Visit to Reynolds Technology

I was fortunate enough to receive a tour of the Reynolds factory in Birmingham whilst attending an informal meeting regarding a proposed frame builders cooperative, which was held at the factory. The factory is a large warehouse building on a small industrial estate filled with a lot of vintage heavy duty and mainly British machines. As the factory is a very noisy place it was difficult to absorb all the intricacies of it’s workings but certainly gave me a better appreciation of where my tubes come from. Reynolds produce Steel tubes mainly but also Titanium. Most of the raw tubing is sourced in Taiwan where it is made to Reynolds specifications. Some Stainless tubes also come from the USA. The factory does most of the drawing and butting etc and final finishing to turn them into bicycle tubing, but also produces tubing for other uses, particularly motorsport. Most of their output is still steel tubing though use of titanium has been rising.

Draw benches are the most dominant machines where the tubing is pushed through a die over a mandrel shaped to produce the internal shape i.e. butted profile. Amazingly, I thought, the mandrel is extracted from the tube afterwards

They do not do much tube bending but have some equipment for this. Apparently they only tend to bend plain gauge tubing with a diameter of 1.1mm and above, demonstrating how difficult bending thin tubing is.
Top a poor shot of the fork blade swaging equipment, very heavy duty, and above some very hi tech stuff.
Heat treating, and the fact a lot of the manipulating machines generate a lot of heat, discolours the tubes which are all sanded down with various grades of sanding belt depending on type. This explains he finish on the tubes I receive. Mirror polishing of stainless tubing if required is sub-contracted.
Thanks to Keith Noronha and Paul Murphy and all at Reynolds.
For more information on Reynolds see:
Reynolds Technology website (http://reynoldstechnology.biz)
Reynolds Timeline
History of Reynolds
Wikipedia page