“We’ll just make our own carbon products…”
At Hope we strive to keep every process of our production in-house to ensure complete control. If we need to learn a new process, we'll apply our engineering experience and spend time with experts in the field until we perfect this process. Carbon fibre production was no different.
We brought in engineers who were instrumental in the success of British Cycling track frames and components. One of them became so involved he stayed to be employed full-time in our purpose built carbon facility.
Carbon fibre might seem like a major change of direction from our tradition of aluminium, however both share many technologies. The main being the CNC machining. The same machines we use to manufacture our aluminium components are perfect for producing moulds for carbon fibre products.
The ethos behind everything we do has been to make things we want to ride ourselves. Whether this is a headset for a road bike or now our own carbon fibre frame.
We never want a reason not to ride, so we always try to create the most reliable and best performing products we can.
Everything we make goes through extensive evaluation and testing before even being considered for production. One of the advantages of having so many enthusiastic cyclists working for us is the wide range of abilities and environments this allows us to test our products in.
All our products are born out of a passion for riding. We're not looking at what products would be the best from a financial point of view, it's about what we want to ride ourselves. The theory being - if we want to these products the chances are most other riders will too this was no different with making a frame.
We made the bike we wanted to ride. (the HB.160) It turned out, other riders liked it too; leading to our second frame and more of an all rounder (the HB.130).
Once the initial moulds have been produced, the actual process of laying up carbon fibre is very labour intensive.
We rely on our skilled and experienced staff to perform this critical process. Why would we trust this to an outside organisation? As always we like to keep control in Barnoldswick.
From here, our carbon department grew as well as our reputation, leading to a meeting with British Cycling and our next Frame the HB.T.