This lecture is on the subject of developing and manufacturing the Brompton T Line. This is a lightweight folding bicycle with a significant manufacturing input in Sheffield UK. The lecture was presented to The Sheffield Metallurgical and Engineering Association by Adam Cox of Brompton
So it is my pleasure to introduce Adam Cox who’s not just passionate about bicycles and cycling but comes from an engineering background um and is using Innovation to make the world a better place through two wheels but I do want to show of hands who’s traveled this evening on two wheels using their
Bicycle those are some good numbers thank you very much so Adam’s Journey with brumpton began not on the racetrack but in the world of high performance engineering he spent years honing his skills in Aerospace and the auto automotive Industries working on everything from jet engines through to goodness knows what other interesting
Technologies but there was something missing in that and he’s moved on and transitioned into the world of bicycles so the iconic folding bikes you can see that Adam’s brought to with him this evening but also some of our guests this evening have brought their bicycles um they are designing and
Streamlining the bike that you see with us and they’re looking at production processes while ensuring high quality standards and improving efficiencies in their processes so it’s no wonder that Adam’s here with us with his background in titanium and Material Science and Engineering to show us a little bit
About what’s going on at Brompton behind the scenes and hopefully give us a little bit of an insight into what they’re doing to improve and design sustainability into their new technology and tonight Adam is going to introd introduce us to the taline so please join me in giving him a warm welcome he
Will take questions at the end and we’ve got the zoom set up in case anybody joins us on the webinar as well so I’ll hand over to Adam thanks for the introduction I see a couple of faces I recognize but a lot I don’t uh yes um my name is Adam um I
Work at bompton Bic schols um and yeah I’m here to talk to you about these weird and worky bikes uh the factory that we’ve got in Sheffield and specifically this titanium bike um before I get into that just a little bit about me so I’m Midway from Sheffield
Myself um I spent um my uni years at the University of Sheffield um which is where the kind of connection to the SMA comes from um but outside of work in engineering um I used to play a lot of football but I’m getting into my mid-30s
Now and I can’t keep up with 18 year olds anymore so I’ve kind of taken a bit of a step back from that few more boring things like squash and a bit of golf every now and then um I waste all my money on travel uh last couple years
Went to the states macious for a friend’s holiday and my partner told me I have to put a picture of our dog because he’s cute and he’s only a few months old so um yeah that that’s a little bit about me um in terms of my career um I did a
Material Science and Engineering uh undergrad at the University of Sheffield and went on to do a engineering doctorate with the amrc and the university Sheffield uh partnered with saffan um so the engine and landing gear connection there um and that’s really where my kind of connection with the SMA
Came from so I was looking enough to be awarded a grant for a a conference talk I did in San Diego which is that pretty Swanky Hotel on the top left um so I was you know really massively grateful for that it really helped um you know pay
For the air fairs and the rooftop pool it’s quite nice um and yeah that uh did a couple of papers and talks at at that conference and I suppose this is nearly 12 years in the making of a bit of a payback for that for that grant that I
Was awarded um so when when Peter offered the invite to talk here tonight I thought it was a a good way of kind of putting back into the association um after my time at saffran uh working in the airospace industry I wanted to kind of work my way through the uh kind of
Manufacturing supply chain I suppose and get a little bit more experience uh working with people on the chop floor get involved in a assembly and start I suppose stepping away from from materials and and and pro and that part of the process stream um and I worked
With Caspa uh spent a bit of time in the Midlands down south uh looking enough spend a bit of time in the states and India as well uh with some of our sister factories and that was all around um automation of uh some of our Diesel and gas backup generator engine uh
Manufacturing processes um then the wonderful time of Co happened and I was really Keen to take another step and go on something different and I supposed to be a little bit more customer facing um again moving my way through that um kind of supply chain I guess um but with with
Co obviously uh a lot of companies kind of Clos the doors to recruitments and I kind of thought a lot of people hunkered down a little bit but one industry at the time that was booming was the basketball industry and I was approached for a role at Brompton and even though I’ve been
Trying to get as far away as possible as from Sheffield uh me and my partner thought it was best to kind of uh move back towards this area as we start think about families and things like that and I was approached for this job at brumpton and I was like cool great
Thanks no I’m not going to move to London um and my now boss said oh do you know Sheffield I was like yeah brumpton haven’t got place in Sheffield so that do so um I’ve been there for the last three years now um and yeah it’s been a completely different experience there
Space or or or Automotive style industry um so what the bompton do well obviously we make bikes um if my CEO was dialed in and watching it he’d tell me no we don’t we create Urban freedom for happier lives um which is the strategy of of the business which is essentially about
Getting people out of cars um getting them on two wheels um and enjoying their commutes and and using this as a tool rather than a recreational product um why does it matter well over the last kind of 50 60 70 years it’s still ongo at the moment there’s a a clear net
