From The Top: Atherton Bikes on Additive Manufacturing, Carbon Masts, & Buckets of Titanium Dust

Episode 120 of the Pinkbike Podcast saw Brian Park and I sit down with Atherton Bikes' Chief Designer Rob Gow, engineer Ben Farmer, Gee Atherton himself to talk about the advantages and challenges of additive manufacturing, why they're bonding carbon fiber tubes from New Zealand into titanium lugs that start life as barrels of really expensive dust, and three new bikes they plan to release this year. For those that would rather read than listen, we've transcribed an edited version of the conversation below.

Gee, first off, you had a huge crash. I guess it was a fair bit ago now. How long ago was that, what happened, and how are you feeling?

Gee Atherton: Yes, mate. Yeah, it was a good crash. It was almost a year ago now. Last June it was, so we're not far off the year mark, which, considering I'm not riding again yet, is pretty heavy. But yeah, feeling much better. I'm on the mend and a few gentle rides recently. It's starting to look up for me now.

Are you looking to make a full recovery and return to racing?

Gee Atherton: Absolutely, mate. Yes. And they're confident in the full recovery as well. There were a lot of injuries and the severity of the injuries meant the recovery was pretty heavy. But luckily for me, all the complicated stuff healed up pretty quickly. And now it's just a case of the big bones, like the femur; it's got a few weeks of healing ahead of it just to finalize those last little bits. And then we are good to go back into the action.

Have you thought of 3D printing some stuff for in there? It'd just be a little stronger.

Gee Atherton: That was literally my first question to the boys. Coincidentally, I am full of titanium rods and plates and screws now. So I'm on brand, so to speak.

Rob, let's get into some of the tech details of your manufacturing and how this actually works. Let's just pretend for a moment that I don't know anything about the additive manufacturing process. Can you explain this to me in general terms, so I have an idea of what it is?

Rob Gow: Yeah, sure. So, I mean, I guess the first clue is an additive that you are... is the opposite of the reductive. Basically, you're starting with powdered material, which in our case is titanium, and you are essentially welding that in very thin layers. So we work in 60 microns, and you're welding the powder into a solid material. So you build up very small layers at a time and gradually create a solid part from powder. And that process basically enables you to create almost unlimited geometry, unlimited shapes. So you're not constrained by having a mold tool or having to get a cutter in, or something like that. So you can create these crazy shapes that are really optimized that you couldn't make with really any other process.

Is this the same as 3D printing? Is the process similar, or is that a completely different thing?

Rob Gow: Yeah, no. Well, I mean, there are quite a few different-based technologies that 3D print. I mean, 3D printing is a hugely general term. Ben can dive into more detail on this. But yeah, the process we use can be used for lots of different materials.

Ben Farmer: If you want to get super tech, 3D printing is a common term for it. The engineers call it additive manufacturing. It was standardized by the ASTM, the American Standards and Testing Organization. And the technology that we use is laser powder bed fusion.

So it's not the same as the little sausage tube squeeze-of-plastic out that I have in the garage?

Ben Farmer: Well, the fundamentals, the basics of it are the same. You take a CAD model that is a 3D representation of something on the computer. It gets sliced. And then the 3D printer or the additive manufacturing machine reassembles those 3D slices in physical reality.

How long does it take to make these lugs? Is it an hour and you come back into the room and you have a bunch of lugs there ready for tubes, or is it days, or?

Ben Farmer: So every frame is created depending on how unusual the size is or something. That can take a few hours. The machine is prepared and warms up. The actual laser process of the fusion takes about 16 hours.

For one bike? One set of lugs, 16 hours?

Ben Farmer: For one bike, yeah. And then once that's finished, the machine cools down, and you de-powder the lugs. So when you build these lugs, they're contained in a box of powder. So you raise the build plate back up and spread away the powder. That gets recycled back into the machine. You empty all the powder you can from the lugs, which are welded onto a titanium build plate. That takes a little bit of time. And then there's a good bit of work to... when you build the lugs, you have to use support structures. You can't weld into free space, so there's some manual work then to do to get the support structures off. So that once that's done, then we go through a whole lot of finishing and so on.

When you say support structures inside, I'm picturing when someone builds something out of carbon, they're placing the carbon pieces over a bladder and into a mold. You're obviously not using a mold or a bladder, but are there some parallels there as well?

