Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/872564
TRIUMPH THAILAND FACTORY VISIT P102 Feature running a triple shift: 24-hour operation six days a week. These each produce a new set of crankcas- es every five minutes, which are then bar coded as representing the start of the process of giving birth to the engine, and are fitted with the crankshaft made in the UK. There are further QC inspections in the so-called One in Ten Room, before these meet up with the Japanese-made gearbox and FCC clutch made ten minutes away from the Triumph plant. There's a 100 percent QC check on all en- gines before sending these to meet their chassis. The production line runs a double shift six days a week, and upon completion of assembly all bikes are run for five minutes on a rolling road for the usual dynamic checks before going to a final overall QC check area, and then to dispatch for crating and shipping. There's a third production line, which only takes care of producing CKD kits for Triumph's own assembly lines in India and Brazil. Though currently focusing on building the Bonneville twin-cylinder family and the new Street Triple 765, which also means the future Triumph Moto2 GP engines will almost certainly be made in Thailand, Triumph switches manufacture of different families of bikes back and forth between the UK and Thailand. "We've had the manufacturing split as low as 60 percent here and 40 percent in the UK," says Steve Sargent. "We've done the Tiger Sport 1050, the Speed Triple and the Rocket-3 here at one time or another, but they're now back in the UK. So it's not a hard and fast arrangement—the smaller bikes here, the bigger bikes there. It's just what seems best at the time. To move assembly of a model around is not that big a thing, and if we've got a number of bikes being developed at the same time, you may want to share some of that development between the UK and Thailand. You don't necessari- ly want it all going on in Thailand, and nothing going on in the UK, so you want to try and share that out. It may sound like a cliché, but we don't see things in terms of Triumph UK and Triumph Thailand, it's simply Triumph Manufacturing. And we have the flexibility to be able to move some of that from the UK to Thailand, sometimes from Thailand to the UK. It's about getting the balance right to make the best use of all of the resources that we've got across both of the sites." Okay, but why did they ever go to Thailand in the first place? Was it to save money? Or was it also to be able to do certain things in Thailand, which wouldn't have been possible in the UK? "Yes, that's it," says Sargent. "It was primarily for us to be able to do certain processes that we wouldn't be able to do in the UK. It's always interesting reading the comments that you get on THE FUTURE TRIUMPH MOTO2 GP ENGINES WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY BE MADE IN THAIL AND. Triumph's 765cc three-cylinder control engines for Moto2 will be made in Thailand, but serviced in