Migration in cities um why do people do it because they sold the of this is where the jobs are this is where the money is and what did they get in payment for that well they get stuffed into a car in a traffic jam like I was
Getting here or stuffed into a someone’s armpit and covered in air pollution um so there’s a a definite problem in the way that um society’s developed at the last 50 60 years in cities and um there’s a better way of doing that and this chap thought that this bike was the
Better way of doing that so in the early 1970s uh there’s a I don’t think it’s still around anymore brickton I think it was there’s like an old uh folding bike that Andrew went to look at uh came back to his dad at the time and was like oh
Did the off your job and he’s like no it’s crap I’m going to do it better and then he spent five years developing uh the Brompton close name um which is this weird and quirky little bike here um which if I can get that up it’s pretty easy to unfold
Unlock and Andrew thought it was and still is the most efficient form of Transport available this one specifically is what we call a pan apologist near ripped my own headphone off um so in 20 seconds or very badly as I just did you can fold and unfold your
Mode of transport and you can take it anywhere you take on a train on a bus maybe even on a plane um so this is Andrew Andrew Richie um we spent the first 10 years essentially in a shed in brenford um fettling with with his design of a
Three-fold four-fold structure of a bike um and actually what he spent the majority of the time which actually is still true today is designing the tools that make the bike rather than the bike itself and eventually he formed a a little business on bolo Lane uh one of our
Offices in the in our HQ is still called bolo and this CH here is Mark still works for the business today um and at this point they were making 60 bikes a month at the most one person at a time would make one B bike at a time
Everything was steel they were almost custom built for each customer but Andrew prided himself on always selling the bike at the same price to whoever it was whether a business an individual or whatever it was um eventually um they moved to kind of full serial production and the
Product really took off it was acknowledged by um the government at the time it received lots of Design Awards and that’s business started to to grow and develop and really what we’ve done over the last 40 years is we’ve not reinvented it we’ve not come out
With the hard tail soft tail this gadget that Gadget we’ve just iterated the design over those 40 years um and the reason we’ve done that is to meet what the customer needs what the what the community out there needs and the bompton solves a lot of those problems forers so one good
Example um in London a standard bike if you were to store it in a standard flat these numbers maybe a couple years out of date now it changes a lot um the bite would cost you about £75 per month in rent for the space in London so the real
Tangible cost to even just a normal bicycle so again having the opportunity to fold it down is a real real word solution to that problem and the other Advantage is um in London I don’t know about other cities around the world but in London the average lifespan of a bike is about two
Years um and it’s always because of theft um great thing about the bomed is you can fold it up you can put it in your boot like added with these or you can fold it and put it under your desk at work and as this uh good bit of
Marketing there it’s not my photo um good bit bit of marketing shows the real tangible benefit you can fit 42 bromton in the average car parking space and this is the team that has done that work over the last 40 years um some nice uh cheesy marketing shots again so around
Uh 2005 uh we moved from uh essentially into a train line in brenford uh with about 40 people to a a big grave box uh in greenford um where we’ve got about 500 people today the the business has got about 800 900 people globally and we
Do everything from design so like uh my colleague Steve and the phot up there um all the way through to assembly and in greenford they do steel brazing so a lot of the frame all the frames you see on this bike are all steel braced um all the tooling all the
Equipment everything’s designed in house assembled built we own all the drawings all the IP all the tech tech behind that um and yeah to be honest a lot of the design development has come from uh the tooling and the equipment we use more than the the bike
Itself and who is a typical bompton customer well we’ve got two in here so apologies if uh I’m way off The Mark with this um but they are typically mid-40s professionals managers directors that kind of level and the value quality and they want to buy a product that they
Can use as a as a tool as a a mode of transport not just a recreational at all um and what we get with um kind of vocal customer base so we always get really really clear uh feedback um and one area that’s growing a lot even though um
Historically the product is you know 60inch Wheels not the greatest thing for for gravel and and downhills but what we’ve seen over the last five or six years is a lot lot more customers are actually using it both for leisure so we need to look at how our product needs to
Adapt to meet that change in need people have seen the use in it getting on their on their train going to work going home but also like a lot of us do on a Thursday or Friday at brumpton cycle down to the pub have one or two pants
And then carefully carefully cycle home um so the the the use of the product is growing as well as the um application in terms of where they’re commuting so the brumpton designed for London a lot of flat roads a lot of straight roads a lot of short distances from tube stations to offices
If you go to other parts of the world where our product is starting to sell more and more that’s not the case you know there’s a lot more steps down to the subway there’s a lot longer distances the road and the paths may not be as suitable as as what we’re what
