Lightcarbon: New LCR017-D (or Yishun R1058-D)

[neobiker]

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].

[rasch]

I agree with serge on this one. That's a luxury brand experience. I get it that you'd be willing to pay for it, but it's a big overhead. Not even Sworks etc do such thing.

Execution time, complexity and scalability just don't simply justify it. In any case, if I'm not mistake n you can ask LC or any other to take a pic and send it to you before they ship. But it's not an approval in most cases. It's just to show the end result.

[neobiker]

I agree with serge on this one. That's a luxury brand experience. I get it that you'd be willing to pay for it, but it's a big overhead. Not even Sworks etc do such thing.

Execution time, complexity and scalability just don't simply justify it. In any case, if I'm not mistake n you can ask LC or any other to take a pic and send it to you before they ship. But it's not an approval in most cases. It's just to show the end result.

Maybe the manufacturers can show us they can be more innovative than stiffer, lighter and more aero frames.

[Serge_K]

The challenge is you are setting the quality bar really high

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.

I agree with serge on this one. That's a luxury brand experience. I get it that you'd be willing to pay for it, but it's a big overhead. Not even Sworks etc do such thing.

Execution time, complexity and scalability just don't simply justify it. In any case, if I'm not mistake n you can ask LC or any other to take a pic and send it to you before they ship. But it's not an approval in most cases. It's just to show the end result.

+1

Maybe the manufacturers can show us they can be more innovative than stiffer, lighter and more aero frames.

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.

[neobiker]

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.