Where Spokes & Wheels Are Made - Inside The DT Swiss Factory

this is the headquarters of DT Swiss based in the city of bill nestled beneath the cycling playground of the Jura mountains in Switzerland naturally now inside we're going to get a close look at what makes this company tick let's go check it out [Music] now the company have been in this facility for six years but it can actually trace their roots in this city right back to 1630 for Alex o Thurman a man our guide for the day nice to see you mate welcome adidas was thank you very much I'm going to show you around today but get Stan you're going to see the smoke production now yeah so let's go in huh all right let's do it now obviously in 1634 they weren't called et Swiss that actually happened what 360 years later but as Alex said a core part of the business is still spoke production so very much true to their original ruse in 1634 they were actually some of the first people to be able to make metal wire right is this where the magic happens right now we're going to see the magic of smoke production and let's come in hope you like it you can hear in the background that's the noise of bladed spokes being made but let's not get ahead of ourselves first of all we need to go back to square one which is this so the very first step in spoke production those reels of wire come into the factory to put it into context there's enough wire processed here to almost go around the world every year so that's a lot of kilometers of wire coming in but it's not just any old wire clearly to get more insight we obviously need to find someone who really knows what's going on here so Peter is the production manager here at DT Swiss now my first question would be you know could I order you know half a ton of wire and then make spokes or is this specifically DT Swiss his own kind of wire basically you you can work with standard material but our a quality demand that we have needs some specification which is not on the market available so our material it's a standard material but with special conditions behind and so what's the first step of the process then you get the wire into the facility and then you literally just unwind it first of all after quality control that goes through the whole delivery will will be checked this device here the wire it's it's not straight so this device makes just the wire straight with different roles we we push it once in this direction once in this direction and then it's the thin part and and here it's just the feeding roles which cooking the pushing the material into the machine here we have different stations first station it's a pre cutting the material comes with a high speed inside and we can't cut it on the right length the second one it's the finish cutting where we adjust the length that we need and it's just like the spaghetti okay third one the biggest one there's the header inside headers up and down and they close and from from behind comes the head standard a change squashes together it's a it's a CONUS in the in the header and then comes to stand behind and precious to turn the head on it flap this station here there we are doing the bending we bent the head and at the end here you can see the three rolls we don't cut the three we just put it on okay so pizza we've seen a normal spoke being produced like a so-called straight gauge but when we go up a notch we then have butted spokes where the diameter is it's thicker at the ends and then thinner in the middle to say way I guess I'm guessing it's not just a case of stretching the spoke so I goes thinner no it's a special area it's a secret area and we don't fetch it we hammer it stammering yet if their own production machine that we've developed years ago and this is why fixing right it's that noise that's been in the background of all this coke production ease is things we've got three massive forging machines what's what's going on at this point there Peter good in this area we are producing the blade spokes porch spokes the different products the machine has loaded up to 200 tons that's the max 200 times our highest and product needs up to 130 tons to each spoke he's basically getting squashed by a hundred thirty ton weight Wow and so they're the spoke that comes in here then they're you know is that a button spoke or a straight gauge smoke or what it can be both it's up to our customer what he wants it's also up to enterprise and the weight of course we have spokes which we we've become from the wire to the spoke to the blading area and we have also spose from the reduction area to the spoke and then blading it's always up to the weight right put it once it's come out of the forging machines and that that is a finish spoke yep that's right Wow well that's hot is there alias yes so just simply because like that the forging process makes a you know cold spoke the progress it's old fortune that's right but the energy that we need with the stuff to 130 times this energy must go to anywhere yeah so we we transfer the energy from cool to Foulke that we can forge it right and the faster you forge it the hotter guessed yeah that's right silver smoke black smoke is quite a simple decision as a consumerist which one you want but actually making a spoke black it's not a simple process and it's not anodizing which I've just made that mistake yeah so it is it's a chemical process you see the device behind of us we have several paths which we need with with lye with acid different acid with a boiling then we have the magic box where where the spoke comes out in black but there are several steps until this focus black because you're actually making stainless steel stain yeah not a simple process no it is and we have specialists as employers here which which know what they have to do a bit because this is the protest not every company can do it you probably still here we are right next to spoke production but in here is the test lab lot of torture machines and all right yeah definitely right Simon and we're trying to go in but actually I'm not allowed to go into so we will have to ride one to show you around there is good morning Philip this guy here is Philip Moody's yeah our manager of the prototyping department and he's going to show you around him to a torture chamber now a few the machines in here are familiar to me except that this one is