You are far too kind and generous @glepore thank you!

I'm still reviewing TanTan's latest gravel frame so I don't wanna ruin my good graces with them until all the video content has been fulfilled. Also I suspect they wouldn't be keen on sending the X68 for reviews since they don't really wanna be promoting clones in public's eye. The X38 Scott Foil clone I paid for myself.

TanTan would most likely want me to commit financially to the X68. I'll see if I can negotiate haha. It's 2 month turnaround anyway.

I guess you should do more penetration test to make content

Check the seat post angle and whether this makes it less aggressive?

The new high-performance carbon spoke wheels have been designed and tested for durability, light weight and reliability. Here are the key features:
Wheel Depth: 50mm
Inner Width: 21mm
Spoke Count: 20H
Spoke Material: 3.4mm carbon spokes (lightweight and very strong)
Hubs: Custom designed hubs with steel bearings for smooth and long-lasting performance
Total Wheel Weight: 1200g.
To ensure these wheels meet the needs of serious riders, we conducted extensive testing. Here are the results:

1. Carbon Spoke Tensile Strength Test
The carbon spokes were tested to the breaking point and can withstand a maximum of 400kgf of tension before breaking. This shows excellent strength and reliability even under extreme loads.

2. Simulated Road Fatigue Test
The wheels were put through a simulated ride of 1000km at an average speed of 25km/h.
In this test, the wheels passed over 75,000 simulated obstacles to replicate real-world road conditions.
The wheels showed no signs of structural failure or noticeable wear, demonstrating their durability over long rides.

3. Torque fatigue testing
Front wheel: disc brake side tested 50,000 times under high torque conditions.
Rear wheel: disc brake side and drive side tested 50,000 times each.
The wheels maintained their integrity throughout the test, demonstrating excellent resistance to torque-related stresses, especially under heavy braking and acceleration.

Any price for this wheeler?

As for the price increases, we might want to wait a bit, I expect it is because the anniversary sales is coming and store are jacking up the prices so that the discount seems bigger.

I wrote "unrideable garbage".
Video sign off and various check lists would sure be nice. Alibaba offers, for a fee, something like that.
It probably doesnt make economical sense, but factories could choose to offer the white glove service as an option, & see what happens. In essence, Hambini suggested that with his made up Z1-2-3.

Fun fact: people say they want organic and stuff that takes better care of the workers, nature and all. Then IRL, they dont buy it, & go for the cheaper option instead. En masse, people simply want to pay less for stuff when nobody is watching.

QC is supposed to reject the unrideable garbage, it's part of the job description, as you must draw the line somewhere.
However, mistakes are unavoidable; I just want to receive something that's 90+% fine. Expecting 100% is unrealistic (80/20 rule).
I think the current system broadly works, and this forum is great: you pick factories that in your estimation are the least likely to cause you headache.

+1


I have no interest in my OEM carbon bike factory hiring Loulou the duchess, chief happiness officer, to send me tiktok reels of my frame being built & what her colleagues had for breakfast. I dont want to pay for it. I want my factory focused on design & execution.

For the last part, I was thinking about camera well place during manufacturing, automatic tagging and computer vision [please don’t write AI] to detect any defect and share the input for decisions. Nowadays, you can even have 3D mesh of the bike with a few pictures, higher resolutions of these meshes would allows us to spot obvious quality issues.

At their scale, a raspberry pi v5 and some accelerated hardware could probably handle the load.

Moreover, if this really work at scale and somehow autonomously, we would probably have a trickle down effect as big purchaser would see this a double insurance and the price small retailer would probably marginale compared to the price of the frame.

That being said a short for your frame which is fed to a computer vision algorithm would honestly be a good QC for us, as it would already better than any offer from western brand.

You'd need a robust ERP to make this viable, so that the right video is uploaded in the right place and made available to the right client. It would be nice, but feels unnecessary. Also, it would slow things down, because you'd have customers having to effectively sign off on the frame, that can easily add 1 week on average, because now between paint and shipping, you have an extra stage, extra storage, and so on.

Alternatively, and more simply, it's called basic QC, where the factory isnt supposed to ship unrideable garbage. Where i come from, people take pride in the stuff they make. Right or wrong, If i receive shit in a box, i feel personally insulted.

The challenge is you are setting the quality bar really high, even high end Swiss watch makers have non zero quality issues (I know as my mother was working for a luxury brand).

As for video sharing, we can just have email exchange via mails, Youtube can also host private videos, so I think this would be an acceptable technological solution.

As for the delay, if consumers are paying, why not? As for an additional week of delay/shipping, I think most would be happy if this ensures there is less risk on quality and provides an additional quality review. I waited 4 months for one order, one week would not have made any difference.

Finally, I think the argument of quality should be refined: I think the workers also want to make products of high quality, but we don't know the environment/conditions in which they work or of they have the allotted time to make good product. [See what happens in fast fashion for example].

Where did you see it?

You should make a new thread, and we will answer you there.

But tldr; TanTan is safe.

Light Carbon and Yishun are great, Velobuild has many users and no one died, Carbonda, Hongfu, ICan are other good brands. Check Youtube for more info.