Ben Farmer: Yeah, it's like building the tooling as you go. The support structures do two things. One, they provide a physical anchor. So like I said, you can't just start building something in free space, in loose powder; you have to weld it onto something solid. So if you've got an overhang, you have to build a support structure up off your build plate to then reach the overhang so they coincide. So it acts as physical support, but also it's a heat sink as well. So there's a lot of energy going through a very tiny little spot that's a hundred micrometers or so, and it's a way to get the heat out.

I imagine there are many advantages to doing it this way, but I'm surprised to hear you say 16 hours. Looking in from the outside, that's probably a factor in the cost of these things. Is there any way in the future to lower that time quite a bit, which would then lower prices?

Ben Farmer: Not in the immediate future. I mean, we use state-of-the-art equipment. We use a four-laser machine from a company called Renishaw. It's very fast, relatively speaking. But the whole industry is getting quicker, so over the course of time, we'll get quicker and quicker.

I mean, the best way to get quicker with additive manufacturing is more machines, so that overnight you can get five out of something instead of one, or a bigger build space, or whatever. But yeah, it all seems to take a lot of time.

Ben Farmer: That's the kind of sledgehammer approach to going quicker. We've been getting faster. I mean, you can look at keeping your parts small, is the way to go quicker. With the parameters you use, the various settings to the machine, and the various things that you do, you can go faster and faster.

And it's not like subtractive manufacturing. A CNC machine would take a good chunk of time to make all the same lugs. It might not take 16 hours, but it would still take a decent amount of time.

Rob Gow: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that Ben was saying, the technology is so new that we are pushing it so hard that we are learning constantly about the technology, and about how to design parts to make them be able to build faster using less material. So we're building efficiency with that. And also looking at how to combine additive manufacturing with other more traditional manufacturing processes. So you mentioned CNC. So the reason we went for additive manufacturing in the first place was because it was really well suited for the particular types of engineering challenges we had. And as we've learned more about the products and learned more about the process, we can look at mixing up different kind of manufacturing options to create something that's still very optimized, but obviously is faster and therefore cheaper to manufacture.

Gee Atherton: The other thing is the rate at which that technology is advancing. A few years ago there were single laser machines and now it's a four laser machine, and it seems to be developing so, so quickly. It's quite a rapidly progressing area.

When you guys are calling these lugs, it almost doesn't do them justice. When I hear lugs, I think of a Giant Cadex or a Colnago and maybe that's not a bad thing, but I don't think you're doing these lugs justice either. First off, they're titanium, but also there are some super crazy details, like the honeycomb structure in there. Can you speak a little bit about weight optimization and what goes into making them like that?

Rob Gow: That's one of the real beauties of additive manufacturing; from a design point of view, it just gives you incredible flexibility so you can almost create any shape. For example, when you're making something in a mold, then obviously you have to be able to remove that mold from the parts, so you're limited to internal details. If you're CNC machining something, you've got to have access to get a tool in there. Whereas with additive manufacturing you're only limited by really whatever you can support, as Ben was describing. And you can also create very thin and complex wall thicknesses. Again, you struggle to do that with other manufacturing.

You can optimize the part massively for strength and weight. And one of the things we got into fairly early on was a process called topology optimization, which is essentially where you use computer simulation. You load up a model in CAD world with the loads that it would see, that the bike frame would see. And using finite elements software, you basically iteratively generate the optimum shape for a given set of loads. And you see this done quite a lot, but often then it's very difficult... The shape it creates can be some wacky form with all sorts of internal shapes you just can't make, whereas with additive manufacturing you've got the flexibility, the freedom, to actually create these shapes and therefore create these structurally-optimized parts.

Ben Farmer: The beauty is, the lighter the part, the faster it is to make. You don't pay anything for complexity, generally speaking. I mean, I share your thoughts. I mean, lugs, it's a really historic term that the bike industry uses for obvious reasons. They're lug bikes. But I mean, our background's from different industries. And a bike frame is essentially a space frame, and if you were to generalize those terms, they'd be nodes and connectors. We can make it sound different, but at the end of the day, is that a bicycle is a lug?

