Building Your Titanium and Carbon-Titanium Bikes in the USA for 29 Years
U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix
Our friends at Wheat Ridge Cyclery in Colorado did a nice write up on the Evergreen S, and took these photos of the bike with some Rocky Mountain back drop for dramatic effect.
They say:
The Seven Evergreen has definitely won us over, it borrows from the performance and passion behind their storied 622SLX titanium lugged carbon bikes and firmly plants itself at the top of the burgeoning gravel bike segment while looking ahead towards the future.
Seven rider, and Rocky Mountain Cycling Club member, Corinne Warren had a nice interview in the Winter 2017 issue of American Randonneur, that ran with some nice photos of her Seven Axiom S. We built this bike for her in 2014 with our friends at Wheat Ridge Cyclery.
Corinne based her Seven on one of Mark Lowe’s bikes. Mark is another Colorado-based rider, organizer of their Triple Crown series, and a serious distance rider.
Corinne had us build her rando bike to be as stiff as possible, a personal preference of hers, and a bit unusual for a randonneuring rig. But that is the beauty of our rider-collaborative process. It ensures you get everything you want from a new bike.
Photos: Nat Schub and Corinne Warren
We are lucky. We know it. All day, every day, we work with people on bikes they will do amazing things with, and sometimes, as we found out recently, they’ll even write books about those things.
Longtime followers of this 7 will possibly remember the Cycling Silk Project, undertaken by Kate Harris and Melissa Yule in 2011, when, in their own words they, “lurched off the European shore of Istanbul, Turkey with overburdened bikes and quaking legs. Just a few days ago, in late October, we pedaled into Leh, a small city barnacled onto the Himalayan mountains in northern India. In the months between, we consumed roughly 10,000 packs of instant noodles to fuel nearly 10,000 km of riding, polishing our souls on roads rough as pumice on this pilgrimage to the Silk Road’s wildest mountains and deserts.”
We got a copy of the book in the mail recently, and it was nice to walk back down memory lane and hear an expanded version of a story we followed closely as it was going on. We were enormously proud to build the bikes Kate and Mel rode, a pair of Expat S off-road touring machines. These bikes played into our thinking as we evolved designs of the early Evergreens, so they, and this project, were highly inspiring and influential for us.
Seven Cycles offers a variety of chainstay styles, each with their own unique features and benefits. Our most popular designs include our Inline stays and Chopped stays.
The popular perception is that chainstay length is one of the most important factors in bike design because stay length affects bike handling, acceleration, climbing ability, and descending stability. While it’s true that chainstay length has an important impact on all those aspects of a bike’s character, stay length is only one factor in more than 200 design parameters that go into developing an ideal bike.
Anytime we put too much emphasis on one design element at the sacrifice of others, the result is a sub-optimal riding experience.
We build a lot of travel bikes. Increasingly, riders are realizing the value, not only of riding in far flung places, but in riding their own bike along to do it. BTC couplers and travel cases make this dream a much simpler reality than it might at first appear. We like to think about more than just getting the bike into the case though.
Part of the value of the way we build bikes, one-at-a-time, for the specific people who will ride them, is that we can be thoughtful about the whole bike and how it serves the larger goal.
With that in mind, and with a request from one of our readers, we thought we would break down, in detail the bike above, one of the bikes we brought with us on our most recent trip.
This bike is optimized for traveling just about anywhere in the world. The kit is chosen for easy service at any reasonable bike shop on the planet.