Accell Group has announced it will move production of Ghost's carbon fibre hardtails from Asia to the Rein4ced facility in Belgium.
We covered the
technology behind Rein4ced last year but in short, they are using robots and thermoplastics to bring carbon manufacturing back to Europe with a process that they say is more environmentally friendly and will produce a stronger frame than conventional carbon construction.
The frames will be built using Rein4ced's Feather composite, which is a blend of carbon and steel, that they claim has all the lightweight benefits of carbon but with superior strength to weight ratio. The new manufacturing process will also mean a greener end product as it will reduce overseas shipments and the thermoplastics used can be recycled.
Currently, only some of Ghost's carbon hardtail production will be transferred to Belgium with the rest of its range still being built in Asia. The frames will be available from mid-2020 in Germany, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and the Czech Republic.
| This collaboration matches Accell Group’s global innovation strategy and ambition to increase sustainability in its products. With enhanced durability and safety through local production and maximum performance for our cyclists with the new Feather technology. In two words: this innovation is smart and green—Ton Anbeek, CEO Accell Group |
| Accell Group is a world leader and pioneer in the bicycle industry and we are proud to work together. Rein4ced developed a new, automated production line for hybrid composite bicycle frames in its production facility in Leuven, Belgium, with an annual production capacity of up to 20.000 frames. Accell and its consumers will benefit from our product as the new Feather composite material offers extreme impact resistance.
Our hybrid carbon-and-steel fiber composite will deliver the confidence that cyclists deserve in high-end composite bicycle frames. The Feather material combines the stiffness and lightweight characteristics of carbon with the toughness of steel.—Michaël Callens, CEO Rein4ced |
It's because this particular Communist country is beginning to shed it's past and fast becoming what these Democratic country is now.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ojr-tqaQQOQ
The country has completely modernised (we have greedy people in western countries to blame as much as the CCP to be fair) on the back of artificially deflated production costs in China as a result of currency manipulation. Their military is answerable to one unelected man who has changed the law to allow himself to be ruler for life. Their military technology has developed at an amazing rate owing primarily to intellectual property theft and espionage. They claim the entire South China Sea because a fisherman in Hainan Island claims he had a map of fishing grounds in the Spratlys that was 5000 years old, although said map has mysteriously disappeared - not that it would give China rights to the entire sea even if it ever existed.
On Hong Kong, well, I think you know about that. Chinese interference in Taiwan is another interesting subject.
The point is, the CCP does what it wants because it can. It makes deals that it never intends to honour. It goes back on its word and then pretends it didn't. It has deliberately ambiguous and opaque deals with pretty much everyone.
No one likes the Chinese way of doing business. They like the prices and that is it.
Of course, I can understand why the Chinese people who are doing as they are told like good little boys and girls like the progress. Fringe groups, not so much. Those people who are subject to genocide, not so much. Those people who are having their organs harvested, not so much. I know the millions are still only a small percentage of the population but it's still a lot of people.
If the CCP really believes it's good for the people, it would face scrutiny and criticism. Clearly since scrutiny and criticism are not tolerated by the party, and that's worldwide, not just in China, the party knows it is doing a lot of stuff that is not really what people want. Its success is based solely on economic growth.
That's why I don't want China to ascend into the position of global hegemon. I value freedom of speech and thought. I value the ideas of a fair trial and free press. I also value the cultural niceties that are diluted by the Chinese - lining up, waiting your turn, not spitting in public, extending courtesy to customer service agents, and generally behaving like civilised adults in public.
If I could choose the USA or China to be calling the shots globally, it would not be a difficult decision. Unfortunately I think unless the west wakes up pretty sharpish and decouples from China I'm going to be on the wrong side of that.
You will be on the wrong side of history no matter what the west does, western cultural and economic dominance has always been a blip in the ocean. China can still rise to being a leading hyperpower by supplying the developing world with goods, services and infrastructure.
Your observations on Chinese obsession with money, their politics and their cultural values are shortsighted as well. It’s not China that sold it’s industry in the pursuit of easy money, it’s not China who caused 100s of thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq - and the last time I was in the services industry I received plenty of abuse from fellow Brits. And don’t forget that it is was the British who created the political vacuum within China that led to the cultural revolution.
The problem with the brand of exceptionalism that you and others like you spout, is that it causes you to vastly underestimate your competitors abilities and their own cultural strengths.
