In our journey, which is now getting close to 15 years, Curve has evolved as a brand, touching various aspects such as events, rides, community engagement, product design and development, outsourced manufacturing and also in-house manufacture. In this blog post, we delve into our product development and manufacturing processes, shedding light on the lengths we go to before we release products to the market. We will focus on our design process, strengths in manufacturing in China and Taiwan, our stringent quality control measures, and our commitment to innovation. Join us as we take a brief trip into our workflow and how we approach the serious world of design and manufacturing.
It all starts with the design:
Curve has a history deeply rooted in adventure cycling. Our ideas don’t come out of thin air, they are thought up and sculpted by our adventures on the road and trails. All Curve staff, past and present, are keen cyclists and most have taken part in bikepacking events in Australia, where we are based, or around the world. Many on our team are highly experienced bikepackers and cycle tourers.
Jimmy Rostlund, Curve's Technical Lead, and seasoned frame builder, has the job of bringing these ideas to life. We don’t just draw sketches of our product ideas on napkins and ask external outsourced production teams to turn them into physical products. This is the typical approach taken by many mid-tier brands. We don’t trust that approach - it often results in products that can’t be trusted on rugged adventures; at least that has been our experience. When those who design and engineer the products are not fully invested in them, the quality of the final product often varies.
Jimmy working on a UDH Compatible dropout
Jimmy is well-versed in CAD and builds up 3D models of all our new product ideas from scratch. We agonise over the geometry of our frames, size by size, studying the fit data and set up of the thousands of bikes we have sold to ensure new models best fit the needs of our customers. We carefully consider toe-overlap for the smaller sizes and front end elevation for the larger sizes.
A bike is more than just geometry though. That is where in-house design and engineering as well as a robust testing programme becomes critical. Sure you could send a frame geometry chart to a random fabricator in China and ask for a titanium frame. But which tubes will they select? What grade of titanium? What tube diameter and wall thickness will they choose for each tube? How will each tube be butted? How will the tubes be shaped? Did you know that slight ovalisation of certain tubes in the right places means the difference between passing the most common test standards or not? What tolerances are needed for each dimension? What tolerances will be placed on the bottom-bracket alignment (relative angular alignment and offset) to avoid endless bottom bracket creaks that are impossible to solve? At Curve we agonise over all these details - these details drastically change the ride quality and durability of a frame. They are the difference between a beautiful bike frame that you can trust and a few pieces of metal welded together.
Jimmy painstakingly analyses every one of these details. This ensures all our products are not only original but pushing the cycling market forward. Bringing market-leading products to release requires a huge amount of work behind the scenes.
A real benefit of our team’s extensive experience is that everyone can get involved in the new product design process. Whether it is the location of the bottle cage mounts or a neat way to tidy up a problem, these ideas aren’t just limited to our technical team, everyone gets involved. Input often comes from real world testing, where you encounter problems that you can’t always find in the lab.
The Power of Asian Manufacturing
At Curve, we've always been transparent about the fact that most of our products are manufactured in Asia, primarily in China and Taiwan. Our products are manufactured in clean, safe facilities that rival or surpass those in any other parts of the world. Each of our key production partner has undergone a factory audit to ensure they are clean, safe and provide fair wages and conditions for the workers.
While some may associate products made in these regions with inferior quality, that thought process is just plain wrong. High volume, specialised production does not occur in China or Taiwan because of cost - those days are over. Cheaper labour can be found in a variety of other countries throughout Asia and Africa. The selection of China and Taiwan is made on the basis of skill and quality at commercial scales. The quality and skill that exists in China and Taiwan for high end technology and technical manufacturing are unmatched. Steel, titanium and carbon bike production fit into this category. We confidently stand by our Asian production partners - they are true masters in their craft.
We employ a dedicated staff member in China who is responsible for staying in constant contact with our production partners, visiting them regularly and working through detailed quality control inspections of production runs. This is critical to ensuring our production partners fully understand our style of riding, the intended use of our products and exactly why we are so pedantic. We don’t want to be stuck in the desert, hundreds of kilometers away from safety, with failed fork mounts.