Rob Gow: The other thing, just to chuck in there in terms of the kind of flexibility you have, is that it enables you to modify parts with real subtlety. So one of the really early bits of work when the Athertons really got stuck into the products, was to work on chassis stiffness.

More or less stiffness?

Rob Gow: It's not as simple as that. It's just different. I mean, it's such a huge question. We're constantly learning more about it. But one of the things we were able to do with the nodes... Lugs? Nodes? Was control stiffness in very particular ways, which meant you can tune it in, combined with the fact that you can obviously create prototypes very quickly. You can literally get a new rear-end made within a week being tested on the track and getting feedback straight away. So that combination, to be able to prototype very quickly, to get feedback very quickly, iterate, and then interpret that feedback from the riders in a really detailed way into the parts lets you create these really refined products.

We're going to come back to those lugs. But Gee, I just wanted to ask you a question about testing. What has this been like for you to be able to have that kind of product available where you could change out this and that, and back-to-back things like that? I imagine it's been super interesting.

Gee Atherton: It has. Yeah, it's been incredible. At the very start when we were brand new to the technology, we were a little bit apprehensive, because we've had in the past very limited experience with additive manufacturing, so to be entering into a brand new technology and having to trust it so implicitly, we were a little nervous. So it took a small amount of time for us to venture into it, test the water, test the bikes, test the strength of the lugs, and test the strength of the joints.

But very quickly we realized, you know what, this works and this works well. We went hard at it. We threw ourselves into that testing, the manufacturing technique. And we quickly realized this works well. And then from there, it was a case of learning how fast we can operate with this manufacturing technique. We are used to six months plus turnaround when we wanted a frame change, and suddenly it was a week. Suddenly it was the next week when we could have a new back-end made with a different size and a slightly different stiffness, or change the reach of the front end. Suddenly it just opened up this enormous array of possibilities that we'd never had before.

Ben Farmer: I'm smiling. You can't see this on the podcast, but Gee is also the king of the wind-up merchants as well. So during that early testing phase, my God, he had our hearts and her mouths at times, but he was always winding us up.

A lot of designers and product managers will always repeat that perfect is the enemy of any good; at some point, it's got a ship. Does it become a challenge to actually ship a product or press the done button, because it's so easy to keep making changes?

Gee Atherton: There is an element of that, but as racers, we were always thinking, how can we improve this? How can we alter this? And like you say, we could keep going with that probably indefinitely, just refining, changing, and altering. And that's where Rob, Ben, the guys, they had to step in and say, look guys, this is an incredible product we've created now. You're not breaking it. You've got a frame that'll do an entire race season and still be going at the end of it. This product is ready for the market, and we need to go with it.

Ben Farmer: There's a very famous Formula One designer, Adrian Newey, who if you ask him which is his favorite design, always says the next one. And that's the case here. You think, well, actually we could do that bit a bit better. And so the next one is always the better one. But the thing is with our race team, we're getting the next one and it's always the best one at the present time. And the beauty we have is that the bikes that we then are able to offer our customers are identical to the race team bikes in every single way. So yeah, perfection is never the enemy of the good, because what we've got is perfect for today, we'll get even more perfect tomorrow.

Rob Gow: And also one of the real benefits of not being limited by having molds is obviously when that feedback comes back from the race team, if it's appropriate from a business and manufacturing point of view, they can be filtered into the customer's production line straight away. We don't have to wait [like a traditional manufacturer] because we've got a thousand frames coming in a shipping container.

The bike industry would never do that! There's lots of talk about 'ride feel' and we were just talking about testing different flex characteristics. So, Gee, from your perspective on the trail, do these bikes feel different than a more traditional frame of similar travel and geometry? Should a rider who buys an Atherton frame expect a different feel on the trail?

Gee Atherton: I think so, yes. And from the very start, that feeling was a big thing for us. The feel of the bike was something we really honed in on, and that playful, lively feeling is what gives you the enjoyment from a ride. And we quickly realized that the strength was not an issue, so it meant we could adjust the sizing and the thicknesses of certain areas to suit the feel as best we could. It wasn't a case of, right, we just need to build this head tube or rear-end up as thick as we can, because it's not strong enough, and then that gives a heavy, sluggish, rigid feeling. We could get away with making certain areas slimmer, and I think the nature of titanium is that it gives you quite a supple, fluid, enjoyable ride. And that became apparent quite quickly. And it was something we really zoned in on and wanted to really explore, and really make it as the very best it could be.

