Factory Insiders – Giant Bicycles –

James Huang, Technical Editor for BikeRadar was invited inside the much coveted Giant Bicycles Factory with exclusive access to Giant’s cutting edge production techniques.

[Music] Giant bicycles truly lives up to its namesake with over 6 million bikes built each year and well over a billion US dollars in annual revenue giant doesn’t just stand out for its size though and its Flagship facility in ta chong Taiwan isn’t just a shipping and receiving Hub Warehouse or Assembly Center giant actually manufacturers all of its carbon fiber and higher-end aluminum bikes here essentially from scratch and we were given an all access pass inside instead of starting with pre-made pre-pre carbon fiber Fabrics as is the norm giant composite frames and forks start out as spools of dry carbon fiber that are laid out into unidirectional sheets those sheets are infused with custom two-part epoxy resins in what was up until now a secret and highly guarded process frames are built from lots of small individual pieces of carbon fiber though more than 500 per bike according to Giant those bits are Stamped Out on hydraulic presses like high tick sugar cookies then carefully gathered up organized on Clever trays that not only ensure that the correct pieces will be used but that they’ll also go where they’re intended those pieces are then laid up by hand on a complex mix of internal and external molds before finally being sealed up in a humongous steel clamshell and baked in an oven once they’re done the pieces are cleaned up holes are drilled and ends are finished as needed those subassemblies are then bonded together cured in alignment Jigs and finally go through another finishing process before paint and decals are applied aluminum frames on the other hand start out at Giant light metal in mainland China there glm starts with molten ore that’s cast into billets and then extruded into tubes those rough tubes are then refined in Tai Chung into much lighter and thinner wall tubing which is then further shaped using a mix of hydroforming air forming and cold working methods after a round of mitering and drilling those tubes are welded by hand not by robot into complete frames then heat treated and finished overall what’s perhaps most striking about Giant’s Taiwan Factory is the amount of human labor involved some folks might imagine that bikes are spit out of huge machines like so many little bits of candy but we can attest that that’s far from the [Music] [Music] truth [Music]