The simple translation of the hanging flags is "Safety First" in one of our key frame factories.
In-House Manufacturing Challenges:
As an Australian brand, the question of why we don't manufacture our products on Australian soil often comes up. The answer is straightforward. Quality and speed. To match the standard of our partners in China and Taiwan for titanium, steel and carbon production would take 10 years and millions of dollars of capital. The best use of our skill, and capital, at Curve is to focus on the new product design and engineering work, and build strong partnerships with production partners who want to be the best. In this way we can work together to forever improve quality and develop innovative products.
Our production partners have been selected because they truly want to be the best in their craft. We have worked with many of them for over ten years now. These relationships are genuine partnerships were we work together and push hard to build the best products possible. We have worked together with our production partners to develop new ways to produce frames which have allowed us to hit tolerances we didn’t think were possible ten years ago.
For carbon products, many high-end producers stay in their comfort zone and produce high-volume quality parts without many improvements year to year. Some of the technology is not fit for purpose for our style of riding. Our carbon production partners are not like this. They are receptive to our ideas even if they are difficult to execute at scale. After plenty of engineering meetings, together we always come up with solutions that can be produced. As an example, we have worked with our production partners to drastically improve fork mounting technology with newly designed mounts that pierce the fork leg. This has resulted in class-leading fork products with unmatched load carrying capacities on our newest forks.
Developing In-House Manufacturing Capability
While most production happens off-shore, we are bringing some elements of production back to our facilities in Australia and Spain. Melbourne had a thriving bike manufacturing industry in the 1890s and early 1900s and it would be wonderful to bring that back along with some other great brands that also exist in our hometown.
We have started to introduce high-end hybrid carbon-titanium bikes, such as the AIR Belgie, AIR Belgie 3D, AIR Kev, CarboKev and 00Kev, which are assembled and finished in Australia. We have been building our expertise and confidence in titanium-carbon bonding in recent years. Expect to see more of these products released in the coming years as they pass through our development and testing hurdles.
Jimmy bonding the 00Kev chain stay into the dropout lug at 36 Bond St
Every Curve product is treated as a scientific experiment, validated not just in our lab and on the trails, but through lab testing at labs including German testing experts, EFBE, at their testing facilities in Germany and Taiwan. We’re committed to producing the best products we can; the kind that can be trusted in the world’s toughest races and on the most unforgiving terrain.
AIR Belgie 3D frame during an EFBE test
Collectively our team has decades of frame-building experience and we are eager to further develop our skills. Aside from bonding, our in-house fabrication capability has allowed us to imagine, design and fabricate prototypes, conduct sampling, perform surface finishing and painting, and engage in other small-scale fabrication and repairs.
Custom paint is something we also do in Australia through our partner brand, Candy Factory Paintworks (CFP). Established by Steve Varga, a Curve co-founder, CFP not only finishes our AIR models but also brings custom paint ideas to life. Titanium is notoriously difficult to paint, but Steve is a highly skilled artist and craftsman. Every week he develops artwork concepts for customers and makes them real. This gives all our customers the opportunity to own a true one-of-a-kind forever bike.
Steve in the CFP studio masking a 00Kev fork
The Importance of a Vast Network of Factories:
To meet our evolving and growing production demands, we have established a robust network of production partners. Key manufacturers form the backbone of our production, complemented by backup partners within each expertise category. This diverse supply network ensures that each product receives the necessary attention and expertise. We collaborate with factories specialising in specific processes that cover a wide range of applications, from carbon manufacture, CNC machining, 3D printing, warehousing, packaging, product assembly, independent lab testing and much more.
