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I enjoy visiting bike factories. Sure, part of the fun is seeing how other people do things differently than I did them (in another life I managed a couple of such factories). Most of my interest, though, is in seeing how the employees work. Do they seem happy? Do they take pride in their workmanship? That's how you know when a factory's well managed or not.

I'd heard a lot about ABG's factory. Everyone I'd known who'd taken a factory tour came out wide-eyed. Frankly, though, I didn't see anything I hadn't seen before. I used to oversee the Merlin operation in Cambridge, Mass. But Merlins made in another titanium fabrication facility gave me a novel perspective, seeing how these Merlins were built compared to the way they came off the line in New England.

The processes were not especially different. I suppose the biggest functional difference is in the equipment. "Old Merlin" had a lot of old, heavy mills and lathes that were bought at auction. As the old, New England manufacturing base was crumbling and businesses were failing Merlin, then a fledgling company, picked up what old equipment it could afford.

Litespeed didn't bother to relocate the equipment to Chattanooga when it shifted the Merlin factory south. It would've been much too expensive to move, as some of those old, big, red Cincinnati lathes must weigh twice what a lathe of similar capacity would weigh today. Besides, ABG's machine shop equipment is relatively modern, and the result is that tolerances are tighter and the bikes are stronger and last longer.

Take for example this hole saw mitering a tube in a horizontal mill. Titanium is twice is hard to cut as steel, which is three times harder to cut than aluminum. After awhile your tools and chucks wear out and you just can't hold the same tight tolerances. When you put all the tubes together in a tacking jig you can see the result. You see space between the miters. The weld bead on a ti bike is small, and it's easy to not get the penetration you need if the miter isn't precise. What's the result of an imprecise miter? You frame will break earlier than it otherwise would.

You'll never see a frame's bad miters as a consumer. But walking through the factory, one interest of mine was in looking at tacked frames, before they went to finish welding. A frame is being tacked to the left. After the tubes are mitered they're placed in a tacking jig, and in a typical high-end factory that makes both custom and production bikes you'll either have "dedicated" jigs like this one — where the dimensions of the blocks that fixture the tubes are more/less fixed — and you'll have an adjustable jig for custom frames. If you look closely you can see the violet arc of the electrical pulse just at the head tube / top tube junction. By the way, titanium welding is very difficult, and it differs in this one chief respect. If you'll notice the pneumatic lines connected to the frame joints, these are used to "purge" the frames of air. You can't have oxygen present when welding titanium. When cheaper ti bikes fail, it is often a result of the "cancer" of oxidation that eats through the welds over time. A properly made titanium bike will never rust, under any circumstances and in any conditions.

What I saw in all these tacked frames (frames with tubes that just have a small tack-weld holding them into place — finish welding is a secondary step) were miters that were consistently tight and precise. This was not the case at "Old Merlin." That is, the miters were often very precise up in Cambridge, but occasionally not so. It was not due to a lack of enthusiasm and attention to detail, but to overworked and antiquated equipment. (Even so, Old Merlin's miters better than 95% of those in the pro bike marketplace.)

I spoke at length with the welders. Cosmetic TIG welders make up a unique group of workers, because they know their workmanship is what will be most closely scrutinized. You don't see the work of the machinists when you look at a frame (except for those who write the code for CNC dropouts and braze-ons). You go straight to the welds when judging the frame.

One of the welders was just about ready to finish-weld a bottom bracket when I asked him, "What's under that compound miter, where the down and seat tubes come together? Do you weld that joint, even though it's invisible to the consumer?"

"Yeah, we weld it," he said in the same deep drawl with which all the ABG factory workers speak. "If that joint's not welded, the frame'll squeek, and pretty soon it'll come back for warranty with a crack."

Yeah, it will, as a matter of fact. That was an Old Merlin discovery, from quite a few years back. But not all bike companies resist taking shortcuts these days, and it's one of the little reasons why there's some comfort in buying from those who know how a bike functions, and who take pride in their work.

Old Merlin had a master welder by the name of Bob Sikes, and he was known and revered inside the industry. Are these Litespeed/Merlin welders of that quality? They're darn close.

I didn't really have to ask who it was who did the frame alignment. Titanium is very ductile, but it has a lot of memory. You've got to coax it quite a bit before it deforms the way you want. You've got to be of a special caliber to do that all day long and you can see in the photo, perhaps, the sort of person it takes to do that job for eight hours a day.

Steve Kirby is the shop foreman at American Bicycle Group. He's an Ironman veteran, as is ABG president Mark Lynskey, marketing manager Herbert Krebel, and about half a dozen other employees. I'd guess there are more triathletes at ABG than practitioners of any other sport. There is some irony in this. Yes, QR's TiPhoons are made here, but the great majority of frames coming off this line are Litespeed and Merlin road frames, and a fair number of triathletes make up the factory workforce.

ABG transformed itself from a bare frame company to a complete bike company over the past two years. But as is the case with every such bike maker, you'll find yourself chasing your tail if the only thing you do is outfit your bikes with other people's parts. One of the companies ABG inherited when it bought the bike division I used to run was a little component maker called Real Design (QR bought Real Design in 1998). I must say that ABG didn't know what it had when it bought Saucony's bike division (QR, Real Design and Merlin). Real Design was a ready-made house component and wheel brand, but it lay fallow the past three years.

Not any more, however. ABG has enlisted the services of Steve Hed (left) as consultant to help with the aerodynamics of its tri and TT frames, and for help in making a house brand wheel for its bikes. Hed is not making the wheels for ABG, but helping ABG set up its own wheel manufacturing facility. These are carbon wheels and will be sold under the resurrected Real Design name. Hed has schooled Kirby (right) and ABG in how to make deep carbon rims, and after this most recent visit (Hed and I toured the factory together) Hed told me that some of the wheel presses and ovens Kirby has built for this project are better than some of what Hed is using in his headquarters in White Bear Lake.

As I was flying home from Chattanooga, I thought of Shimano and how, in a way, the stories of the two companies are parallel. ABG has a precision factory. The Lynskeys were titanium fabricators long before they were ever bike makers. When they came into the bike biz, they were considered outsiders by the industry, and they've had to earn their way in.

Likewise, if you go back far enough, Shimano was a company whose business was cold forging aluminum (it wasn't a component company). Throughout the 20th century Shimano became more and more of a dedicated bike company, and its roots as a forging contractor are now a distant memory.

Now, when one tours the ABG factory, one sees titanium sheet being fabricated into shaped tubes for TiPhoons and Blades, and all manor of brakes, shears, bending machines, cutting machines, welders and finishing equipment designed to take raw materials to finished frames. But you don't see anything else besides bike frames (and now wheels) made here anymore. It's taken a generation for the Lynskeys to go from, "Oh, and by the way, we build bikes too," to dedicated bike makers. No, I wasn't awed by the factory, it was just a slightly (and frequently above slightly) more efficient, precise version of what I'd grown used to seeing in Cambridge.

But at base, it's just a bike factory, managed by triathletes and road racers, whose workers are triathletes and road racers. And Seven is supposed to be the brand with all the cultural authenticity?