Cyclist hasn’t visited the Apple headquarters, but we bet if we did it would look and feel rather a lot like Trek. Pristine composite labs, futuristic paint shops and cleanly lit reception areas mingle with softly furnished meeting rooms, beer-dispensing coolers and workshops where Hawaiian-shirted engineers knock up homemade anodising equipment in between building bikes for Frank Schleck’s offspring while listening to Dr John.
The company operates entirely on renewable energy; cycling to work earns employees money for food at the organic cafe; in-house baristas brew coffee all day long; an on-site ‘Wellness Center’ keeps everyone trim, and manufacturing workers are gifted their very own bicycles. Next to each desk is at least one bike primed for the lunchtime ride – either a brutal road excursion or a mountain-bike jam on Trek’s very own bike park, maintained by a full-time trail builder.
Yet beneath the clubhouse veneer is a highly calculated, efficient operation that’s almost as watertight as the packaging for Van Holten’s Pickle-In-A-Pouch pickled cucumbers that are manufactured down the road. For at Trek virtually every stage of the process of making bicycles, from the tooling of moulds through to the marketing photography, has been brought in-house. Here, buried among the prairies and farms of the sleepy Wisconsin town of Waterloo, Trek is very much in control, and the people inside this well-oiled machine every bit as dedicated to their work as they are to their cycling. The company’s international trade shows aren’t called ‘Trek World’ for nothing.
Trek bikes
Trek was founded in 1976 by the late Dick ‘the Big Guy’ Burke and South African Bevil Hogg. Their previous venture was the Stella Bicycle Shop in Madison, a university town a few miles west from Trek’s current HQ. One shop grew into two but, despite grand plans to build a nationwide chain, trading was cut short after the French factory that made Stella bikes burnt down, and the pair closed their doors in 1975. ‘Bevil was a very convincing guy, and he got my father to agree to starting a bike company,’ recounts Burke’s son, John, who became Trek’s president in 1997. ‘At the time Schwinn had the share of low-end to mid-range bikes, but no one in the US was doing high-end. They found a big red barn in Waterloo and there they produced the first framesets. The name Trek was picked off a long list of candidates over a few beers one Friday night. Bevil liked the name Kestrel, but the Big Guy liked Trek. So Trek it was.’
With just five employees, Trek turned out 904 lugged steel touring framesets in that first year. These ranged from the entry-level TX300 – made from Ishiwata Japanese steel and selling built-up for a little under $200 (approximately £120) – through to the TX900, built from Columbus SL tubing and Campagnolo components, which sold for just under $800 (£480) complete. Today Trek shifts around 1.5 million bicycles annually, and like so many top-end manufacturers has moved much of its production to Asia.
However, the Waterloo facility around which Cyclist is given the guided tour remains at the sharp end of Trek’s operations, together with its sister plant in nearby Whitewater. Even the ‘red barn’ is still functioning as home to the CNC machines that cut the moulds used to make carbon fibre framesets. ‘We build 6 and 7-series Madones here, as well as the Speed Concept [Trek’s flagship TT bike] and the Session downhill bike,’ says senior composites manufacturing engineer Jim Colegrove, as he pushes open the door to the validation lab. Colegrove has been working with Trek since 1990, and together with the late Bob Read oversaw the rejuvenation of the company’s carbon fibre programme after what he admits was a less than auspicious debut.
Carbon-fibre
‘Our original carbon fibre bicycle was the Trek 5000 in 1989. We used an external company to build it and it was kind of disastrous. We got back pretty much every one. Terrible failure.’ (Interestingly, the company Trek contracted was Aegis, some of whose employees would later split off to form Cycle Composites Inc under the watchful gaze of Bevil Hogg and ex-Trek employee Tom French. Hogg would finally get his way, and CCI would go on to make frames bearing the name ‘Kestrel’.) Trek was adamant carbon was the future, so invested in its own manufacturing equipment and in 1992 turned out the Trek 5200 and 5500. These second-generation framesets were some of the first mass-produced carbon bicycles the industry had seen, and certainly the most successful as far as Trek was concerned.
Today in the validation lab are several technicians – all female – who are busy cutting up large sheets of pre-preg (carbon fibre sheet impregnated with epoxy resin) into the intricate shapes needed to create parts such as head tubes or bottom brackets. These pieces – or pre-forms – are then laid into metal moulds resembling large briefcases, along with an inflatable bladder. Once closed, the moulds are placed between two flat metal plates – or platens – of a heat press before the bladder is inflated and heat is applied. This last stage forces the pre-forms into the shape of the mould, while the heat cures the resin and gives them lasting structure.
‘Everything here is an exact duplication [of production in Asia] – the same presses, the same tooling and equipment,’ Colegrove says. ‘So what we’re doing here is developing and validating manufacturing processes to check we can execute them on a mass scale. That, alongside a lot of other R&D.’
With around 180 individual pre-forms (each made from four to 12 pieces of pre-preg) that make up a Trek Madone, Colegrove is at pains to point out just what a laborious and human-centric operation carbon manufacturing is. ‘What we’re really doing here is tube and lug construction. We make piece-parts [eg a head tube and a down tube] and bond them together. One thing I wish I could get the industry to change opinion on is tube and lug. So often carbon frames are referred to as “monocoque”. But what does that mean? It means the structure or shell carries the load, not any internal parts. So every bike is monocoque! Yet so often people use the term to refer to frames or parts that are made in one piece.’
