Not strictly a ride-out, I shared a car, but it would make a fab rideout.
No cameras or phones allowed inside, except by leaning out over the storage area, so the photos are limited in quality.
The tour took 2.25 hours - much longer than expected (my advice: tea, cake and wee BEFORE you go round!).
The chap taking us round was a proper expert on the marque and the factory - not just a bored part-timer. He was also a rider, of course.
The tour runs through the whole factory, bar R&D. The major different sections of the factory are, roughly in order:
- crank manufacture (all measured by laser to silly accuracy like 1-2 microns)
- crankcase machining
- cam, swinging arm and shaft drive machining (the Triumph shaft drive is quite a little work of art)
- paint shop (all painted by hand in-house - no robots)
- engine assembly line (basically every engine is blueprinted because cranks and cases are machined to match each other - if I understood it correctly)
- bike assembly
- QA room, to pull out random bike off line and disassemble it, which they were doing whilst we were there
- test (6,000 revs in top gear, then they leave the engine to run to burn any remaining petrol off)
- storage (including a stack of Moto 2 engines about to be shipped out to Spain)
Other nuggets:
- engines are good for 200k miles
- employees get their bikes at 75% list, but only one bike per year (oh sufferance!)
- employees can get their bike painted any colour, inc wheels
- bikes are assembled in the UK except for Brazil & India, where by law they must be be assembled by local workforce. So Triumph have local assembly plants in those places. Those ones go in boxed kits - v neat.
- the destination stickers on the bikes were impressive, DE, CZ, Russia, Aus, etc.
- they had several T1/T2 (test) bikes lying around, that were going to be scrapped. Noooooooo
- it's impressively clean, all swarf, etc collected at source rather than dumping on floor
- they'll hit their 1 millionth bike this year - 980k and counting
If they created a sports tourer from that shaft drive engine, and upped the power a bit, I'd probably be up for buying British.
Thoroughly recommended.
Cost: £18
https://www.triumphmotorcycles.co.uk/visitor-experience/factory-tourThe factory. It's big:
Ooooh - A lovely Swiss Motorsports. A man of taste:
At the entrance - a double-take. Had to re-read it:
The cafe had wall-to-wall engines through the (modern) ages:
No cameras or phones allowed inside, except for leaning out over the storage area.
The group below are just finishing their tour. The bikes next to them have just come back from the Welsh-based off road school:
Wrapped bikes (and other spares) sitting very high up (15-20m?). Not for vertigo sufferers: