How are Motorcycle Tires Made?
Michelin separates tire production into four stages: preparation, assembly, curing and quality control. Here’s a detailed study of those stages, from raw material to final product. PREPARATION Tire design and engineering happens at Michelin’s world headquarters in Clermont, France, not at the individual factories. Preparation for production at Lasarte begins in an upstairs office bank, where electronic schematics of the individual tires are created to guide the factory’s computerized tooling. This electronic data is exceedingly important, as every step of tire production at Lasarte is computer tracked for quality-control purposes. Each individual tire produced by Michelin is assigned a computerized bar-code number that allows the company to trace the manufacture of that tire through each assembly step. Similarly, the processing of raw materials takes place at other Michelin facilities before being shipped to Lasarte. Incoming rubber is marked according to quality, then dated–there is
