4 O ne day this summer, I sat down in my backyard with an old friend who has nothing to do with bikes. He was curious as to why he should buy a NICOLAI bike. So I gave him a one hour monologue outlining the reasons why. A shorter version follows: Back in 1990 I was a little bit bored by my engineering studyies at university, so a few friends and I had the great idea to get to know the sunny side of life in California. One year and lots of paperwork later, we all had a “Greencard” and a job. I was hired by AMP Research in Laguna Beach as an engineer, this was exactly the place where I learned to think outside the German university ”box”. We designed many different types of frame triangles and kinematics for mountainbikes and on my return to Germany I continued to work for the overseas market. In 1995 I received an order for 1000 frames from a US Mountainbike brand. Fresh out of university, you think you can oganise almost everything from your home- desk and so I took on the order. Within no time I had found an Italian company who comitted to building the thousand frames based in my drawings. I picked up the first batch of 50 frames, which were of fantastic quality and I was really happy. But the joy was short lived. The next 250 frames were at best scrap. One week later a fax arrived from the USA headed “default in delivery” or “compensation”. My heart sank to the pit of my stomach. What the hell was I going to do? It was a case ot either build the frames myself or go bust. Quality of production We started building up our own production with all the necessary machines and made it happen: 1000 frames from in house production. This was the birth of NICOLAI. Manufacturing quality itself isn´t an added value for the customer but the added value results from the Durability and manufacturing quality. To build a long lasting bicycle frame it´s important to have welds which are rootwelded and don´t have any notches. To have a bike which rides in a straight line, it´s important that the front and rear wheel are lined up 100%, even a layman can tell when the wheels are out of line. Over the past 20 years we have been constantly optimising our manufacturing process to improve production quality and to biuld more technically demanding frames. Of course you can outsource the manufacturing process, but this leads to a higher quality control work load and the co-ordination of external partners. This isn´t what we do. We produce in house. Customer specific adjustment possibilities Since we only build to order it is relatively easy for us to modify the frame to suit the customers‘ requirements. Colour, cable routing or a tailor made geometry are all perfectly manageable. Numerous possibilities can be discussed in person with our sales and engineering team.