This facility also hosts marketing, advanced development, and HR team members to round out this tightly-knit group of SRAMmies. Quarq power meters are designed, tested, built, and shipped out of this do-it-all facility on the western edge of South Dakota.
Beautiful views, open roads, and a close team of employees are what thrive in the foothills. The 80, square foot facility is home to manufacturing for Zipp wheels as well as critical office functions for SRAM and all of its brands. Although this configuration was not an entirely new innovation in itself, Patterson's design was indexed, meaning it easily clicked to numbered positions corresponding with specific gears.
Day assembled a group of investors in the summer of and set up an office in the Fulton-Carroll entrepreneurial incubator building run by the Industrial Council of Northwest Chicago.
The company ended with about a dozen enthusiastic employees, some culled from Day's former employer Molex. Day became the company's president while Patterson served as head of research and development. Scott Molina, Ironman champion, was among the triathletes who enthusiastically embraced the product, originally called the DB shifter. Its location at the end of the handlebars proved troublesome, however, and it was repositioned between the grips and the center of the handlebars.
The product later evolved into the Grip Shift. Cannondale began using the CX model of the shifter on its mountain bikes in A couple of years later, after being hounded by SRAM for years at trade shows, Trek and Specialized Bicycle Components finally introduced Grip Shift as standard equipment on their hybrid bikes, a smaller market. The bike components business was then dominated by Japan's Shimano Inc.
The company shipped more than , of its SRT shifter sets to leading bike brands. An office opened in Dortmund, Germany, in and moved to The Netherlands the next year. The company shipped two million shifters for the model year, reported Crain's Chicago Business, and five million for the next. By the mids, Grip Shifts were specified on half of the bicycles sold at independent bike shops in the United States and dominated the U.
Having the test center close to the manufacturing aides in keeping the production moving with less time taken out of the process for quality control. Perhaps the most interesting or at least revealing process was the creation of their machined steel cassettes. That steel billet is then forged into a rough shape and then machined into that familiar cassette shape.
Needless to say there is a lot of machining involved hence the endless bays of CNC machines. Wheels you say? Why yes, wheels are assembled here as well. At least high end options like the Roam wheels rolling off the assembly line. The wheels are laced by hand and then go through a sequence of hand and machine truing, tensioning, and stress relieving. One of the more impressive custom machines was this cassette assembler. The rather large device feeds individual gears and spacers through the different hoppers and out pops the completed main block of a cassette.
Due to the noise and movement of the massive machines involved many of the actual production tools for tasks like stamping and forging are located at two other facilities. However, most of the finishing is done on site at Shen Kang including robotic sanding, and hand polishing.
Products that need to be painted are loaded on the hanging conveyor and moved throughout the paint facility. More quality control for the appearance of the painted products. This machine was actually pretty fun to watch, as it snares each box with a packing strap. Walking around Taichung specifically, you get the feeling that a large portion of the population commutes by motor scooter, while the rest resort to public transport which is excellent.
Regardless, SRAM tries to make it as easy as possible for their employees to commute by bike to work with a free bike shop, storage, and shower facilities available for use. Why is this RockShox Argyle in a glass case? It represents the 1,,th fork made in both their Shen Kang and Suzhou factories in a single year. After all of that, it still feels like we just scratched the surface.
From the pictures, they literally have them laying around all over the place! Everything breaks. Entropy and all that. SRAM is serious business right there! Shimano ought to be the same. SRAM is american and Shimano is japanese. Each one with their own particular style. Both are great. Well at least that answers the question that had been rattling around in my head since last night: I know Shimano uses bushing pulleys, does SRAM as well?
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