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U.S. Built Bicycles in Titanium and Carbon-Titanium Mix

Author: Seven

Matt O’s Festive 500

Sven in front of a bright red barn in winter

On a more positive note than recent posts, we have just collected some of the photos Matt O’Keefe took during the Rapha Festive 500 at the end of the year.

When you ask Matt why he rides the Festive 500, he’ll laugh and say, “I don’t know,” but then all the reasons come tumbling out. And it’s pretty clear peer pressure got him out the door to begin with, at the end of 2012.

“I had just signed up for Strava,” he says, “and then Rapha put out the challenge, ride 500km in the week between Christmas and New Years, and I mentioned to John Bayley that it was a cool idea, but that I didn’t have a Garmin. So John gave me a Garmin, and I was out of excuses.”

Montage of Matt, his bike, and his frozen beard

Despite some untimely snow and a day off for family commitments, he managed to complete last year’s challenge and enjoyed it. This year, the weather was better. The snow held out (until just after the holiday), and Matt managed to get 7,000 miles in his legs over the 2013 season, so the kilometers piled up more easily.

“I don’t know why I do it, but it definitely ends the season with a bang,” he says.

Here are some more of his photos, and for even more of Matt’s cycling adventures, follow him on Instagram.

Looking down on a rough roadFour views of Matt's bike in the elementsSeven at night in front of the T-Rex sculpture at Boston's Museum of ScienceSign that reads 'Tattooed Poultry, Registered with Mass.StatePolice'

After the Flood

papers drying on the floor

It’s funny to be writing about a flood after we’ve just written about a major snow storm, but the two are not wholly unrelated. The weekend after the storm, temperatures plummeted here, as they did in most of the country, and the heat in the vacant space above our office stopped working. Pipes froze, burst, and then unfroze, which lead to a prolonged rain shower down here where we work.

photos layed out for drying out after the flood

So, we sustained some damage. The better part of this week thus far has been dedicated to figuring out which of our computers are salvageable and attempting to dry out our space.

The damage will be hard to quantify. We will replace equipment, and that will have a dollar value attached to it. The building management’s insurance will cover those things. For once, a flood/fire/alarm didn’t originate with us.

The bigger and less quantifiable harm will be in lost research, smudged notes and lost reference material. Living in modern times, we all marvel at how dependent we have become on technology, but an event like this one points out how dependent we still are on old-fashioned pen and paper. To borrow a phrase, for a custom frame builder, the pen may in fact be mightier than the torch.

Cover of a book entitled 'Bicycle Metallurgy for the Cyclist - Douglas Heyduk'

The key, we understand, in these situations is to find the positive, and of course, there are many. First, we learned a lot about the elasticity of our systems. Bike production didn’t stop, just because the front office was incapacitated. Second, we were forced to rid ourselves of a lot of stuff we no longer needed. When you’ve got your head down, building bikes, dreaming up new products, trying to navigate the world as a small company, you seldom take the time to clean out the old. Now the old is out, and we have room for some new.

Finally, the flood did a great job of flushing cool, old stuff out of the corners, reference books that have influenced our thinking, old photos of the team when we were younger, and prototype parts, the constructive failures of past projects. All of it has us thinking differently.

Sometimes you don’t want to start over, but starting over is valuable nonetheless.

Nor’easter

We got a foot of snow last night and the afternoon high for the day will be 12F. That didn’t keep Rob from striking out at 8:30am to make the slippery trek into the shop. Our Expat S. Studded tires. Full fenders. A frozen water bottle. There is work to do, after all.

Expat S after the snow commute

It’s a good thing there were so few cars out. Plow dodging will no doubt become an event in some future Winter Olympics. There is also valuable experience to be gleaned for work on future winter commuters.

Snow trail forged by bicycleSnow on a rimStudded tire

And he wasn’t the only one who chose to ride. Cold puddles dot our bike parking lot today.  We can’t recommend riding in these conditions, but it’s amazing how many times “go outside” turns out to be the right decision, and how often the bike is actually the best tool for the job.

Jim K’s Axiom SL

Jim K's Axiom SL in London

The day we get tired of hearing about the amazing adventures riders get up to on their Sevens is the day we pack up the shop and ride off into the sunset. This is Jim and his Axiom SL, built with our friends at City Cycle in Corte Madera, CA.

Jim says:

For my 70th birthday, I had a Seven Axiom SL made and took it from my home in California to London to do the first ever RideLondon London-Surrey 100 on August 4, 2013.  The century was on the London Olympics road racing course which was closed for the day.  The ride started at the Olympic Park in London and finished at the Mall in front of Buckingham Palace.  This is a picture of me taken at the finish in front of the Palace.  Both the bike and the rider did just fine.

Thank you Seven.