bonzobanana
Guru
They did have issues when painting was done in Wales - my 2008 bike would have been. What I don't understand is why some bikes - the ones with good paint - have a black undercoat and other - the flaky ones - don't. Someone is cutting corners somewhere. It's not just Brompton: Moultons, at least the affordable ones made in Stratford-upon-Avon, are powdercoated, and it can be woeful. My TSR could really do with a respray.
I've watched a few factory videos for bikes and I could be wrong but I rarely see an undercoat used although not sure about this but when you paint a frame at home you'd pretty much always undercoat the frame before putting a top coat on and then lacquering that. Actually looking at the fuji-ta painting process in their video there are a lot of stages of painting and to be quite honest its looks extremely high quality painting. Fuji-ta make a huge number of brands at different times for varying priced models. Specialized, Bianci, Cannondale, Carrera, Btwin, Muddyfox, Raleigh and many others. There are literally 100s maybe 1000s of brands they have made for. I think one year they were close to 20 million bikes made a significant chunk of world bike production. It seems to be aluminium frames they most dominate in, in western markets. Even when bike brands have assembly planets in Europe etc often the frames and forks come from fuji-ta. Dorel have used them extensively in the past as has Accell the two giant bike importers. Many people reading this will have a fuji-ta bike without actually knowing it if they own a few bikes and have bikes from the big factory-less brands. I personally don't think they quite match Giant or Merida frame and fork quality but are very decent.
I think my Muddyfox Race 200 bike is fuji-ta as I think it was even mentioned on the box and the paint finish on that relatively cheap bike is superb. Dare I say it but some of the Brompton clones that aren't sold in the UK or Europe may be coming out of the fuji-ta factory so likely to have a better paint finish even if the bikes themselves are often compromised a bit with more flexy frames and lower weight ratings.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8fihx4iUlI