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Current Lead Times: Rider-Ready Framesets: 3 weeks. Full Custom Bikes: 7 weeks.

Building Titanium and Carbon-Titanium Bikes in the USA for 28 Years

Author: Seven

On the Road: Seattle with Cascade Bicycle Studio

sheltered from the rain

We can’t lie. It was nice to fly out of snowy Boston, even if our destination was rainy Seattle. 55F with rain is a welcome break from 10F with mountains of snow lining the roads.

We gave a Tech Talk at Cascade Bicycle Studio, delving deep into the benefits of steel, titanium and carbon, as well as looking at the latest in custom paint and talking about our Evergreen bikes and the act of Evergreening. We never tire of talking about bikes and bike riding. As usual, the questions at the end were the best par.

The guys at the shop were game for a ride the next morning, even though it was pouring. Sometimes the stereotypes are true, it rains a lot in Seattle, and sometimes you still have to ride your bike.

We rode up along the canal, out of Fremont. We climbed what seemed to our New England eyes like impossibly green hills. We hurtled down wet descents, trusting to our local guides. We crossed the ship locks at Ballard near the west end of Salmon Bay, walking our bikes to escape the ire of the very serious people who operate them. There were no salmon on the fish ladder, and the view was seriously compromised by low lying fog and pelting rain, but still, what a ride! We finished at the coffee shop, as you do, and warmed ourselves while we dripped dry on their nice wood floors.

It’s easy to get stuck in your bubble, thinking the rest of the world rides the way you do in the same conditions you do, but that’s not remotely true. We love visiting our friends at shops all over the world, if only to better understand why we build so many different bikes.

Busy Hands – Seven Cycles Factory Tour

Our friends from SimWorks visited us in the fall and made this video. What is fascinating here is how universal the language of bike building can be, and how our own processes (and people) look when they’re reflected back to us.

Thanks to SimWorks and our friend Ryota for making us look so good.

The Overlooked Awesome, Part I

Custom is a bad word, not like the ones that get a ten-year-old sent to the principle’s office, but one that can mean too many things, or not enough. The common perception is that a custom bike has custom tube lengths and angles, that a good fit is the primary benefit. But we do so much more to personalize a bike for a Seven rider. Maybe the most important custom element in a Seven is the rider-specific tubeset.

We have riders who are 6 feet tall and weigh 150lbs, and we have riders who are the same height and weigh 250lbs. Each of them wants a comfortable ride that performs well.  To achieve similar ride characteristics for each rider we pick a tubeset that accounts for their differences. This seems obvious to us. A custom bike should fit perfectly, of course, but it should also feel perfect, and that means selecting the right tubes for wall thickness and diameter.

With our double and ultra-butted frames, we can go even further in personalizing ride feel for the individual, refining the tubes to make them more compliant and lighter. This is three steps of refinement beyond geometry, and we feel these steps are integral to delivering a real custom bike. Rider-specific is core to our philosophy, an extension of what we wrote about last week regarding women’s specific bikes.

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Greg C’s New Old Axiom SL

We built this Axiom SL in our original 1,000 sq ft space back in 1997, the first year of our existence. It is serial number 158 (before we developed our current serial numbering system). It originally had a 1″ headtube, as most road bikes did at that time. The bike’s owner, Greg, decided this was the year to upgrade his bike, so he sent it to us to put on a new 44mm headtube.

Greg wrote to us, after getting his new/old bike back:

To All Those at Seven,

WOW!!!

Great Bike!! Frame #158 runs like a Dream!!

Took it out to Ocotillio CA for the Stagecoach Century, it was a Blast.

Simply cannot say enough, the difference is astounding!!

Thank you all So Much!!

Greg

We have always aimed to build bikes that last, that riders will come back to year-after-year, ride-after-ride. It is extremely gratifying to work with riders who have the same aims.

An earlier version of this post stated erroneously that Greg had added an 1 1/8″ headtube instead of 44mm.

The Specific Woman

Who is the specific woman? We see a lot of “women’s specific” bikes out in the world, but we have yet to meet any specific women. In all the fittings and all the designs we have done, what is resoundingly clear is that women’s bodies are pretty non-specific. In fact, women’s bodies vary more than men’s do, in proportion, so it’s a hard task to design something that will fit most women, even of the same height, in any more than a cursory way. Making a man’s bike smaller doesn’t get at the half of it.

So we consider what makes women different than men. For example, women generally (but not always) have a wider pelvic arch than men, greater pelvic tilt also. These things affect saddle position and saddle height. Generally speaking (but not always) women have longer legs relative to their height than men do. Their weight is lower and farther back, which affects the center of gravity, handling and reach. Their shoulders are usually (but not always) narrower, and they have smaller hands (sometimes), all of which impacts front-end geometry and handling.

The generalized differences are informative, but really, when it comes right down to it, every rider, male or female, is an individual, with specific geometric needs, with a tubeset that matches their riding preferences, with their own aesthetic sense and ideas for their bike. That’s why we make rider-specific bikes.

As far as we can tell, there is no specific woman, but there might be a specific bike for every woman (or man), who wants one.