I’d also add that your comments on “good little Chinese boys and girls” and the CCP success only being based on its economic success fail to take Into account Confucian culture as well.
You are also wilfully blind or ignorant of the way the west did and still does business. The Americans for example, when confronted with a Japan that didn’t want to open up to the world sailed gunboats into Tokyo bay. Their trade model is still based on having a large blue water navy that acts like a protection racket.
I admit I am somewhat biased because I lived in Taiwan for more than ten years and have seen first hand on a daily basis the entire repertoire of the CCP's negative behaviour. Like a very wealthy but very unattractive man who wants to marry a beautiful woman who has continually rebuffed his advances - but he doesn't want to take any notice of her feelings. He is intent on marrying her and he will do anything to get what he wants, including paying literally anyone who will support him in pressuring her into it, and heaping scorn on anyone who says we should listen to her side or respect her wishes.
The human rights abuses are sickening but again not isolated to China. The pressure the CCP puts on other countries to toe their line is horrifying. And they toe the line. Commercial entities need to grow a pair of balls and stop putting money before morals (NBA, Premier League, Apple, Hilton, and pretty much every legacy airline in the world).
I know there are a lot of c*nts about, but in the world right now, they don't come bigger than the CCP.
All superpowers and hyper powers attempt to exert control over their neighbours, out of fear of those that may engage them in great power competition may gain influence in those countries. America did so in Cuba and South America (the former was understandable after the missile crisis). American attempts to control the Far East are often seen in Asia in the same way that the PLAN rocking up in Mexico would be seen by Americans.
Corruption and human rights abuses are an issue in China, they are also major issues in tin pot democracies like the Philippines.
When you talk about whether we should accept the exporting of the Chinese model, what would you have us do? Restart the containment and domino theory that worked so well in Vietnam and was definitely not viewed as a colonialist continuation of French-Indochina by the locals?
Once again, European co-operation and peaceful harmony was a post war blip - that is starting to come apart at the seams - as evidenced by Brexit, Austria, Poland, Hungary and the FN in France. For thousands of years before that, Europe was in a constant state of war.
And if you think that Japan is some bastion of tolerance, you haven’t spent any time there.
And you should try listening in to conversations in a British pub - they are no better, Brits are only better at hiding their prejudices.
Your disparaging sentence about white savages tells me you just see them as a threat and are fitting your narrative to that view.
I don’t really care about whether a Buddhist monk or “yogi” as you like to call him is or isn’t a selfish as a wall street banker - what I care about is geopolitics, conflict and cultural understanding.
How dare they do exactly what we asked them to do for decades. They should have said "No, thank you" to all that foreign money pouring into the country.
It seems pretty simple. Don't give 95% of your money to one single country, period. Especially not "a fast growing fat kid from the countryside", who turns up in his BMW, parks in the disabled spot and walks to the meeting in his flip-flops, then signs a multi million dollar deal even though he's never been to the dentist in his life. And then next week changes the deal without telling you. And don't you dare complain because you will "Hurt the feelings of all Chinese."
Am I sounding like too much of a snob? My apologies for that.
I do say a lot of shit about China. Really, I could tolerate most of it if they would just leave Taiwan the f*ck alone, accept that it's a country in its own right like everyone in the world knows it is in everything but name, and get on with life.
I've often said "Who cares the most about Taiwanese independence? Foreigners in Taiwan". The locals just want to get on with the business of living. They've grown up with the pressure from the CCP, and the murders and oppression from the KMT before it. I feel a bit jealous that Taiwanese are culturally free from this horrible western sense of right and wrong, justice at all costs mindset to be honest.
The Chinese are among the hardest working people on Earth. It's the party that I hate, not the people. Sure, they need to get some manners in most cases, but that will come in time. They are good hearted, dedicted and friendly for the most part.
China only accounts for 6.6 percent of UK imports - we do not give 95 percent of our money to the Chinese.
You don’t sound like a snob, you sound like you think you’re McArthur, it’s the 1950s and the Reds and the Yellow peril are out to get you.
They might get you seeing as you lot are good at fleeing from Finland whenever they turn up.
How will the man on the street notice his way of life changing?
Do you mean the Chinese are going to invade and install dictatorships?
Or do you mean the cost of living for us goes up because other people are being lifted out of poverty?