Ben Farmer: To give you a bit of a tech reflection on that as well, is that I mean, composites work really well in nice, simple shapes where the loads are coming from nice, easy to understand directions. Metals work really well when the loads are coming from different directions and the shapes are complicated. So what we do, is we put very, very high specific strength metal, titanium, in areas of high load and low complexity, and we're connected together with very high specific stiffness carbon tubing. And what that does is we can control where the stiffness is. When Rob was talking earlier about some of the testing feedback from Gee, we were tailoring this very specific wall thickness in one spot. So, you were asking if it's stiffer or less stiff? Well, actually we want less stiff in one area and stiffer in another.

So the reason we can do that more so with what we do versus a 100-percent composite frame, is that when you build a bike frame, there's a lot of shape complexity in it. You end up with a lot of excess material, especially on the bottom bracket, areas of shape complexity that you need for strength, but you get too much stiffness. And so that's the side step we make from that, is that we don't need to worry about that. We can make it stiff and strong, but just in the right way.

I've been to countless media presentations over the last 15 years where engineers and marketing people have drilled into my head that a monocoque carbon frame made in a mold, it's the lightest most efficient way to do it. But your guys' processes is very, very different. How would you reply to that?

Ben Farmer: Pretty hard to tackle that one. So I think there are a number of different directions you could go at here. I mean, why aren't others doing it? Firstly, the commercial model's turned on its head. So we are custodians of a very high-value piece of equipment, but it's extremely flexible. It can make anything. The upfront investment we make in any one particular product is quite low, but the cost of making that product is quite high in a recurring sort of way. So that's one thing. If you are used to the way of doing things, it's totally alien. And so for an existing company to go down this route, it would require tearing up its rule book and starting again. So that's one thing.

The other thing is the materials are... The whole thing, understanding the materials, process control, and how you design for this process, it's not easy. And the reason we can do it is we've got many years of background coming out of aerospace and Formula One, which is where we've learned this stuff. And especially from the aerospace side, it was taking years to see this knowledge come to fruition in products. It's why we decided that, hey, let's start a bike company. We had to express that really quickly.

So there's a lot of know-how needed to understand how you design the metal parts, how you finish them, and how you construct the bikes or the bonding elements of it. It's something a lot of know-how has been brought to bear, so not easy to do. We brought together a team that is quite unique. There's some combination of engineering expertise, and then it's really come alive with Dan, Gee, and Rachel in terms of not creating a generic bike, but a bike that's an Atherton bike.

It's really difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison to subtractive like CNC or a welded-together frame. If I ask you guys to fire up the Renishaw machine and make a basic shape, and then we use a CNC to make the same shape out of titanium... I realize it's not apples to apples because you could make a more complex shape with the titanium, but if everything is the same shape, the subtractive would be stronger, right?

Ben Farmer: Such a simple question. Difficult to answer. I mean, generally speaking, you get a rule of thumb, which is you can get about a one-third weight-saving via the use of additive because of the shape freedom it gives you, generally speaking. If you just took the same shape and made it via subtractive and additive in the same material, your subtractive part would probably be... Well, the properties of the top metal classes are forged plate products, and so on are very high, very good. The additive part's statically the same, roughly. The fatigue performance is less.

However, you can control the shape in a way to manage the peak stress, so you don't push the fatigue in the same way. When it all comes out in the wash, you end up with about a one-third weight saving.

Ben, are you, are you familiar with a Czinger 21C? For people that want to see what additive manufacturing can do, that's the place to look. It's pretty impressive.

Ben Farmer: Oh, it's a Californian hybrid hypercar where the basis of it was partly a showcase of what you could do in automotive with additive. He's done a great job. It's amazing. Let's come back to our team. Our team has been around a long time. I mean, Andy Hawkins, he's not here today but he was working in Renault Formula One during the Alonso days, using additives to produce castings for gearbox casings. I met Andy in an Airbus. When was that, 2006? And that was just when his team in Airbus were pulling additive manufacturing out of making wind tunnel models, firstly to make the tooling, and then secondly flying parts. And we were involved in various projects with the first part-metal additive part in space on the Atlantic Bird 7 satellite TV in Europe.

