Cycle News

VOL. 55 ISSUE 36 SEPTEMBER 11, 2018 P93 the wheels we had because it was very labor-intensive, very highly skilled, and very low levels of capacity. We had to change the way we made carbon wheels. So what we have done, we have now developed the car wheel manufacturing process that we previously used, and we've been working with the National Composite Sector, which is a UK government funded R&D center for composites in Bristol, about 25 miles from our factory. The UK government gave me about 10 million U.S. dollars' worth of grants and loans to work with the National Composites Center to develop a new wheel design, which we've patented, as with the car wheel, and to help the new manufacturing process, which we are still developing but we've done a lot of work on. Now we're going to bring across all the stuff we've developed with the car wheel for the last three, four years in terms of manufactur- ing and design back into the next generation of carbon bike wheels. Do you guys have partnerships with motorcycle OEMs? Is there an avenue like that to produce wheels for high-end products directly for manufacturers? Currently, we carry the motor- cycle stuff for racing and after- market. We're not doing any OEM stuff. We don't have that repeat- ability in the production process to meet their quality assurance standards. It's too much labor. The new process with the car wheels, which we've already started, has met several OEMs re- quirements, and we've got several OEM projects under development. On the car side, we are already do- ing the OEM stuff. We are target- ing moving into partnerships with major motorbike OEMs over the next two or three years. We've got an idea who we want to target and who we want to work with. As you know, BMW has already developed their own carbon wheel on the HP4 Race, as has Ducati with the Superlegerra. We are looking to get more into that over the course of the next 12-24 months as we get ourselves to proper serial produc- tion of our motorcycle wheels. Is the way BMW makes a carbon wheel different than how Dymag does it, or is it a similar process? I believe there are two core issues in making any carbon wheel. One is how you put the fiber and what type of fiber you put into the dyes. The second is Cycle News been using the UPX7 wheels on our Project Kawasaki Z900RS, which weigh nearly 30 percent lighter than standard. do you use what we call prepreg, where the resin is already infused into the material, and then you put it in an autoclave and cure it, or do you resin-inject them. We use a resin transfer molding technology, which means we lay out the fibers dry. We lay them out in the form of pre-fabricated mate- rial, what we call tri-axial or bi-axial materials, which are later dried into the dye—this is the car wheel—the dye is then closed and we inject. That's called RTM—Resin Transfer Molding. That is our chosen tech- nology for mass production. There is a prepreg technol- ogy, which is used for low vol- ume manufacturing. BST uses prepreg. It's a good technology, but it requires autoclaves, which is capital intensive, and it's also quite labor intensive. I think what you'll see now, whether with car wheels and potentially motorbike wheels—the BMW wheel is going this direc-

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