Inside the Winspace Factory: How Carbon Frames Are Really Made

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I flew to Xiamen, spent a day inside the Winspace factory with CEO Steven, and filmed how their frames are actually built. It’s the biggest and most expensive video I’ve made, and it finally answers a question I’ve had for years. How much of a carbon frame is really made by hand?

The short answer is most of it. The longer answer is the whole tour, and it changed how I look at carbon product manufacturing.

What You’ll See in the Tour

• The cold room, where the prepreg carbon lives in a fridge. Once fiber is laid up with resin, it has a shelf life, so Winspace tracks the time from the fridge to the mold and keeps it within 7 days.
• Carbon cutting, where machines cut the Toray sheets into shaped pieces to save weight and waste, since carbon scrap is hard to recycle.
• The layup, done entirely by hand. The HYPER handlebar alone is made from over a hundred pieces laid out on a paper map, and each worker specializes in one part. A beginner makes one bar a day, a veteran makes ten.
• Molding, and why the frames are built in two halves rather than one, which comes down to baking the carbon evenly all the way through.
• What gets made where. Winspace builds the G3 and M6 in-house and leans on partners for the T1600 and SLC5, with a plan to bring the high-end fully in-house.
• The testing, and there is a lot of it. 24 checks per frame, 16 per fork, a water-bath bubble test, X-rays on forks and handlebars, a head-tube impact drop, a stiffness test on every fork, one frame in every hundred destroyed on purpose, and more.
• A multi-step paint process that takes surprisingly longer than you might think.
• Warehouse, wheel-building, and final assembly of complete bikes.
• A few things I wasn’t expecting: New T1600 colors with the new logo, a Tour de France edition, and a new TT bike I caught mid-photo shoot.

I also put Steven on the spot more than once, about a HYPER bar that reached me with an uneven diameter and about the fiddly cable routing in the seatstays.

If you’ve ever wondered what separates a $1,500 frame from a $300 one, that’s one of the many things you will learn in the video. If you think about buying Winspace products, consider using the code below. It’s the best way to save money on your purchase and support what I do. Thank you very much in advance.