If that had happened in my life, I would be telling every single person I met!

Ben Farmer: Doesn't work at dinner dates and so on, haha! And then we got involved in various... We were back into Formula One. There's always been this close relationship between aerospace and Formula One. There's a lot of similarity in requirements and the types of structures you see; we did some really cool stuff with various Formula One teams back in the day. That's why we can do it. And that's why you don't see many companies doing it, because there's a lot of know-how required.

Do the lugs have to be titanium?

Ben Farmer: No, but there's a very good set of reasons why they are titanium. Firstly, they're very high specific strength. Titanium is really compatible with carbon fiber. So aluminum and carbon fiber are not at all compatible, mostly because of galvanic corrosion. You don't want to bond carbon and aluminum together, whereas titanium and aluminum are better together. And lastly, they have a very similar Poisson's ratio.

A what now?

Ben Farmer: Contracts when you stretch it. It's Poisson's ratio. So when it comes to bonding, you can bond titanium and carbon fiber together with a lot of freedom because their Poisson's ratio mismatch is not very much.

Also, I imagine that because it takes so long to make these things, it's going to be expensive anyway, so you may as well make it out of the best material.

Ben Farmer: You're absolutely right. Over the years, it's getting less so. The contribution of your material priced into your part price with additive is pretty minimal. As the machines get faster, you worry more and more about the price of your material. But yeah, it's not such a big deal with additive.

This might be a stupid question, but do you guys just get a box of titanium dust? Does it just melt it into the piece you want? Is that how this works?

Rob Gow: Well, it's a tub. But yeah, literally, we have tubs downstairs and special storage for titanium powder, which you empty into a... It's actually a giant hopper.

Ben Farmer: To be fair, Rob, it is a million-dollar hopper.

Rob Gow: It's a very shiny hopper. When you recieve it, it's literally tubs of titanium powder in the back door. Ready to go mountain bikes out the front door.

Wow. How does the custom process work? Let's say I want a silly, short travel bike that's too long and too slack. Do I just go to the website, tell you what I want, and then the lugs get printed out, and obviously they're slightly different shapes to give you those angles, and then the carbon tubes are glued in?

Rob Gow: We currently have two products. So we have the downhill bike, and the race team racing then a 150mm 29er enduro bike. That's it. We've got another three products that are coming out in the next two to six months, which I know Gee might want to talk about. But basically from those two platforms, the way the CAD, the computer and the design model are set up, it's parametric. Basically, all the different elements of the model are related and controlled by a master equation if you like. So we can take reach, head angle, head tube length, seat angle, and chain stay length, let you put those numbers into a spreadsheet, and then the model will automatically update to create the model data, the manufacturing data for the lugs. And then in turn, also tell you how long the tubes need to be to fit between those lugs.

What's happening is that the lugs are changing, so the angle of the joints changes, and then they work with the different lengths of tubes, which then get bonded into the lugs. And it's all done on very precise jigs that are able to adjust for the different geometry you require. But it's worth saying we can do forecasting, but we learned that for a lot of people it's actually pretty overwhelming because it's millimeter increments, tenth of a degree increments. Where on earth do you stop? Obviously, creating these Atherton bikes, we've created bikes that we believe are what people should be riding. But within that, we offer a huge number of sizes. So we've got 22 standard sizes for the Enduro bike.

Ben Farmer: It's probably worth saying from the customer's point of view that the experience then is you go onto our website, you put your height, arm's span, and inside leg in, and there's a fit calculator. There's a bit of code that runs on the website, which converts those numbers into the inputs for Rob's parametric model. So it goes from my height, arm span, inside leg into reach, head tube length, and so on.

Did you guys just find that people screwed up their bikes too much?

Rob Gow: It was overwhelming and it just freaked people out. And they were always put off by the process, or they didn't really know what they wanted. So, I mean, the approach we took was to give us say these 22 standard sizes so that basically we've got 10mm increments on reach. And then for every reach, there's a standard seat tube. So basically, as Ben described, the fit calculator directs people to their closest fit, but it also indicates how close they are to that fit, so whether or not it's worth considering a custom frame.

How the hell do you guys do like EN testing and stuff for that many frames?

