So I can have a very low resolution to see a fiber in a carbon fiber frame to measure it to understand the directions and so on. But I can also uh identify for instance some pocity in a mold. So for that I need a very high power. So we we will have two X-ray sources in the same system. For that is the material characterization area. Yeah. So we have from metalographic microscope. So hardness measurement systems, tensil test systems, portable and more fixed with more resolution to have some results. Dim needs to work with labs in Turkey or in Greece and so on. So in terms of rich regulation and was detective, right? We will be able to perform the full set of tests here. This is the area of the accredititation accredited tests. So from the wheel to the frame to the fed to the cranks, we can test everything from fatigue, impact or static tests, right? So we can do it all with temperature precondition or during the test or or before the first areas that we have because this knowledge came from Aimoto, the Portuguese association. Yeah. That has this test area for more than 30 years ago. In the other pavilion that will be will be passed in the in the corner. Yeah. through three other systems that are very interesting for for the bike industry really. A vibration system to perform some vibration tests. Uh an independent vibration in the front or in the back of the bike with temperature control. It’s very important to study phenomen like related with electrical systems but also in terms of comfort of the rider. It’s very interesting for that to be installed in the other pavilion. Uh other system that is very important kicking in safety is an area for crash test. Okay. We will have an area that give us the possibility to to perform tests until 45 km per hour. Okay. So speed packs we need also to have high speeded cameras, lighting control and so on. Will be on the other side. Last one but not less important. Yeah. Uh it will be a wind tunnel. Wind tunnel real scale. Yeah. with all the needed features to to be solution for our industry. We posed to measure drag the flow about the shape of the products. We will use it for bikes for bike developments but also to study for instance stability of cargo bikes. So the dimension of the the tunnel will be large enough to do that but in a short time will be fully operational in terms of R&D for bikes. Right. So how does how does something like this get funded? Is it like a like a country initiative to be a leader in bicycling or is it just through membership of the the first point the first point is to keep up the momentum of being the biggest bike exporter in Europe. Okay. After co the government create some mobilizing agendas. One of the areas that uh should be supported is the bike industry because the results are clear for all. We adimote the consortium creates a mobilizing agenda call it M2R mobilizing agenda for the two wheel industry that puts together almost 50 entities from uh associations to companies to the academy to the monips for instance putting all together you’re creating a clear ecosystem develop new products right and to to help the industry to to to change from the OEM conventional profile pile of work to ODM with some capacity to develop in the middle of this ecosystem. It makes totally sense to have a center like this to support the industry because part of the industry is able to do it alone but the other need to have a center to have the the equipments and to have know to do it. The people that work here are they just independent technicians that you guys hire or are they people from the brand when they do the the testing in this moment? Yeah, cuz we are still capacitating everything are all our technicians. Yeah, but in the future will be this share of knowledge with the technicians from the companies working here together with our technicians or in some cases alone uh studying their own processes and products. In our week in Portugal, we saw a bit of everything from new builders, builders that had moved from other countries to start over, builders testing out the idea of microactories and smallcale automation, and and finally, what could be the future of bike manufacturing in Europe. Despite all that, there was so much more to see.