We’re used to so we’re having to adapt the design to meet what those customers really really need but like I said we’ve got a very uh corporate bzw Vibrant Community so a lot of consumer products my my background being not in initially in consumer products um it’s quite surprising how uh
Normally if you you know if you book a a hotel room and you look at the reviews there’ll be loads of good reviews with no descriptions and then a few bad reviews with really really detailed descriptions what we’re really looky to have is a really an active community of
Owners um you can go on on social media Reddit for example um and see long long change of people talking about how they’ve modified the product what they want to use it for and genuinely we have taken even in the three years I’ve worked at grpt at least three design
Changes from what somebody has said on Reddit because they come up with great ideas they come up with great Solutions we interact with those we get a load of feedback um from our stores and our Distributors um and really this is the key thing we’ve got 50,000 what we would
Call Active uh an active customer database so people who we can email call speak to meet talk to in stores that can give us information and feedback on the product and it’s not just the consumer and recently we’ve just been awarded Bop uh status which is a commitment of the
Business not to just put profit first but also put people and Planet first um a lot of the cycle industry leans on the fact that the product is green it doesn’t emit uh F fumes into the air if you cycle a bike your footprint is relatively low
But we can’t rest on that if we’re a industry leader as bromton is the largest uh bike manufacturer in the UK we’ve also got to lead in terms of how we care for the entire supply chain and our footprint over the world um obviously we’ve got a a long history
In London um and in in the UK but actually 75% of everything we make is actually exported outside of the UK um key markets at the moment where we’re seeing a lot of growth a lot of interest southeast Asia and and America but again like I said earlier the challenges that
Those customers face and dayto day the the pavement servfaces the the the distances they commuting are very very different I I was saying someone earlier me and my partner went to Copenhagen a couple years ago um one of the cycling capitals of the world didn’t see a
Single problem in because we don’t the problem we solve like I said is not being able to have um abundant storage for for bicycles um not having abundant cycle Lanes um and needing to carry that that product actually um the other thing is um one of the key differences between us
And the the vast majority of the cycling industry is the cyc industry essentially sells to cyclists sells to a small proportion of of the globe uh we’ll sell the next setup we’ll sell the next Breakin setup um the Lo want to sell a gadget a gizmo a widget to a relatively
Small um market so in Germany for example cyclists account for about 10% um of commuting in the UK about 5% in the United States about two and a half percent but in Germany 95% of people can cycle and in the UK 92% a little bit
Less 92% of people can cycle so a lot of the cycle industry is focused on that 10% or that 5% or about two and a half percent and squeezing every penny and pound out of saying here’s the next gadget for you what we want to try and
Do is say hey everybody you know every majority of people 92% of the UK are grown up like learning to swim pushed along the road by the parents until they can cycle on their own and the parents will cheer and once they can do that
That’s who we want to sell to I’m not a cyclist particularly um I didn’t join brumpton because I’d got some you know long history of buying lots of bikes and spend a lot of money out of it I joined in the company because the engineering interested me um what tends to happen is
I’ll go to a cyc event an exhibition show and after about five minutes I’ll be in a really really deep cycling conversation and there may be a couple people try and catch me out on it later um and I I don’t know I’m I’m not I’m
Not an avid cyclist I know about our products I know about the engineering and we want to take away that stigma of people being afraid to bicycle shop and just say hey I’m just looking for a bike and the guy selling that bike saying oh
Do you want this what gear set do you want what handle bars do you want do you want chti you want this that the other we want to get rid of that we want to appeal to that 80% 90% of of of a country that can and wants to sell one
Way we do that is with our Junction stores the previous slides even out a day even though it was made about six months ago we’ve now got 16 uh drun stores across the world 2011 was the first one that was opened in Kobe in Japan uh this is the bromton junction
Store which is now also moved uh in London near Oxford Circus um we’ve got stores Amsterdam Valencia Milan and more recently Shanghai and the idea with these stores is they’re really approachable anybody can go in anybody can unfold a bike fold a bike have a go
On it we simplified the product range as well even in the time when I joined if I went on our website when I first joined it was basically a bromton and 50 versions of a Brompton and I had no idea I don’t know how high my seat should be
Whether a a straight handlebar is better than something else we’ve simplified that now so we essentially sell four products an a line a c line a p line a tline an a line is the entry don’t spend too much don’t want too many options the SE line is the Brompton the
Standard bromton and that comes in lots of variable comes in electric non electric then we have this which is what was originally uh called the super light um is now called the pine this in and then this which I’ll move on into a second and the idea is you can go in and