Or is it because the west will no longer be able to act as either colonialists or the “worlds policemen”?
If it’s the latter, what gives you the right to carry on being much more effluent than the rest of the world?
And how is what China does worse than bombing all of the following countries since ww2?
China 1945-46
Korea 1950-53
China 1950-53
Guatemala 1954
Indonesia 1958
Cuba 1959-60
Guatemala 1960
Belgian Congo 1964
Guatemala 1964
Dominican Republic 1965-66
Peru 1965
Laos 1964-73
Vietnam 1961-73
Cambodia 1969-70
Guatemala 1967-69
Lebanon 1982-84
Grenada 1983-84
Libya 1986
El Salvador 1981-92
Nicaragua 1981-90
Iran 1987-88
Libya 1989
Panama 1989-90
Iraq 1991
Kuwait 1991
Somalia 1992-94
Bosnia 1995
Iran 1998
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998
Yugoslavia – Serbia 1999
Afghanistan 2001
Libya 2011
Are they worse because “they hate our freedoms?” - is it only bad or terrorism when dictatorships do it?
Cuba (attempted)
Vietnam
El Salvador
Panama
Grenada
Yugoslavia – Serbia
Afghanistan
Iraq
Agreed.
But don't think that the rest of the world is going to take your side if they see you as hypocrites. There is a reason why China and Russia are 1) Making considerable economic gains in the developing world at the expense of western influence 2) Able to sow anti-western discontent easily.
That's because the west has a nasty history of not praciticing what it preaches, colonialism and exploitative trading practices - on the otherhand China is winnning the hearts and minds of many developing nations through huge infrastructure projects, hilariously more equitable trade deals and by not dropping 2000lb JDAMs on them for giggles.
What we are reaping now is the result of a few hundred years of umitigated geoploitical stupidity and ignorance, carrying on right up to the present day, in the near and far east.
A Taiwanese passenger checking in to a European airline to fly from a European country to another European country using a Taiwan passport which is visa exempt in the Shengen zone, scans the passport and is then given the choice between “People’s Republic of China” or “People’s Republic of China - Taiwan Area”. Obviously this is not an accurate description of what it actually says on that passport. The next step says “No visa required. Proceed to bag drop.”
In other words, the airline and the European immigration authorities know and recognise the Taiwan passport, but to keep the CCP happy they make Taiwanese self identify as Chinese citizens if they want to fly - within Europe.
Absurd.
Create jobs for robots...
I actually ordered rims from them too for the first time and I am waiting for them. Hope this won't happen, but will probably not buy from them again seeing this kind of service not only to customer, but to the planet. And they are even bragging that their paint-less rims are more eco friendly, would you believe that?!
compositesweekly.com/how-guerrilla-gravitys-revved-carbon-technology-is-disrupting-the-mountain-biking-industry
On a side note, that picture of the carbon layup of a downtube/headline section is like 50% waste. Apparently Rein4ced didn't get the memo on environmental stewardship that GG did when they developed Revved.
Wonder how the finish on the frames is gonna look like. But i like automation in bike layup just for the sake of consistency...
PEEK (polyetheretherketone) is a high-performance engineering plastic with outstanding resistance to harsh chemicals, and excellent mechanical strength and dimensional stability. It offers hydrolysis resistance to steam, water, and sea water. PEEK has the ability to maintain stiffness at high temperatures and is suitable for continuous use at temperatures up to 338oF (170oC). This engineering plastic has a proven track record in challenging environments such as aerospace, oil and gas, and semiconductor. www.curbellplastics.com/Research-Solutions/Materials/PEEK
@SleepingAwake you're not wrong... but at least they are doing something different and trying to find a better solution than traditional carbon fiber. My main issues with carbon fiber's use are durability, recyclability, and cost. Using peek would help with durability but I question how recyclable it is. Since it has an operating temp that is so high and it is not very widely used, I can't imagine there are many facilities that will process it nor is there much opportunity to reclaim old material. If the recyclability claim is legit then cost could come down as well. I feel the look could go one of two ways depending on which color they use but the black plastic along with the steel fibers could look pretty sweet!
But I would like to try, If I could grow my own materials
www.windy.com/-Show---add-more-layers/overlays?cosc,28.072,84.463,3
Plus GT was selling thermoplastic bikes for a few years before became a serious problem!