new this is a spoke testing machine right yes exactly on this machine we are doing a spoke tensile test so we can investigate the tensile strengths of the spokes here and we basically do this test in most cases for quality control purposes to ensure a continuous high quality and in the production so literally taking spokes that have just been made bringing them in here in a batch and just saying yeah that meets your standards okay this is one thing we do under the finished spoke on the other hand we do also tests already on the coil and the raw material off spoke to really see if the tensile strings is already sufficient there okay and so we literally just kind of pull it apart right so you know and then and you reckon it's gonna fail on the spoke not the nipple or the rim basically what we see here is an interface test so we are able to investigate the entire interface spoke nipple and rim segment and yeah we will see what happens cool you know something good is gonna happen when you hand it a pair of safety glasses now that was quite pleasingly catastrophic I do like a loud noise a but that's not representative of spoke failure in the field I've never seen that half a net on the road or all the trail in fact when we talk about failure in the field it's more about like especially in the mountain bike segment then we have sticks or stones coming in the wheel and they're in the spokes and this is mainly posing then the failure or we have really local overloads do two hits or the wheel is built wrong with the wrong spoke tension and so these are mainly the reasons why it comes to spoke failure in the field this one is an impact test and a custom made by DT Swiss right to test complete wheel sets to make sure they comfortably exceed the standards expected of them and this one Phillip is currently set to UCI standards is that right yes exactly so there are some user requirements that the front wheel that are written off or must mass art competitions need to pass this test okay got tire on there I wish yeah that's actually true and this is just because of the repeatability and reproducibility of the of the test method itself because we really want to focus on the wheel or on the rim and yeah this is the reason because when we mount a tire we have all the influences of different tire types air pressures and finally yeah it's not an accurate test and for the wheel so this white dropping onto the wheel now is what you say forty tools the Lewin's yes that's that's actually the UCI requirement okay we're gonna see carbon breaking I'm not sure I'm sure got the stomach to see beautiful wheels break in this morning it's okay it's okay guys survived apparently it would take an awful lot more energy than that to actually witness anything at all on this wheel now this final one here is the torque tester so you can see force being applied to the hub you can either test but braking forces from disk brakes or also in this case pedaling forces which seems like a good excuse to talk about one of my favorite bits of DT Swiss text a ratchet freewheel system it's actually been around for 20 years now DT Swiss hubs are famous and you might not know it but you will know I guarantee plenty of wheel sets that used proudly use TP Swiss internals so this is the - 40 s it's the classic been superseded out the top of the tree by the 180 but this one is conveniently been exploded so we can actually see what's going on inside and there is our freewheel system it's the absolute nuts you've got two spring-loaded ratchets in this they've got 18 to teeth on either side you see they slide effortlessly over each other when you're freewheeling and they bite as soon as that pedaling force is applied so this really rather noisy room is the fatigue endurance testing room as you can see we got wheels spinning and these are on 24/7 right yes that's actually true twice a day we are double checking all the wheels all the components on cracks and failures and and then what speed of those drums spinning out how fast is the wheel going okay so we can see this one actually is stationary the minute right so that's that's an obstacle and then so depending on whether you've got an ER ste like all road wheel or an IRC you'll put more or less both the sound of spokes being cold forged nice so just across literally from the testing center we've got the BPM which is Bill performance manufacturing the home of six master wheel builders and you might think well that's too small surely to make all of DT Swiss as wheels and you'd be right like most manufacturers DT you've got facilities all around the world so in the US and in Poland and also in Taiwan and that's where i'ma right thinking the hubs and the rims and the bulk of the wheel berthing gets done but then in here they've got this a steam you make a small percentage of wheels but before they actually going to be for ya we are building here up to 250 wheel sets each week so the main part of these wheels is for our testing facility which you have just seen yeah it's for marketing purposes so our sponsored riders wheels they get built here and also wheels before serial production for our sales customers they get build up here we land the BPM Department okay and I'm told that the guy heads up this team is himself actually a world downhill Masters champion not only masters wheel builder but a masters world champion in downhill so let's get into the BPM and get introduced to myself all right let's see how some wheels are made cool so what we got welcome here at the BPM Department so this is where the magic of wheel building happens yeah we are from the team of my cell here six persons in total working here on the different stations and basically the process here of wheel building is actually the same like we do it in Taiwan and in Poland in our serial production okay so I'm going to show you right now and you could see the different steps of how to build a wheel nice alright so what we are seeing here is the first process and we're building the waterslide details okay coming onto the rim so we are not using vanilla or vinyl decals and because water slide tickles are much more durable okay they get put into the special process and the special thing about waterslide tickles is they go into an oven and get baked afterwards right so this process makes them very durable and you