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No parts off the rack
There are many motorcycle fans who do not want to ride a bike off the peg. They develop their own ideas and wishes. In order to make all customers even more satisfied in the future, we have extended our in-house Thunderbike production with another CTX beta 800 TC machine. In order to be able to use this machine park of meanwhile 5 CNC machines effectively, naturally a lot of experience and technical know how with the operation and programming are necessary.
Now our construction comes into play. It creates concrete designs and finally finished parts. We used to have these parts manufactured by suppliers. Until we had all the parts here, the season was over, says Herbert Niehues, responsible for CAD / CAM and production at Thunderbike. So one came up with the idea to build up an own production. Today there are no less than 3500 active production parts.
With the production, the first CAD system (2D) and a CAM system came into the house. In 2012, Solidworks was introduced as a 3D system. This allows creative ideas to be quickly translated into photorealistic representations. “Just imagine once, someone pays high sums for a motorcycle – up to 150,000 euros – and then, so to speak, the cat in a poke buy. This is not possible”, says Herbert, and is happy to be able to show the machines on the monitor as they will look – as far as possible – even at the design stage. Now the customer can bring in change requests.
We have current program licenses from Solidworks Premium and Professional in use. Thus, all work in the two-wheel design can be handled. This type of construction is ideally suited for vehicle construction. It gives us the flexibility to make changes quickly, without violating fixed constraints. In the manner briefly described here, there are also 2 to 3 home-made motorcycles per year. These are very individual designs, but they are realized with the most modern tools.