Meet Your Maker: Titanium Frame Fabrication at Ora Engineering
Meet Your Maker is going to be a new series for the site, highlighting the people, places, and things that bring you the bikes and components you love. Today I'm kicking things off in the land where many bikes start their journey: Taiwan. A few of us from the team are here on a fact-finding mission, seeing all the hot new things at the Taipei Bike Show.
Thanks to some extra time on the front side of the trip, we were able to visit a few factories along the way, including today's highlight. Ora Engineering is a frame manufacturer located in Taichung, specializing primarily in titanium fabrication, but working in steel and aluminum as well. They build bikes for a wide variety of customers, from small one-off projects to major manufacturers anybody would recognize.
We'll start with the tubes.
These rods are destined to become components, like stems and crank spindles.
Thick tubes are typically the starting product for the butting process, where the material gets drawn into much thinner sections.
On a basic level, Ora takes raw tubing and metal billet and turns those ingredients into bike frames, components, and tooling. They do all of this in-house, with a large team of experienced workers and relatively little automation. There was one charismatic little robot and a bevy of CNC machines, but otherwise things are fairly similar to what you'd see at a much smaller outfit.
Butted tubes being squeezed into shape.
Friendly and uncaring robot arm hard at work.
A visual on how tubes elongate as they're butted - these started off identical.
They do all their butting, forming, and mitering in house, in contrast to most other outfits that choose to outsource those processes for efficiency.
Bending and forming molds, mostly made in house.
A variety of the possible tube shapes.
Working his way through a pile of stay tubing.
Tubes are mitered by *wire EDM, a process I personally hadn't seen before. Often tubes are cut with a hole saw, laser, or ground into shape.
Good fixturing keeps things in place.
This little wire does a lot of work.
Once mitered (and formed, if need be), tubes get mounted into the jig for that given bike, aligning the cut tubes in their final form. One welder on line tacks things in place, then hands that frame off to another station to get fully welded up.
One of the five or so finish welders working at a given time.
Many, many, many jigs in storage here.
Some frames, half built.
Frames undergo an alignment check after welding, to make sure nothing got too distorted by heat.
For checkin'.
Mr. Brown approves.
After alignment is checked, things go through final detail processes, where surfaces are ground, bearing references are faced, and accessory holes are drilled.
This BB is about to get faced, so the bearings run true and free.
Magic wand.
Finished and ready for a few more steps.
There are many procedures a frame undergoes to be truly complete, such as heat treatment, chemical baths, and pre-paint texturing. All of those are done in Ora's factory, in a few disparate corners around the place.
Ready for the final steps.
It'll buff.
The lubricant/chemical/rinse zone, mostly serving the CNC machines.
Some of the frames get sent off for powder coating, others are kept raw, and some titanium models get the anodization option from factory.
The graphics department, getting stuck into some work.
Truly bare bones anodizing setup.
The product of said setup.
Slapped, wrapped, and ready to be packed.
Things aren't just frame focused at Ora though, with some pretty complex components moving through their factory as well.
Many bits and bobs come out of the machines, including this unusual pasta.
Shiny teeth.
A full warehouse, humming along.
Forbidden milk.
Thumbs up for safety.
A house brand stem in the wild.
Some laser graphics practice.
The frames and components made at Ora are also tested in their facility, to make sure they handle fatigue, impact, and other use-related damages without failure. There are a variety of machines at play here, as well as some attractive graveyards of parts and frame pieces.
Cranks and whatnot from the test lab.
A frame undergoing a fatigue test.
Welded fork cutaway to check for porosity and weld depth.
Pretty sure I had this poster on my wall as a kid.
One of the more impressive machines was their water treatment facility, which removes any byproducts of the fabrication process.
Filtering media sucks out the bad stuff.
The bad stuff.
Scenes from the neighborhood.
While Ora might not sell bikes directly to customers on the open market, odds are good that you've seen their bikes and components out in the wild.
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Personally, if a company/business/person/whatever, goes out of their way to try to hide this behind a veil of secrecy or denial, it is quite off-putting.
There are ways to look into it, though.
www.importyeti.com/company/chromag-bikes
www.importyeti.com/company/riser-distribution-chromag-bikes
www.importyeti.com/company/cane-creek-cycling
www.importyeti.com/company/fox-factory
www.importyeti.com/company/yeti-cycles
It also gets muddy when components from one country of origin are assembled into greater parts, which are then moved again, assembled into even great parts etc etc.
Frames should be pretty easy though, they aren't very complicated. Banshee's factory for example, has even been shown on PB here. But again, there is nothing wrong with where its made - some of these places export very high quality product.
www.pinkbike.com/news/closer-look-banshee-scythe-2010.html
Ive heard a podcast with the owner of sour Bikes (Germany). In Corona they moves the frame-production of one Bike frame tò Germany ans they had a hard time finding wielders, who can wield as food as the taiwanese. Not in terms of durability, but in particular optic-wise. So i Guess its Safe to that a taiwanese frame Is high quality and these people are experts in their job.
Riza stems are definitely made in Whistler.
So the stainless steel ball bearings that that the company I used to work for anodised on a weekly basis were in fact aluminium or titanium !! (or even chocolate perhaps)
Duuuh
Also, that is one of the cleaner factories I've seen.
Oh and industrial anodising is performed in plastic bins and you can’t anodise a ball bearing unless it’s made from aluminium or titanium of course.
Derp.
"test rig" - Lol
So the stainless steel ball bearings that that the company I used to work for anodised on a weekly basis were in fact aluminium or titanium !! (or even chocolate perhaps)
Duuuh
Do you know how titanium is anodised?
You anodised stainless steel ball bearings?