Say hey look I want to spend this much I’m not bothered about electric and the person who’s talk into that stock and be like great hey try this and then if you want to change and add some variation you can another way we trying to get the
Products um out to more people is through our company bromton back so there’s 70 of these around the UK um and basically for5 you can use a card use the app hire a bike take it home work for the day rent it for the week rent it
For the month um we essentially make no money from this um it is purely there to get more people giving it a go I was in Manchester just before Christmas um there’s a huge one outside station and actually it was empty which is great to see I did check that they were still
There and not stolen but um but about 25% of our um active customer base in bromton bike higher actually result in a bike sales so we’re constantly turning over bike higher customers everything I’ve just talked about um is I think nicely summarized by it takes 20 years to become an overnight
Success um from 2,000 bikes a year uh 2022 we hit through 100,000 uh bikes um it’s that’s taken a hell of a lot of work hell of a lot of development we’ve M moved building four times we’ve bought Distributors sold Distributors change the the product and now change the
Material of the products the industry at the moment is really really struggling um during these years bik went AB absolutely crazy everybody wanted them every distributor was more more more we actually had to stop production twice in greenford uh because we were piling up bik boxes near
The uh outbound doors quicker than the delivery Vans we’re collecting them which is a problem we’ve never ever had to deal with before the downside of that now is Distributors are greedy and never want to say no when times are good now the market is saturated with bikes
There’s been quite a few orange bikes wiggle quite a few uh well-known names in the industry that have f for bankruptcy over the last couple years the best thing about us and the position we’ve put ourselves in is we’re developing the products we’re changing the products we’ve got can’t go into any
Details but we’ve got at least three new products um lined up for the next 18 months two years of those needs so that’s where we’re trying to address the challeng that are out there in the market um and one of the um successes last coup well last year actually is we
Actually sold our one millionth Brunton the on the top left is blur but um Andrew Richard on the right with his bromton which is marked as bromton number one but it is technically not bromton number one but it’s the number one of the um kind of mass-produced
Sector of of bromton before they were they were kind of you know a different shape and Rob Adams our CEO currently um that is the one million prompton we had it thepoke artwork by other engan artists and then uh the team took that one bike all around the world
To all our main markets and our and our Emerging Markets as a celebration of the the products what we’d achieved um and I think with the way things are going I think we’ll get to the second millionth a lot lot quicker than the first so one of the other challenges that um
The bompton product faces is once you fold it you’ve got to carry it um and it’s a couple of people whove got a brmt in here it’s quite prone of banging your thigh quite a lot quite heavy um so that’s where sheffi comes in that’s
Where we come in um and I think I’ll for two minutes and let’s see if it when we started this project we said that nothing was off the table this was a chance to just roll out a blank sheet of paper and say how are we going to really
Do this from the ground up in the end about the only thing that’s carried over from the old bike is the brake system everything else has been finessed paired back upgraded this is the lightest prompton we can achieve the bromton the problem that we’re passionate about solving is how
You move around a city but without the encumbrance of a bicycle when you’re not riding it that’s that’s what Andrew Richie was trying to solve 40 years ago and that’s been our Guiding Light ever since we’ve always known that we wanted to do a no holds B you know the lightest
Possible bike that we could make we had to maintain the fold that was absolutely key titanium is an abundant material within the Earth it’s it’s one of the most common ores but turning it into a useful product is not done in a lot of places it’s extremely strong it’s extremely light it’s tough
It’s corrosion resistant but it is not straightforward to work CW Fletcher are a company based up in Sheffield they have a long history going back over a 100 years Sheffield has got a big history in manufacturing the city was founded in steel manufacturing we were presented with a different vision
Of what was achievable they felt it could be done when everyone else was telling me it couldn’t all the frames that we make here in bromton are handcrafted and handmade we take titanium tube titanium plate and we weld them into frames that then get shipped down to London facility
And built into the tline bike technology advancements particularly in mechanical simulation has allowed us to carry out a lot of optimizations which we wouldn’t be able to have done uh 5 10 years ago we start with the design in CAD so we have a computer model we then map that
Model with effectively Lego bricks and then each of these elements experience uh displacement and stress once we understand the loads and we apply the simulation tools we’re able to understand the stress and the strain of these components with a whole new level of insight and that guides our design
Decisions and allows us to really just follow the physics we’re adding material in when we need it and we’re taking material away where we don’t need it we have gone over this entire product in every detail and looked for every single gram we can find we’re using polyurethane inner tubes because we’re
Saving a relatively large percentage of weight for that inner tube and the orange which is cool there a metal titanium can be quite difficult to work with whether you’re Machining it whether you’re rolling it bending it or in our case welding it it’s not like steel so we have to form
