Articles – Page 28 – Seven Cycles

Video – Green Mountain Double Century 2012

The Green Mountain Double Century is a singular sort of endurance event. The 2012 version was 215 miles, 80% on dirt roads, with 26,500ft of climbing. There is a time cut off of 40 hours. Theoretically, it is a race, but such is the challenge that many ride just to finish.

The inaugural event, in 2011, saw about a dozen riders start, and only four finish. Three of them were from the Ride Studio Cafe Endurance Team, John Bayley, David Wilcox and Matt Roy. They finished in just short of 19 hours. The 2012 version saw the RSC team, all on Ti Sevens, “win” the overall again, shaving three hours off their previous best time. These guys are all randonneuring legends who keep raising the bar for the endurance cycling community. We were incredibly honored to have them all on our bikes.

Natalia Boltukhova of Pedal Power Photography, who shot most of our Love to Ride brochure as well as the photo above, traveled with the winning team in both 2011 and 2012, putting together this photo set and this video, which captures the brutality (and humor) of the event beautifully.

GMDC 2012 from Natalia Boltukhova on Vimeo.

Claire’s Axiom SLX

This is Claire’s Axiom SLX. We designed it with help from our good friend Chris Richardson at Bike Doctor of Waldorf, Maryland.

Claire sent us this picture of the complete build, and said, “I’m quickly falling in love with my new Seven! It’s an amazing bike. You were right, Neil; the paint looks awesome and I’m happy with the final choice. My initial impressions after 2 rides: light, agile, stable, lively, and effortless.

Bike Builders

First there is Skip who opens the shop early. He uses the pre-dawn to make his rounds, cleaning and lubing all the machines on the shop floor. He spends all his days maintaining our tools and building new fixtures. Skip is the bike builder who builds no bikes.

Next through the door is Mike or Chad. Mike is our lead machinist. He does the CAD drawings of frames that guide us as we move from tube set to finished frame. Chad hits the finishing department and tries to work his way through whatever didn’t get done the day before. He fires up the drills and fills the air with the whirring noise of things being built.

Jennifer and Rob arrive. Inventories get sifted through. Parts orders get readied. Rob sorts a stack of folders, orders for new bikes with designs from Dan or Neil already done. He evaluates their work, makes notes for changes, improvements.

The welders, Stef, Tim and Yoshi, show up. They wheel the freshly prepped tubes from machining into their own department and assemble them in the frame jigs. Gas lines get fitted to the jigs. Oxygen gets purged. Joints get tacked and then checked for alignment.

Painters come, too, Staci and Jordan. They pull primed frames from the drying booth and begin sanding out imperfections or begin masking for top coats.

In the office, the blinds slide noisily aside and Karl sits down at his desk, cracks his email to see what’s come in over night, questions from shops from all over the world. Orders get pulled off the fax machine. The coffeemaker stirs to life.

Throughout the morning, the rest of the crew rolls in, Matt and Mary, Dan and Nick and Lloyd, Seth and Lauren, Sutts. The whirring sounds rise and fall. Compressors fire and shut off, and frame-by-frame the boxes fill up in shipping.

Love to Ride – The Photographers – Kristof Ramon

The excitement of a bike race is very rarely captured in the single click of a camera’s shutter. There are so many intimate details in the course of a day, a story that starts before the whistle blows and continues long after the finish. The story is told by faces of pain, in loss or injury, or even in moments of extreme joy. There are nervous glances and rituals behind the scene, environments of beauty, tranquility and sheer chaos.

Kristof Ramon has an eye for such intimacies. His photos of large bike races such as the Paris Roubaix and most recently the Ironman 2012 World Championships evoke emotion while simultaneously giving us context for what is happening in the shot. His ability to capture the very essence of what it means to be a cyclist and athlete makes him a story-teller as much as a taker of pictures. His photos tell both action and the in-between; the glamour and the grit.

We were honored to be able to use one of Kristof’s photos for the Love to Ride project, a haunting portrait of Seven-sponsored racer Mo Bruno Roy at the 2011 World Cup Cyclocross in Namur, Belgium.

Wasting No Time

Well, we made it through the holiday rush, getting out all those bikes that had been promised as gifts, and it was nice to get a few days off with family and friends to over-eat, dream about bike riding and then over-eat some more.

Sure enough, a truck rolled up first thing this morning with three boxes of raw Ti tubing to be crafted into the New Year’s custom bikes. Nick and Sutts loaded the first one onto the dolly and wheeled it off to machining.

Lathes and mills spun to life. The compressor to the paint booth cycled on and off. The coffee maker bubbled and spluttered.

We gathered briefly by Nick’s computer in shipping to watch the end of the World Cup cyclocross from Belgium (SPOILER ALERT: Nys won, again), before catching up on the orders sent in over the weekend, updating status on bikes in process and chatting idly about the impending winter storm.

This is the thing about doing something you love to do. It’s nice to take a break, but it’s also nice to get back to work, wasting no time, while riders here, there and everywhere dream about their new bike.