Per Intense Cycles Blog - http://www.intensecycles.com/engage/ The next generation of intense “Part 2″ October 30th, 2011 by Mr_Intense Part 2 ” Pass me a cry towel ” Believe me when we decided 2 years ago, as we started seeing carbon pushing high end aluminum down stream, my first goal was to produce it in the USA. My good friend Jason from then ENVE and I thought we could do it and what a great story that would be for both of us. 6 months later the hard facts as our made in America Carbon frame would have to retail for $1000.00 more than the competition to cover the costs of the middle man doing the manufacturing.The decision was made based on the domestic trends and new buying habits that this would not work. It would work if we produced it ourselves in our factory as we do with our high end aluminum but we had $ invested years into building our facility to produce aluminum and the casts to tool up for Carbon well forget it. I decided to try an lobby for any programs avil to help us capitalize such a venture and set up a production cell for producing Carbon frames in our factory. Remember my brain says build not buy , but thats another story.I started local , chamber of commerce, county EDC, State , Federal, pretty much a waste of time for small companies our size. My wife & I even sent several letters explaining our dream & situation to President Obama, very frustrating not getting a response not even from an intern, time for the cry towel. During all this we had decided we could make our aluminum factory work if it could become more efficient and started to introduced LEAN manufacturing principals to improve capacity , QC, overhead etc. and this has been working well and is a process of constant improvement. We have started seeing the fruits of this direction and as stated earlier our Aluminum $ MSRP’s are in line or better than most in our class.