It in a different way we have to build it in a different way so there’s like we have to play with different wall thicknesses and different Bend angles and the way we Bend stuff spring back for some of the things in tline we had to create new ways of
Testing so for our gearing system we had to create new ways of replicating you know dirty road conditions bad weather from you know hot and humid through to sort of cold and icy and dirty and gritty so not only do we have a bike Which is less than 7.5 kilos in its
Strip down form as an 8 kilos you have a bike with gears with mud guards uh with all the things that you need to actually use it in a practical way you feel closer to the bike you feel part of the bike because the weight isn’t there and to see people fold it
And then pick it up and the the look on their faces when they see how much lighter this product is you have the sense when you leave the house that you can just go anywhere so all of those shared environments you know that it’s not going to be a burden you know you
Can do whatever you want and that’s a it’s a pretty amazing feeling seeing it come from an original concept through inter production has just been fantastic it makes you feel proud that you’ve worked as hard as you can to make that world as good as you possibly can it’s
So rewarding it’s bloody awesome to see it coming off the end of the line now it’s hugely rewarding and it’s been a massive team effort and you know the team have really driven it beyond what my vision of it was and it’s great to see really that we’ve ended up with this
Product so yeah so post um the pine being developed the idea of this product was to make the SE line lighter so it’s about 10 and a half kilos um this includes a a titanium rear triangle things like carbon fi seat post Etc but as that video explained um taline which
This is actually um one of the very last uh prototype bikes so can’t ride it I’m afraid um because it is not designed toh survive very long um is really the development of the pine so this is 100% titanium frame so grade two
Five and nine um be right if I knew I to actually fold and unfold the bik um this same so it’s a 3 kilo reduction from our previous lightest bike and that makes a huge huge difference the first time I saw uh somebody down in London who
Bought a t line and was walking through a tube station the uh Turn Style gate things that you go through when you swipe your card um and normally have to really struggle through to get through uh with luggage Etc he just picked it up and walked through the uh the turny
Which is a m different same as like going upstairs it makes a huge different experience for the for the consumer so why uh shaffield so it’s mentioned in the video about 10 years ago will was doing what he does best which is talking to someone at event over a beer uh he
Met a chat called Steve Kirk who’s the MD of CW fetchet who an airospace company just outside Sheffield um who’ been on that site for uh 90 years um and they’ve been ring titanium for the a industry for the last 40 or so years um uh we kind of partnered with those
Guys say hey look we’ve got a team full of brazers who brace uh steel trade a couple of them few months it’d be really easy teach them how to well titanium a few months turned into 10 years um and a exercis in training turned into a joint
Business um so when I joined bromton Fletcher um in Sheffield uh it was actually a 50/50 owned Enterprise between CW ther and bomton obviously during covid our sales went absolutely crazy the airospace industry stagnated um we took the opportunity to buy the business from C fetches and now they are
Essential our landlords but in principle they’ve taught us or taught the welders not me I can’t um everything they know and we spent many many years just making one type of rear triangle um but now this product’s been on the market for about coming up to two
Well we’ve been making it about two years but coming up coming up to two years for the for the consumer um now we weld the entire frame so three and a bit years ago we were producing in Sheffield uh one type of frame and doing about 600 frames a month
Now we’re doing four complete frame sets essentially building the entire frame set of the of the bike we’re doing about a, of these every single week every single every single week that we do so we have a massive massive growth um we carried a lot over from from bromton
Down in greenford so all the fixtures like you can see on the right we design in house we build um and then we maintain and look after and actually most of my time has been spent on the fixture and the Jigs and the process not
As much with the design um it’s all Big Welding um we do we’ve got a team of uh about 32 people now in Sheffield 24 of which are full-time tig welders everyone’s trained in house uh we’ve got three Advanced trainer welders that uh will train somebody
Who’s never even worked in fact I think we’ve got the first two people we’ve recruited who’ve actually worked in manufacturing before everybody else has come from every Walk of Life in fact our team leader who is essentially in charge of every welder there um his job before
This was working on the doors of a club in Ram so we’ve got people from all walks of life all different expences um so we we don’t we’re not training people to weld we’re training people to be brmt and welders um one of the most unique
Things about what we do on this bike is we’ve actually uh carry out on six different joints orbital Welding which is pretty unique in um bicycle manufacturer um it’s kind of a technology uh for oil and gas and and nuclear predominantly in companies like Rolls-Royce um and yeah we’ve grown
Massively over the last three years um here’s some of the joints so there’s a couple of frames here so for example this is the what we call the main frame um these three corners of the triangle I suppose are all automated weld through orbital welding and then