Rob Gow: Yeah, that's a very good question. Basically, we test the toughest situation so that the frame, the frame size, and geometry, which will be subject to the highest stresses for a given load set... So basically test the worst case.

Ben Farmer: We use the German test house, EFBE, that you guys are familiar with. And we're really proud because we won't just send them one frame to do all the tests. We actually take an athlete's frame who's used it at the bike park and put that through the tests. Everything that gets sent, gets sent back afterward. So yeah, we're really proud of how that works. But yeah, we take the worst-case scenario test for that.

All right. Let's backtrack a little bit because I just heard that you guys have three new bikes in the works. I don't know how much information you want to tell us. Part of me is hoping that it's some short travel 29er for me to ride irresponsibly, but what's in the works?

Gee Atherton: Yeah. You're pretty close with that actually. The next bike to be released, which I believe is only a couple of months away now, is going to be 130mm. So a bit shorter travel, quite a playful bike. It's something we've already been testing quite a lot, and something we've had a lot of inquiries about. So a bike that is still structurally as strong as all of the other bikes due to the way it's made, just slightly lower travel. So a bit more playful, I guess you would say.

And then added to that is the bike we're super excited about, a 170mm park bike, I guess you'd call it. So the idea with this bike is going to be one bike that does everything, something Dan's been testing already at the bike park and on the local tracks, and it's by far his favorite bike so far.

Going back to additive manufacturing, was the development of the suspension similar to how you would've developed suspension for a traditional bike? You do a bunch of thinking, get some ideas out on paper, and then try it in the real world to see how it goes? Or were you able to iterate faster, or did you have to think about different things?

Rob Gow: As Ben was describing before, in terms of our approach with how to manage the loads going through the structure, it's all about directing them back to these nodes. So that then sort of governs how you lay it out, so that you're not, for example, mounting a shock halfway up the down tube or the top tube. So everything is directed back to the points of the triangle.

So that's maybe a limitation of using a lugged additive frame, is that you aren't going to put a shock mount point in the middle of a down tube or a top tube.

Rob Gow: You could still do it, but it's not good practice for a structure anyway. And then as you said, obviously the ability to iterate is key to being able to produce these very fine parts. But specifically, the DW6, which is our platform, was a great natural marriage with additive manufacturing because it inherently is a very flexible system. Essentially, with your fixed pivots, you can change the character of the suspension, and the different elements of the characteristics independently without butchering the entire feel all around the common front end. Particularly with the race team, that meant that we could have a common front triangle, and then throughout the race season we would be swapping in different chain stays and different seat stays in order to affect specific suspension characteristics, which is a particular characteristic of DW6.

When I see those two letters, DW, I think light compression tune and great under pedaling loads. Is that true with your bikes as well?

Rob Gow: I'd say so, yeah. I think at the very start when we started working with Dave Weagle, we were quite keen to say these are the main areas we really want the bike to feel and perform in. And it was a case of giving him those key points and then him creating that kinematic around it.

Ben Farmer: And that's the key marriage you've got at manufacturing technology, which gives you a great deal of freedom both in the shape of not only one part but the ability to iterate really quickly. And then the kinematic gives you a lot of freedom as well, so they work really well together.

Weight isn't everything, especially with a product like this that's obviously meant to be ridden quite hard. But I would guess that the finished product would be slightly heavier than a monocoque carbon frame. Is that true?

Ben Farmer: No, we have a really robust product. It's quite a conservative design approach to make sure it's very, very durable. When you have that, you have a very durable starting point. Weight-wise, we're on a par with full-carbon products. And the reason being is what I explained earlier about the strength of composites, being in good, nice, flat, simple shapes. And metals work well in complex shapes. We take the best of titanium, use it where it performs really well, and connect it together with very high stiffness carbon fiber. You get the best of both worlds. The trick is to make sure you don't offset that benefit by the weight of the joint. But we use these super weight-efficient joints that are very robust and really high-performance in terms of weight character.

Let's talk about the carbon tubes and those joints. First off, where do the carbon tubes come from, and are they different on different size bikes and different models of bikes?