However you look at it, carbon manufacturing is at once a very hi-tech and yet curiously basic process. Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ has just come on the radio, and as the technicians hum along it’s strange to think these middle-aged women might just be working on Trek’s next race-winning bike. Which begs one more question: why are all these technicians female? ‘It might sound sexist, but this type of activity just seems to be a woman’s domain. Take Sue here. She’s highly skilled and has been doing this for 23 years. It just seems that women have a better level of dexterity and attention to detail than men. And with carbon, that’s what you need. Quality, precision and repeatability.’
Project One
If there’s a stereotype for female technicians then there’s certainly one for paint shop workers. Bob Seibel, a veteran of 24 years who oversees Trek’s Project One programme, is one such guy, cutting a larger-than-life, bearded figure in his blue overalls that would be right at home in the workshops of American Hot Rod. After leaving the army, Seibel got a job assembling microwaves. ‘They said, “Hey, you seem pretty quick at that, want to try painting?”’ he says. ‘I said sure, and then the guy that showed me how to paint went on to Trek and I followed. My first day here I was touching up brake bridges with a brush!’
Trek’s new paint shop is a far cry from Seibel’s early days. The bulk of the painting is now carried out by robots. Each frame is attached to a fixture carrying an RF tag that sends a signal to the robot to tell it which paint to select and where to spray. The paint itself is sprayed out of a rotating atomiser and clings to the frame thanks to a 90,000-volt static charge. ‘Because of the static, the paint wraps around the frame,’ says Seibel. ‘In the old days we had guys with spray guns, painting each frame as it went by. There was a lot of wastage and it was kinda slow. Now we paint a bike in 70 seconds.’ The Project One programme gives clients the ability to customise the look of their frame, choosing from a wide colour palette and countless designs. And of all Trek’s customers, who’s been the most difficult? ‘Well, that would be a guy called Lance,’ chuckles Seibel. ‘He used to be extremely particular about everything.’
Prototypes
Cyclist’s tour ends up in the prototype shop where lead engineer Jared Brown oversees an Aladdin’s cave of invention. As we enter, a Dr John rendition of ‘Big Chief’ is being belted out over the whirr and hum of pillar drills and CNC machines. The walls are adorned with all manner of framesets and bicycles, from one-off downhill rigs to flashy beach cruisers. In the corner, next to two large 3D printers, are a couple of curious, liquid-filled drums. ‘These are our homemade anodising baths – it’s almost like a garage meth clinic in here,’ laughs Brown. ‘We wanted one, so we Googled around, developed the recipe in-house, then got some buckets, lead and battery acid from the shop downtown. It’s not production quality, but it’s pretty good.’
This approach is symptomatic of a department that has a hand in ‘95% of everything Trek makes’. The team creates anything from the aluminium housing for a new front light through to metal tubed mock-ups of proposed carbon frames (used to test the geometry before going to the expense of creating it from carbon). It’s at the heart of the Trek operation and, having been here for 18 years, Brown is deeply ingrained too.
‘I started welding swing arms for the Y-frame [Trek’s early full suspension mountain bike]. I guess I’m one of many people that’s here for the cycling, not the money. When I first started I’d open up a magazine and see a bike and think, “Shit, I made that.” It’s really cool!’ Brown then points to a red, white and blue frame above the door. It’s an alloy TTX time-trial bike that the US Postal Service team rode. ‘That frame was one of the 24 I’d make a year, a custom TT bike for each rider. I used to watch the races on TV and go… that one’s mine… that one’s mine… that’s one’s mine!’ So how does Brown feel about Armstrong, who was so closely associated with Trek for so many years?
‘Well, it sucks to be him, I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes, but it doesn’t take anything away from us. We poured our guts out to make products like the TTX, which paved the way for the Speed Concept [widely regarded as one of the fastest bikes in the world], and to get to a point where the pros are happy to ride our production bikes. What you see on TV you can buy in store. That’s incredibly special.’
Trek Factory Racing
Wherever we go in Trek, the attitude of the workers is that they want to make bikes they want to ride, and they want you to want to ride them too. Ben Coates, road product manager, is a prime example. Together with his colleagues he has been responsible for what many commentators cite as game-changing innovations, such as the fully integrated Speed Concept front assembly, the IsoSpeed damping on Cancellara’s Flanders and Roubaix-winning Domane, and the aerodynamic Kammtail tube shape of the latest Madone. He’s also been a team liaison, getting his hands dirty on the pro circuit, and is about as dedicated to the cause of getting people out on their bikes as you can get. ‘My biggest goal is to get people to spend their Xbox money on bicycles – get people out there, get them losing a few pounds, get them chatting to their mates. So the whole Lance thing was painful. Lance never said, “Make this bike look like this and it will win races.” He just said, “Make it better, make better, make it better,” and we dedicated ourselves to that cause.
‘We put blood, sweat and tears into years of development, doing our best for a partner we believed in. It hurt us more than anyone because of that personal link. We’re game players, we’re not rule makers, we’re not part of the other side. It burns deep, the pain that we’re somehow less because of someone else’s indiscretions, but you still can’t take way what we’ve achieved. We did it in earnest; there’s no faking it.’
So if you ever find yourself driving through the sleepy town of Waterloo, Wisconsin, drop in on Trek – and they invite you to do just that. From the outside it might seem like just another big brand, but on the inside it’s driven – or, rather, it’s cycled – by the people, and there’s certainly no faking that either.