Put into a single fixture which is go back really which is like the uh two FS on the left here of Matt welding um and these joints are all done manually and he’ll do 25 30 of these frames in a in a day um once we’ve completed those four
Different frame sets they’ll be packaged up and sent down to the main site down in greenford in Northwest London and assembled with things like carbon fiber seat posts um with’ everything on here like the video said really been stri back to maximize the weight reduction and this is actually I think bik four
That we built a couple years ago in the summer that was down for to watch the assembly um and yeah we finished the first week of December on our 10,000th keine full frame set um I think one of the biggest similarities between us in greenford um
The Grow for the team so when I started three years ago like I said we were just producing one component for one bike um we had a team of six or seven welders I think one of them must have been sick on that day on the photo um the photo below
It is actually eight people were not on site that day and that’s a change in just over two and a half years so it’s been a massive massive growth in a lot of ways kind of similar to the growth that they’ve seen down in down in greenford
Really so the future of of bompton I suppose this is our ambition for the the coming years um we want to hit that 250 bike number a year which is obviously a huge growth even from where we are four years ago we celebrated 50,000 bikes last year we celebrated 100,000 bikes if
You speak to our CEO he’s absolutely convinced this is easy um we also want to continue to make the bike lighter we want to Electrify more of the the product base um and one of the main things we’re doing outside of the engineering space is around the after
Care and the customer care we want 100% of the Brompton products that we sell to be registered back to the business so we can extend those warranties extend that after care and really sell a product that people can keep for many many years change a tire every now and then but
That that’s what we want to achieve and one of the main um kind of huge changes that we’ve got planned um is about 2028 uh we plan to be breaking ground on a complete new site down in Ashford um this is like a uh it’s almost like a a marsh land
That um we’ve identified with the local Council and the idea of this is to a give us the capacity to hit those numbers that we’re talking about we want to generate another million uh bromton users in the next 10 years um and bring everybody kind of Under One Roof par
From Sheffield um so bring more of our parts and accessories area our Aftercare teams um our test houses Etc in Under One Roof um yeah it’s quite exciting really a lot to do we’ve got three new product lines to coincide uh with the the start of this building uh so it’s
Going to be a busy uh busy five years and that’s it really um I’m open to any questions if you want to find me you can scan the QR code on the left if you want to find prompton you can scan the QR code on the right thank you very
Much I have no doubt there will be questions I’d ask that we use the microphone so that everybody in the room can hear your question but do just raise your hand and I’ll come and find you thank you very much uh I I’m from cycle Sheffield by the way anybody who’s
In Sheffield wants to active be an activist about cycling um a question well I have the double question I think one part of it you probably can’t answer but I was very interested to see you using I guess you would call it finite element analysis for the design there’s
Always an interesting question how you deal with the stress razors and the detail of the wells uh because do you just use some formula or codes or however I used to do that for offshore long time ago um and then more generally the actual cyclic loads on the structure and therefore the
Fatigue and Fracture uh resilience and so forth um a long time ago before Brunton existed I was given a molten bicycle as a Teenage present which has suspension now the company’s been molten company’s been resurrected sorry mentioning a competitor the company’s been resurrected and their new designs
Also have a very fancy lightweight frame it doesn’t fold but it has suspension how do you deal with the terrible sort of roads that you have in places like Sheffield that are full of Po and create loads of and cyclic loads and you name it yeah great question um so yeah first question
Yeah so yeah first question around FAA yeah so I think one of the biggest uh learning cares that I’m trying to drive in brumpton um is a lot of the FAA work was on the structure of the frame didn’t NE doesn’t necessarily or hasn’t until recently necessarily focused on
The actual World joints themselves we’ve validated that through practical testing the knock on effect of that is there’s not that many who have a lot of experience or equipment to proper fatig test uh bikes uh we do have a test house in ourselves in London we’ve got a
Reliability team um uh it’s a like a unit just off off site from from greenford and we can road test almost like a Rolling Road and we do like wet weather testing um and we’ll provide uh that test house I think every about every six weeks with a number of frame
Sets they’ll build them essentially into mockup bikes the fatig testing that’s done is kind of without wheels I think you saw on the video there’s like a a Mot Drive the the chain essentially um and we’ll build that into our control plan for the bike we do a lot of work at
The moment with the FAA team of trying to bring in some of the the weld specifics into those models um I suppose it’s a little bit like uh the way uh danss were first built make them big and make them strong and then you haven’t
Got the uh the fear of it at later so we in a lot of ways we’ve kind of over engineered um the product really at the moment um because it was such a gear change from steel brazing to uh titanium welding um and obviously now the the
Titanium product is such a larger of of the product we sell there’s a lot more focus a lot more interest and um a lot more investigation into it um what we’ve done over the last six to to nine months one way of bridging that gap between
