It is quite fascinating how Royal Enfield became an Indian company from its humble beginnings as a pure British brand over the last 122 years it has been in existence. The pivotal shift occurred when the motorcycle company's facilities in Redditch, England and at Upper Westwood, near Bradford on Avon (which was an underground facility), had to be closed in 1967 and 1970, respectively.
Also Read: The Royal Enfield Bullet lives on!
This left the factory at Tiruvottiyur in Chennai, which had been operational since 1956, as the only facility to produce Royal Enfield bikes. At the time, the factory was primarily making only the Bullet. Today, Royal Enfield has three facilities in Tamil Nadu, which produce as many as nine models combined, each of which come with a myriad of colour choices and variants.
We visited the factory at Vallam Vadagal, which spans over 50 acres and it produces three important motorcycles for the bikemaker and all of them are 350 cc machines and they are - the Bullet 350, Classic 350 and the Meteor 350. The moment we enter the campus, we see large coaches which bring in the staff (who work on a shift basis and there are three shifts a day) and hear the sound of machines working away and the two-wheelers roaring to life. To those who love the smell of machining and paint shops, there's no better place than this, for one can see everything up close.
But, as is expected of state-of-the-art manufacturing sites of today, the Royal Enfield factory at Vallam Vadagal puts great emphasis on safety. We had to wear our boots and had to keep our limbs strictly within the yellow markings and bear in mind that there are machines and people at work, that there will be trolleys full of parts and even conveyors carrying components for various purposes including thermal curing or, simply put, for baking in a large oven.
We began by seeing the machining section where the crankcase and the head of the 350 cc motor (for the newly launched, new generation Bullet 350, a bike known to be in continuous production for the past 91 years) get readied for assembly. The parts get machined, powder coated and inspected, before being sent to the engine assembly section that is present on the floor above. There, we were greeted by a working model of the engine with cut-outs to help us better understand how the engine operates. Seeing the piston, the connecting rod and the valves dance as the camshaft and crankshaft rotate was mesmerising to the author.
The engine assembly facility, which has many sections and numerous people working on a block which moves on a timed conveyor belt, is partly automated. We saw an operator load the valve springs and valves on to the cylinder head, but a robot fix it in place. On the other hand, the operators at each section have full control over the process and can, at the push of a button, stop the production line should they find that a faulty component has somehow made it to the engine assembly section.
Also, to ensure that dust and other particles do not contaminate the engine and the components, this particular section of the plant is air conditioned and when we walked out, we saw sealed engines on wooden crates waiting to be shifted to the assembly line. Of course, Royal Enfield does perform cold tests on them too.
Moving on, we walk to the paint shop, where the components are handled by both humans and robots, to give them the mirror-like finish customers expect. While the robots ensure that the apt amount of paint is used for a component and do a swift job painting each part, a human painter inspects the painted component and provides the finishing touch, for the robots, although very efficient in what they do, do leave some portions of a component in need of some more paint.
Having seen some mudguards and side panels of the new Bullet 350 get a makeover, we briefly looked at components like the frame, subframe, swinging arm and centre stand get powder-coated and cured, after which we saw magic take place. Royal Enfield always puts emphasis on the human touch when making its motorcycles and we saw two experts do the hand pinstripes on the body-coloured fuel tanks of the Bullet 350. We were asked to witness the pinstriping process and given a tank to try and replicate the same. Having spectacularly failed at doing even a half-decent job, we went to where some more magic happens - the final assembly line.
If a musical person were to see the place, he or she would immediately and visibly see that the whole system operates in a rhythmic fashion. With people placed on both sides of the assembly line, parts from the component trolleys are in no time transferred on to the bikes and secured in place. The sound of the air guns tightening bolts is a symphony in itself. The finished Bullets are then fired up and tested on a dyno, before test riders take them around the factory test track to see that things are in order.
And that should complete our factory visit, expect that it didn't. Since the launch of the new Bullet 350 is a huge milestone that needs to be celebrated, Royal Enfield had setup a museum at the factory, right next to the engine shop and we spent the next hour or so looking at the presentation by Royal Enfield Historian Gordon May, at the posters from from the days of Madras Motors which imported Royal Enfield bikes to India as completely knocked down (CKD) kits before assembling them here, and at all the live examples that represent the nine decades of the Bullet's existence.
It is from this short museum visit that we found out something rather interesting. When the Bullet was originally launched in 1932 in England, it came in three versions -- 250cc, 350cc and 500cc, and the models cost between £42.17 and £53.17! Given that in 1947, £1 was equal to INR 13.33, that seems a palatable amount. Today, the new Bullet 350 costs between INR 1.73 lakh and INR 2.15 lakh before taxes in India! Quite a shift, eh!
