00:00No Western media has ever been allowed through those gates.
00:04Until now.
00:1020,000 bikes a day.
00:138 million bikes a year.
00:15There's a pretty high chance that your bike was made in one of these mega factories that you've never heard
00:21of.
00:27Well, they've just crashed the world tour party and now we've been given an exclusive access all areas pass to
00:35a brand that is changing cycling forever.
00:38This is China.
00:40Welcome to XDS.
00:46China, the place where 63% of the world's bikes start their lives.
00:53But forget what you think you know about Chinese manufacturing, because this isn't just any factory.
00:58This is the XDS factory, one of the biggest, most influential and fastest growing players in the cycling industry.
01:06And for the first time ever, we've been given exclusive, unprecedented access to see how they pull it off.
01:14128 CNC machines.
01:16Yes.
01:17That is incredible.
01:19In this feature length special, we'll be taking a deep dive into the tech,
01:24unraveling 30 years of carbon fiber expertise and getting hands-on helping birth their flagship bike,
01:30the XLAB AD9, the bike of XDS Astana.
01:37So where better to find out how a world tour bike is made than here in Shenzhen at the XDS
01:43factory,
01:43where I believe they're doing more of the processes in house than just about anyone else.
01:49So today we're going to follow one of these from start to finish.
01:54To help us out, we're going to get shown around by vice president of engineering, James.
01:59So with a nine step bike building process ahead of us, we better get cracking.
02:09So welcome to XDS Carbon Tech, where, well, this is the carbon fiber facility, where we're about to have a
02:16tour of how a bike goes from an idea in an engineer's brain to a reality.
02:23And up there, those four words, well, that means the pursuit of perfection.
02:34Okay, so step one, this is one of the molds that the carbon is going to get laid up into
02:39to create one of the XLAB AD9 frames.
02:42That's a very natural way.
02:43Okay, so we use the mold that we bought back when we bought before we bought this material.
02:51It has to have a wide range.
02:55The wide range is only 0.5mm.
03:00The size of the size is about 400mm.
03:04So, the size of the size of the size is about 800-1000mm.
03:10The material needs to be better.
03:13And then, the size of the size of the size is about the size of the size of the size
03:20of the size of the size.
03:21That's the case.
03:23XTS, because they're doing this on such a massive scale,
03:26they've tried to automate as much of the process as possible.
03:29But then, as we'll see in a minute, there's still a lot of things that are going on by hand.
03:34The more nuanced tasks, so the polishing of the molds,
03:37because any errors here, it's just going to create a load of problems down the line.
03:42And that's why XTS wants to keep this in-house.
03:45This thing weighs 400 kilos per slab.
03:49So, I'm going to try and pick one up.
03:57It weighs a ton.
03:59Well, actually, it weighs about half a ton.
04:02Not a whole ton.
04:13So, this is basically the polishing process.
04:16Well, they're polishing by hand, so that they can check that it's as smooth as possible.
04:20Because any errors here, carbon fiber, when they lay it up, is really susceptible to,
04:27if there's any defects, then it's going to transfer into the completed bike.
04:41So, this is it, the complete mold, ready to lay up some carbon fiber in.
04:46And there's 15 components here.
04:48The tolerances have to be, like, minuscule.
04:52So, this has got a margin of error of 0.05 millimeters.