Kind of academic study and hey test it on a on a Rolling Road it lasts three and a half four times longer than we’d ever need it to last great sell it is around the world specification and the the processes we actually follow uh so we’ve been working with a a consultant
Called Cod Weld and who are essentially like um a middleman between companies like ours and uh ukas test houses so they’re starting to strip back that and say hey we don’t care that this is a bike we care about that joint and we we’ve been providing those test houses
World samples from all of our world as it’s building now into our world certifications a little bit like getting coded as a welder so we starting to really build that breadth and depth of of data second Point around suspension yeah I’ve rode this bike a lot in places
Like Sheffield and Country parks and things like that stones are not your friend um a lot of that comes from the wheelbase size 16 in is a very very tiny wheel it doesn’t give you a lot of area to withstand there is a definite different feel between riding the tie
Brompton and the steel Brompton the stiffness and I was explaining someone earlier my my boss is Aid T list goes B James three times a week uh he was one of the first to ride the the tline and he uh described it as if loose underneath you so there is a lot more
Variation the stiffness of of the T line to the standard bike um can’t tell you too much uh there are Changers that we’re looking at and lines that we’re looking at that are to satisfy some of those um kind of more challenging environments we aren’t going
To be coming out with any downhills we aren’t be coming out with any BMXs but yeah you know our biggest growing Market is Asia um and they don’t necessarily always have the you only have to come Che to get a bit of U dodgy Paving so yeah they there’s there’s limitations to
Maintain the fold that’s the key thing we start the design like of this bike in the folded state from a design perspective and work our way out to the unfolded state because we we literally call it foldability you know we have to maintain that that footprint that
Package that in itself brings a lot of challenges but yeah back into this year across to Peter should have worn less noisy tries where do you Source your titanium tubing from does it come from within the UK or you bring it in from outside so uh
In sheer we’ got four main suppliers two of which are British and two of which are Taiwanese so it depends heavily on um one of the things we’ve done different from the pine frames that we made in Sheffield to the tline frame sets we do is and brumpton generally um is focus on
What we’re good at and essentially Buy in through the supply chain what we’re not good at so I haven’t got a rear frame with me but four years ago those frames I gued be bending Tu tube drilling tubes de bearing things flattening things all sorts of bits and
Bobs we spent a lot of time working in the supply chain to find expertise in the areas that we don’t want to add the value so for example this bottom bracket lug investment cast pass expore machined Precision stuff we don’t need to be touching it we’ve designed it we know
What we’re after we hold those suppliers to um high standards our our energy goes into into the worlding processes the challenge we’ve got um with those suppliers is economies of scale really you know in most of these companies that we’re working with even though we are the largest titanium frame manufacturer
In the UK I think probably now if not already in Europe we’re still a small customer for a lot of the companies we go to and actually one of the things I’m interested in myself is why are we having to buy or why are we convincing ourselves we have to buy Aerospace grade
Titanium for this which we do which is great hey it’s a good great selling point you know we’re buying the same stuff that automotive and airace companies are buying from same suppliers not convinced we necessarily need to there Greener and more interesting things we could be doing that leads on
To the question I have and I might as well ask it now before you answer it you are a global leader what is the one thing that you can see changing in the next five to 10 years that will make a significant difference in your sustainability uh material is the number
One thing so was part of the Bop uh application we did um we had to kind of like lift every lid of every box scratch under every surface and um find out all the information we can about our entire supply chain and what ends up with our product um the actual manufacturing we
Do in both greenford and Sheffield in our overall footprint both from a a green standpoint Financial standpoint is not by far not the largest uh contribution 30 to 40% of all our contribution to our footprint comes from anything I’ve just described there where we’re buying the material from um I
Think if I speak specifically for us in Sheffield kind of links back to what you were saying earlier the more we start to look into what we’re doing look into the the welding look into the testing look into the structure the more we’ll be able to take what was described in that
Video stripping things back um more really I want to look at alternative sources of where we buy our titanium from alternative uh Downstream processing um and I think our customer base is already extremely uh aware of that you know a standard uh typical brmt customer is substantially more environmentally aware
Than the standard Ford customer they expect a lot from us we we have to give a lot back in three years time we have to to uh essentially reapply for the B Corp status but the level of expectation from that corporation on us is substantially higher so our biggest
Challenge now is passing this mentality onto our supply chain and if not we have to find alternative routs I think that’s going to be the biggest um biggest impact Yeah question then come back to hello you you talk about the number of people who can learn to ride a bicycle
