Case Studies

When a premium east coast custom bicycle manufacturer wanted to incorporate composites into their designs, they came to GCi. While they had years of experience with steel and titanium, the complexity of composites required outside expertise.

Working closely with the customer, GCi developed a process that produced one of the first and most widely acclaimed carbon and titanium forks. It utilized critically-machined foam cores, a unique crown design, and our proprietary High Performance Resin Transfer Molding (HPRTM) process. The fork went on to become an underground favorite of racers and serious riders, known for its unique combination of stiffness and dampened ride quality. Our next project was to develop a process that would yield a carbon fiber frame tube set with tailor-able properties and critical cosmetics out of the mold. GCi utilized braided reinforcement, HPRTM and a novel semi-rigid internal mandrel concept that allowed for excellent wall thickness control and easy removal despite being trapped by the complex interior shape. GCi went on to make thousands of these components for Serotta with the overall result yielding the Ott Rott bicycle, one of the most wildly acclaimed bicycles of the last ten years.