The opening of the Velosione frame production facility in Germany is an important step for production close to the market and a more flexible supply chain. This year the company celebrated the commercial launch of its first injection-molded open-mold carbon city e-bike frame. The company also introduced carbon frame recycling.
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Velosione has a daily capacity of 1,000 frames per mold. “A single operator can produce a complete frame in just below 90 seconds,” explains Velosione general manager Harald Schweitzer. “When it comes of the machine it is ready for assembly with an excellent surface finish, without welding lines. Thanks to our high production volumes our production cost drastically undercuts those of the traditional Asia made aluminium frames, while reducing the CO2 footprint by more than 50 percent.”
Partnership
This technology is the result of 5 years of cutting edge development from experts from Velosione, PlasticInnovation and Coleo Design. Velosione is part of ISOCO, a company that specialises in the development of plastic products, mold design, mold manufacturing and production of laminated and injection molded parts on 30 injection molding machines with clamp forces from 40 to 2300 tons. ISOCO runs a R&D department of 100 people and produces for the logistic-, automotive- and construction industry in particular.
Sustainable production
The bicycle industry has seen other projects in the past with injection-molded frames but they were not successful. Thanks to the combination of carbon composite materials and fluid molding-technology in injection-molding, Velosione now claims to be “capable of producing lightweight, very stiff frames with hollow-tube geometry with until now unseen design-freedom.
Open-mold e-bike frame
The sustainable frames are 100 percent recyclable, and have a 50 percent reduction in carbon emissions during production compared with the current state of the art technology.”“We have finally reached a defining milestone in the production of bicycle frames,” says Harald Schweitzer. “With our first open-mold Carbon City e-bike frame we prove that just-in-time economical production of light-weight, A-class surface frames with very high stiffness in Germany is possible.”“The frames provide higher stiffness than aluminium frames in comparable geometry. With this, we have brought back large scale and environmental friendly bicycle frame production from Asia to Germany. Our plant in Saalfeld already has a capacity to produce up to 3 million units per year.”