When they’re young and then they give it up when they’re adults and obviously the number one reason why people give up a bicycle is because of the sheer stress of driving you know riding a bicycle in London or anywhere else so really a lot of your growth will have to depend upon
Governments or the UK government saying we’re going to have cycle paths we’re going to go back to what it used to be before we all had the cars cuz I only found out recently it was the American car companies that made the government in America make jaywalking illegal as a
Way of avoiding the car accidents you’ve got a sort of you are taking on the car industry and what what are your what is your connection to the government to say you know this will be sustainability this will be better exercise obesity the whole what are you how are you
Connecting to the government onise yeah I uh unashamedly stole a hell of a lot of these slides from um well Butler Adams our CEO who did a talk at eurobike in in the summer um and I took out the last couple of slides which because uh he’s an exciting interesting guy and he’s
Also not scared of saying what he really thinks and there were some slides of members of our Parliament I thought hey I’m I’m going to delete their slid I’m not going to get scratch that surface but he talks about that exact thing he said hey I’ve been in this business 22
Years working in in brumpton and he was all hey let’s you know let’s get this the local governments and and the government of the UK heavily involved in what we’re doing but in those 22 years the number of people he spoke to they’ve all moved on you know they’ve all
They’re in the in the vote game they’re in the the fouryear cycle game um it’s a massive challenge um I don’t know what the answer is um what we try and do uh like with the Ashford project is uh put ourselves in front of those people as soon as
Possible so we’ve got Ashford Council for example um essentially what they’ll be doing is buying that land from themselves and leasing that back to us and being a partner in that development so that’s really what we’re trying to do is get them involved from from day one
Of the next developments and show show them the benefits of the product um we do some other kind of schemes and Awareness stuff so for example during covid we did um I think it was like 250 bites to the NHS um so a lot of the Outreach stuff is is what we’re trying
To do and we put on a really good tour at greenford we’ve had a lot of politicians come around everyone wants to get on a bike so everybody can ride a bike um it’s always music to our ears when there’s uh news of uh low Mission
Zones or pedestrian or no car zones in cities um I think as a populace like I said about our growth being you know takes 20 years to we’ve had 5050 60 70 years of Designing cities in that way um it’s going to take a long time for them
To be unengineered that way we just need to keep leev leving ourselves at the front of that and then putting ourselves in front of those members of parliament definitely I think we’ve got one have one more question from the gentleman here well sorry Bob uh you mentioned briefly the um the
Then Ashford site’s going to have more to do with the accessories like so how much does that come into things like the finite element analysis with your cranks your pedals your accessory parts is that all done in house as well or is that Parts you buy in I think where I’d say
Our work and development and design and testing kind of stops is probably around the gearing systems outside of that then yeah we’re we’re kind of doing a lot more kind of aftermarket standard ping which is something we’ve kind of if I give an example of our electric product line um
Brompton is less today even than three years ago when I started but still has a bit of a startup kind of business feel to it everybody wants to do everything thems everybody wants to no put intended reinvent the wheel um our uh electric product our motor and Battery setup we
Actually designed with Williams F1 team um it’s been fantastic it’s sold really well like it but we have had you know we’re not hid in the fact we have had challenges and issues with that product and then all the burden of the the intricacies in the design and the the
Testing everything falls down in yourself you know if I went to a bike show in um ear’s Court about a year ago and a guy that works me we were walking around the show going we’re the only ones that like making our own Motors and buying in our own batteries and
Assembling and setting everything up a lot of those things that where we don’t think we really add a lot of the True Value we’re starting to take advantage of the market that’s out there you know we’re still boom booming even if a few other cycling companies are struggling
Those those uh members of the supply chain are there we’re taking advantage of that definitely but yeah I think the the testing for us heavily around the frames heavily around the gearing a little bit around the braking systems everything else after that is we kind of Buy
In right thank you very much I’m afraid we’ve run out of time for questions uh tonight because we’ve I’ve got a bit of a time scale um think it falls to me to to give a vote of thanks um I think it’s been fantastic talk tonight uh really
Love the fact that you’ve you know the core of the product is is key you know the foldability the transportability is still the core aspect of the product that you’re trying to sell but the innovation of listening to your customers what do they really want and
What do they want to do with it is so well being absorbed and integrated into what is uh doesn’t look like it’s changed that much but fundamentally is by far a different product to the one that was originally produced 40 years ago so thank you very much for your
Coming tonight thank you much to talking to us uh we do have a bit of a gift for um for your time it it is metallic uh I wouldn’t make a bike out of it I don’t think it has great mechanical properties from uh from a fatigue point
Of view however it is uh relatively corrosion distant it is highly polishable and it holds be very well so thank you very much