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.
02:42We will say we need to buy that on the XLAB AD9 frames.
02:48The Ром that we bought before, we need to buy that on-the-loop to have a lot of the
02:53revenue.
02:55The volume of the size is just about 0.5s.
03:23XTS, because they're doing this on such a massive scale, they've tried to automate as much of the process as
03:28possible.
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 moulds, because any errors here is just going to create a
03:41load of problems down the line, and that's why XTS wants to keep this in-house.
03:45This thing weighs 400 kilos per slab, so I'm going to try and pick one up.
03:52Yee-haw!
03:54No.
03:57It weighs a tonne, well, actually, it weighs about half a tonne, not a whole tonne.
04:13So this is basically the polishing process, well, they're polishing by hand so that they can check that it's as
04:19smooth as possible, because any errors here, carbon fiber, when they lay it up, is really susceptible to, if there's
04:28any defects, then it's going to transfer into the completed bike.
04:41So this is it, the complete mould, ready to lay up some carbon fiber in, and there's 15 components here.
04:48The tolerances have to be, like, minuscule, so this has got a margin of error of 0.05 millimetres.
04:56OK.
04:56OK.
04:56OK.