Ben Farmer: They're Mitsubishi materials. We currently source them from New Zealand for various historic reasons. There's a very strong mast manufacturing business for sailing boats there, that's why they're the best in the world when it comes to carbon tubes. And they arrive at us in long lengths. We use different materials and dimensions in layups for each tube on the frame and different products, so we use different layups for different products, but we use the same design for different sizes.

And how are they attached to the lugs? I bet me saying glued doesn't do it justice...

Ben Farmer: Adhesive, yeah. So we use a two-part toughened epoxy adhesive. It's very similar to what you find in an aircraft, but with room temperature curing.

What if I had my Atherton frame and I damaged one of the carbon tubes. Is it feasible to send it to you to have it repaired?

Ben Farmer: You don't take the tube out. We can repair the tubes, though. So if the damage is sufficiently far away from the lug, the tubes are eminently repairable. The tubes are made with a roll wrap process, so it's very easy to reconstruct the tube to its original specification.

But you can't actually take the lug apart?

Ben Farmer: No, because we go to a lot of lengths to make sure it never comes out.

Going back to the weight, do you guys have a number handy on that one 150mm bike?

Ben Farmer: From memory, we're around 3.1 to 3.3 kilos with shock. We're middle of the range for a composite bike.

But you feel you could go lighter if you wanted?

Rob Gow: Oh, definitely. But the design spec is very much set out. In terms of a hierarchy, robustness and durability are absolutely at the top.

Ben Farmer: Yeah. So the way the bikes are designed, we apply downhill load cases, and we use infinite life design principles to the metal parts, so we can apply those downhill load cases repeatedly, indefinitely to those metal parts. And we apply a no-growth principle to the composite parts, so you can saturate the composites in barely visible impact damage. Little knocks and stones, and if you accidentally tap it with a wrench or something, you don't see any damage, but there's a little delamination that's there. It's inevitable in all composite parts. But you can apply those downhill load cases indefinitely to that frame and that condition, that tube in that condition. So given the high level of requirement we set there, the weight is quite remarkable with what you end up with.

Shifting gears, Gee, I want to go back a little bit and talk about the business itself. You're riding bikes at the highest level, going along like, oh, you know what, downhill racing, it isn't enough of a challenge, I feel like I should start a bike company. What made you want to own a bike company?

Gee Atherton: Well, I guess the idea has been there between my brother and me for a long time. It's something we've always talked about and always discussed. And working with a lot of big corporate companies, you see the pitfalls and the areas they fall short. We've often discussed the way we'd do something, or what we'd like to do if we had that opportunity. And when we started talking about it and started realizing it could be an actual realistic thing... For us, it was about creating bikes that we would've wanted to ride at different times during our lives and careers. It was about creating bikes that weren't just made because they fit that commercial sales pattern the best. It was about creating bikes that are best for the rider.

We didn't want to create a bike that you would break in six weeks, but then we would send you another one after a while, you know? It was about making a bike that was going to work well, and work for a long time, and do exactly what you wanted it to.

What does success look like for Atherton Bikes five years from now or ten years from now? What are you going to be happy with?

Gee Atherton: Well, I mean, it's a bit of an unknown for us because we don't have experience in this world, but at the same time we know exactly why we want the company to go and what we want from the company. We want it to grow in a natural, organic way that we can control and keep a good hold of. And we want it to expand; we don't want this to be a small back garage operation. We want this to become bigger and bigger.

And we truly believe in what we're doing now and the people we're doing it with. We're onto a good thing here. This is incredible. And when people get on the bike, and test it out, and come down the hill with a smile on their face, and they're excited about what they're riding, that's where we want it to go. We want people to be on bikes that they're stoked with, and we know are going to serve them well.

On the business side, one of the advantages that a lot of people talk about with additive manufacturing is being able to hold stock in powder rather than in product. And the other is just in terms of the reduced waste of shipping and the environmental impact and energy that it takes to make a frame. Is there a world in which we would see a North American outfit get approved to produce Atherton Bikes with your algorithm and your technology if they had the machine? Is that a thing?

Ben Farmer: You raise a really good point. I mean, our process inherently is very low in waste. We waste very little carbon. There are no offcuts during the manufacturing process, and the other waste from the carbon process is minimal. The metallic side of things is very, very low waste again. We would prefer not to be shipping mostly empty space in boxes around.