Carbon rim production starts with rolls of raw material pre-prepared by hand before being CNC cut
Brand new shiny tooling for our Carbon Walmer Bars
Inspecting the new tooling at one of our carbon production partners
Maintaining Stringent Quality Control
Quality control is paramount at Curve, and we have implemented comprehensive measures to ensure the high standards are met by all our products. We have a dedicated staff member based in China; he's a self-confessed bike nerd and frame builder from California. He conducts regular visits to our partner factories and testing facilities, carrying our custom-made specialised QC toolkit, meticulously inspecting each frame using the same tools employed at Curve HQ. This process ensures that every frame coming off the production line undergoes thorough inspection, guaranteeing precise repeatability and adherence to our design specifications.
Regular visits to our carbon production partners are also carried out and production runs are thoroughly checked as part of our standard QC processes. We have a catalogue of known issues that we have seen over time and we’re constantly looking out for these and new issues.
Because Jimmy, our Technical Lead, is on the ground in Melbourne, all final checks carried out on products are completed by the same person who designed them in the first place. This ensures complete accuracy and confidence that we are manufacturing our products as they were designed, to specification and to the demanding standards we require.
Just a small part of our QC toolkit
The Diverse Landscape of Titanium Frames
With the increasing number of new brands selling titanium frames, it's important to distinguish between the various quality and price tiers.
You can contact a random factory through Alibaba and ask for a titanium frame. While the price might be attractive you just don’t know if it can be trusted. Has it been tested for the intended use? Are the tolerances sufficient to ensure your bottom bracket won’t creak endlessly or your gear shifting is always clunky.
The next price point is from brands who take a generic approach, offering frames produced with little optimisation for their intended use. Their frame models are often selected from catalogs or built by just supplying basic geometry and completely outsourcing the design and engineering work to the factory. If you look closely, you can see similar finishing parts on the bikes from multiple brands. The same frames and tubesets are recycled across multiple brands. Many of these frames look much like a quality titanium frame, at first glance, but look closer and you’ll see they are built without much concern for testing. The low price tag is alluring, but it comes with caution. These frames are typically made in small aging workshops using basic materials backed with little to no testing facilities.
At the other end of the spectrum, boutique builders provide custom-sized, one-by-one frame fabrication, delivering exceptional craftsmanship but at a much higher price point. While these frames are expertly produced, some of these boutique builders do not subject their models to rigorous lab testing. While it might surprise you(it certainly surprised us), we have seen plenty of quality control issues concerning tube formation and tolerances on frames that have very high price-points from reputable builders. Testing and quality control processes are important matters to research and discuss with custom frame-builders to ensure you get a product that will last the test of time.
Curve is somewhat unique in this landscape. We offer stock-sized affordable premium bikes, and also custom bikes on request, but with tolerances that are equal to or better than the best of the bespoke custom builders. We are confident of this because we benchmark our frames against these brands. We have deep experience in adventure cycling and we’re pedantic about testing protocols. We strive for the same level of perfection as boutique builders, engaging in many steps of the production process and working closely with our partner factories to ensure precision, tolerance, and overall excellence is achieved every time. The difference is that we ramp this up to an industrial scale.
On the service side, we do everything we can to ensure the best possible bike fit for our customers. With staff who are experts in bike fitting, we draw up finished bikes with detailed customer fit data to ensure the finished product will work and look as expected. For completely exhaustive bike-fitting for customers in Melbourne we have a strong partnership with professional bike fitter, Riderfit, to ensure the best possible outcome.
With our in-house developments in recent years, we are now able to compete with the ultra premium custom-sized, one-of-a-kind bikes in our own Curve way. With models like AIR Belgie 3D, CarboKev and 00Kev, we can offer personalized geometry, custom paint and detailed fitting advice.
Part of a batch of our popular titanium GXR frame, nearing the end of fabrication
Conclusion
Curve's design process and production partnership network are the backbone of our product development process. By leveraging the expertise of our Asian manufacturing partners and maintaining stringent quality control measures, we deliver exceptional products to our customers. Our commitment to innovation, collaboration, and attention to detail sets us apart from many brands operating in our space. We remain dedicated to our mission of providing world-class products that push the boundaries of adventure cycling.