don't have to worry about stretches or anything else one of the things I'm worst at in life is sticking stickers on straight see terrible I would suck at that gel so step two we have the rims with the decals on it and now it's time to combine them with the other components of the wheel so what you see here in German we call it spicing balm the English translation would be something like spoke tree maybe spoke to in fact that looks pretty apps like cool that spoke tree so no we already have something which looks like a complete wheel set but the problem is we do not have any tension on the wheel set you'll see it so basically the next step now is to put the spoke tension onto the wheel and this is what happens here as you can see Alex and what about this on this little machine yeah this is a very important part of their choice it's about distressing the wheels so during the process of building up the wheel or through the wheel each wheel has to be distressed up to three or four times okay that's the if you didn't do that that'd be the point where you get on your bike and it would all go like is you ride along okay so that stops that so we can make sure that it's distressed correctly and afterwards it gets back to the station and we check all the tolerances and make sure that everything is still in our very small tolerances cool so what you can see over here is now a digital control of the spoke tension of the dish and all the tolerances we are looking for so we are checking the spoke tension it gets read into the computer yeah and only if the computer gives green light if it's within the tolerances the wheel gets a serial number and leaves the BPM Department so every wheel solve you if someone were to ever have a problem you would be able to scan that wheel and then you would know categorically what the spoke tension was when it left the factory that it was in we would be able to track everything a wheel we have the serial number specific so we know when it was built to build it we know how the weather was at this day so we know everything no say well I mean all of what goes on in that room actually seen high-end manufacturer with the spokes we've seen the test lab you've now seen the master wheel builders but there's also big team of engineers here right right okay so can we we're never gonna have a look over some shoulders see if we can find out something about 2018-2019 Thurmond Cobb cigarettes I don't think so come on man coming top secret will find everything opinion this looks like a cool experiment address what what exactly is going on yeah you are we try to get more information out of the wheel what happened under stresses on different loads we attached some Israeli IDs or a strain gauges here and compared to our simulation results what what we get out of the simulation what we get in real world or in our laboratory so like refining your engineering models yeah yeah real world did I don't know whether you can tell us but did you find you know did you tweak stuff actually yeah but it's still ongoing we are we are in the middle of this investigation and also discussed how we can bring it even further but here I cannot say okay well in an effort to get some top-secret information for you the GCM viewer I have come to one of my senior members of DT Swiss Daniel I've been plying in with coffee as much as I can to try and get so I guess you can't tell us like proper proper secrets about what's coming up in 2018 2019 this year's been a massive year for you with the launch of a RC super arrow range but what where are you heading like what's what's next yeah definitely we had a busy season and clearly that next year we won't have that firework as what we have this year but clearly will continue for example in the road we see some still some white pages on our program so there we will fail some with some some other or different products we started now with high performance in mountain bikes and are thinking now what's going on Road commuting wherever it this will be yeah so there we have ideas and we have ideas even for complete new products next to suspension I mean next year or model in 19 this is something I can tell there will be the focus on users product something I can say and I think yeah do you will be maybe some people will be maybe a little bit surprised but we'll show it but I'm looking really forward to that totally eager to do that so the lounge will be next spring time yeah and yeah and others saw the products or their other kind of different products we never offered until now we are awesome in a pipeline just interesting now we touched on Eve ice there to put it in context we caught you Daniel on your commute this morning riding your super commuter turbo ebike so fast it has to have a number plate on I've never ridden one you know given this it's a trend that you guys are highlighting can I take it first spin would you mind why sure yeah absolutely absolutely right you see what you made up I'm ready let's go wait wait wait wait wait go on Alex go mate Alex thank you so much for sharing strats I see I'll be here hey no worries right I gotta say genuinely what a super cool company the engineering side was everything I'd hoped for but the passion for cycling that clearly runs from top to bottom in the company it's just yeah really impressed me genuinely has if you like this video do you have to give it a big thumbs up and then also make sure before leaving that you subscribe to GCN definitely needs to do that and if you like some more content you can see both DT Swiss Road and mountain bike wheels in action in road versus mountain bike which is harder which wish you think harder clear one on the road side oh yeah I think yeah I think you're right and then if you want to see the unboxing of those new AARC wheels that we talked about you can click just down there

Channel: Global Cycling Network

Views: 538,086

Rating: 4.9163532 out of 5

Keywords: GCN, Global Cycling Network, Sports, Cycling, Bike, Bikes, Bicycle (Product Category), Road Bike, Cyclist, dt swiss, bike wheel, spokes, bicycle wheel, dt swiss wheels, hubs, suspension, switzerland, GCN Cycling, Cycling Tips, cycling workout, cycling training, velo, simon richardson, simon gcn, sec-feature, b1, gc04s1, Ꮈ, Բ, Ի, Ձ, Ꮉ

Id: 2zkt-kM8JIA

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 24 2017