Author: Seven
Unstoppable
Morning Roll
Hand Finish
The Hand Finish
You can get your custom Seven painted just about any way you want. Still, for our bare Titanium bikes, we prefer one finish and only one finish, and people wonder why.
Just to describe what we do, so you have some context: First we take the best US-milled 3-2.5 Titanium tubing available, and we cut, butt, miter and cope it to look like a bike frame. Then we load it into a frame jig and weld it together, checking alignment 17 times throughout the process. Finally we face and thread the bottom bracket, before passing the complete frame to our finishers.
That’s when the fun starts.
The finishers take the frame and wheel it out with a buffer. The first pass eliminates discoloration around the welds. Then they go at it by hand with some Scotchbrite, before adding decals, head badge and any other accessories on the build sheet. Each bike takes roughly two hours to finish. It takes a certain amount of patience and strong forearms.
The result is a clean, lustrous look. We like that it exposes every last piece of craft we’ve put into the frame. You can see the quality of the tubing, the quality of the welds. It lays bare our process.
The reason it’s the only finish we offer is that it’s the only one that will hold up over the lifetime of the bike. If you scratch it, you can Scotchbrite it out and return it to new. Beat it up over time, we can fix it. There is no point in the future of one of our frames that we can’t restore its original shine. This is not true of any other Titanium finish we’ve seen or experimented with.
As with everything we do at Seven, “by hand” just seems to yield the best result.
650b-Specific Mountain Bikes: A Perspective From Seven Cycles
When Nino Schurter won the first World Cup mountain bike race of the season in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa on a bike with 650b wheels, it sent a ripple through the cycling universe. Anyone viewing 650b – essentially a size midway between 26″ and 29″ – as a novelty wheel up to that point, suddenly had to take this new/old wheel standard very seriously.
Seven has been building 650b-specific mountain bikes for a few years now, and in our experience, 650b gives a nice balance between the handling of a 26″ wheel and the obstacle clearance of a 29″ wheel. It manages to maintain momentum better than the 26″ and dive through switchbacks better than a 29″. Certainly, for smaller riders interested in the benefits of a larger wheel, the 650b standardcan beeasier to build a well-fit frame around thana 29″.
What we find, time after time, is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for building a great bike, and we think 650b is a good example of the big benefits to be gained by thinking outside of the conventional wisdom.
At Seven, several of our employees are riding 650b for their everyday trail bike, including Joe Wignall who has his set up single-speed with an eccentric bottom bracket and belt drive system, and John Lewis who stuck with chain drive, but is also running single speed. These bikes give a pretty pure trail experience. You work for the climbs. You pick your way through the more technical descents. There’s a lot of stripped down, old-school fun to be had on bikes like these.
The industry looks to be expanding into 650b for the coming season, and while the cynical among us might view that as just another opportunity to sell stuff to cyclists, the benefits of 650b are pretty tangible, once you take the time to ride it.