Partington CC - High performance carbon fibre wheels

Partington CC - Waurn Ponds, Victoria

Founded in 2015 by Jon Partington, Partington CC specialises in designing and making high performance carbon fibre wheels.?

A cycling enthusiast, Jon drew on his knowledge of automotive design and carbon fibre gained early in his career working in the UK’s automotive and motorsport industries and supplemented with a mechanical engineering degree from #DeakinUniversity. This knowledge and experience allowed him to apply frontier engineering disciplines to the design and manufacture of exceptional light-weight high performance bicycle wheels.?

Partington wheels are produced as a single unit. The unique carbon fibre spoke design is bonded under tension to two points of the rim and wraps around the aluminium hubshell. A high density, aerospace grade “PMI” (polymethacrylimide) foam core supports the fine carbon fibre wall.?

The rim has high stiffness-to-weight and strength-to-weight characteristics. Carbon fibre pre-preg and towpreg feature as well as titanium, aluminium and plastic. The spokes are made from unidirectional carbon fibres that can have a stiffness-to-weight ratio of >12 times that of steel. Partington has developed a number of proprietary manufacturing processes as well as its own tooling.

At close to $8,000 for a wheelset, Partington’s high performance carbon fibre wheels are in the upper tier for discretionary cycling investments. According to Jason Steinwedel, CEO of Partington, there is no shortage of cycling enthusiasts willing to pay for high tech equipment.

Every aspect of a Partington wheel has been developed from a concept put forward in-house, from ideation, detailed design, and analysis, materials characterisation, tooling design and manufacture, component manufacture and testing. Every process, material and test result is analysed in order to refine and redesign, and to capitalise on the material properties.?

Partingtons’ wheels have been verified by the UCI (The Union Cycliste Internationale), the world governing body for sports cycling that oversees international competitive cycling events and technical regulations.?

“We’ve moved beyond the startup phase and well into the next growth phase. Structures are now in place to rapidly grow our capacity and throughout. We have an R&D team and administration support, Business Development, Sales and Marketing, and recently appointed a Manufacturing Operations Manager.

We’re investing heavily in tooling plant equipment and scaling up production to become a much larger player. We will have automated half our processes by the end of the year, which will be ongoing into 2022, and we’re developing more prototypes with the aim of having 16 products in the field,” said Jason.?

For the time being, demand is exceeding production capacity. “We’re sold out until end of year and only taking expressions of interest beyond that. The scale-up will increase our production capacity to 4,000 wheel sets per annum,” advises Jason.?

Investors have been keen to buy into the company with a vision of being part of one of the world’s premium light-weight high performance bicycle wheel manufactures. A second fund raising round will open soon.?

Written by Kerryn Caulfield, Executive Director, Composites Australia Inc.

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