And so, yes, I mean, North America, in particular, is a really important market. The Atherton brand is really strong in North America. And absolutely, having local manufacturing, local-to-market manufacturing, and domestic manufacturing is very much part of our ethos and plan. Whether or not that's actually the machine running locally to market immediately is another question. There's a lot of expertise and know-how that goes into the smooth running of those machines at the moment. So we may have a plan to get there. It may not be immediately just setting up shop with a Renishaw machine. Maybe we do some bonding and assembly locally to make our shipping more efficient, so we're shipping lugs tightly packed in boxes rather than frames and a lot of empty space.

And that's powder bed fusion, right?

Ben Farmer: Yeah, laser powder bed fusion. It's the ASTM term for the technology.

And how does that compare to some of the brands that we've seen?

Ben Farmer: Our process is essentially the micro-welding process. The powder bed has different ways of realizing those technologies. So one of the other technologies, which you're making reference to is a binder jet technology. Binder jetting in metals is not as mature as laser powder bed fusion in metals. And the choice of materials is limited at the moment. So running reactive materials, aluminum, and titanium, in binder jet technologies is proprietary. A lot of the bike industry is essentially using laser powder bed fusion technologies, though if you look into the road area... I mean, I'd give the guys at Bastion a shout-out; they've been around a similar length of time as the individuals here. They also use Renishaw machines, different design approaches, different products, stiffness driven rather than strength driven.

So our technology is the one that's most established in the bike industry, but it's also most established in other sectors, in particular aerospace and Formula One applications.

Who else is doing a good job in additive manufacturing? Are there other people we should be paying attention to and thinking about?

Ben Farmer: Oh, Bastion. I mean, we have a lot of respect for what Bastion does. There are quite a few companies starting to pop up doing things. Our approach is really driven by a set of really clear principles, and I explained some of them. High specific strength titanium, high specific stiffness carbon. You keep the titanium parts small, a very weight-efficient joint. They're very clear principles. And when you see... I mean, I don't want to call out specifics, but if you look at some other examples and you apply those principles I just shared with you, you might think, well, actually, is that the best solution?

So there are lots of different variations popping up. It's nice to see and it shows that there's a lot of potential in this technology. But yeah, we've got to come at it with a very clear, defined approach and apply it in a really focused way. And it's something we're really proud of.

The Atherton's view is very long-term. It's their name above the door, and the company needs to be respectful of where they want to take things, so we'll be around a long time. And we want to be providing them with the bikes that they want to ride. I think it was, for Gee, one of the catalysts behind this. He felt that the bike industry was lagging behind the pace at which riders were developing, and this technology in this team was a way to keep the pace up at the rate the riders were developing their riding. And that hasn't stopped. I mean, God knows, it hasn't stopped.

That's our kind of mantra. And if we can be around in many years to come, still at the front of the market, providing the best technology for those riders, then it'll be a good news story.

Gee Atherton: And I think to go back to what you mentioned earlier, what it looks like for us in the future and what success would look like. For us, right now, we don't necessarily know, but we do know that building the company with a great team of people, what we've been doing already, is how we're going to find that success. The company is Dan, Rach, and I's baby and our passion. And we want people there that feel the same. And at the moment we really do. It's an amazing crew, everyone rides, everyone's into riding. They love the technology behind it, and they're a passionate bunch, and that can only create good things, that can only create good products.

And we're not in a rush to turn this into some corporate monster. We're happy for this to grow at the pace it needs to. And number one for everyone at Atherton Bikes is to create good, strong products that we would be proud of.

Ben Farmer: You guys should come over to the HQ. It's an incredible place. It's fairly modest, it's not a huge building, but it's got our Renishaw machine running on the ground floor. We've got a bonding room. It's got super clean metal floors and looks like an operating theater. We build the bikes with our world cup mechanic. The design office where Rob is right now is upstairs. It overlooks the bike park and so it's about a mile away. I mean, it's a dream place. It's just no coincidence. We're trying to realize the dream. So yeah, you guys should come over and check it out.

Let's wrap it up with Uncle Gee. Have you guys made a 3D printed run bike for Rach yet?

Gee Atherton: We're close. And this is something we get reminded of daily from Rach, so I'm sure it's going to happen very soon just to keep her quiet.

Very important addition to the catalog.

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