U.S. Built Bicycles in Titanium and Carbon-Titanium Mix
U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix
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.
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.
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.
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.
You will notice right away that Russian-born photographer Natalia Boltukhova can’t sit still. With a camera slung round her neck she is all action, all energy, and that energy lights up her photos, which, coincidentally, tend to be of other folks who can’t sit still.
Upon moving to the United States in 2006, she immersed herself in New England’s gritty/beautiful cyclocross scene. She not only races cross but also keeps her hands full during the season taking beautiful photos at races. And while Cyclocross is one of her busiest times of the year behind the lens, she shoots full time for her own Tiny Russian Studios and showcases her cycling work under the Pedal Power Photography moniker.
Natalia’s photos have been featured in several magazines, newspapers, and on book covers, and she has even released her own coffee table book on New England Cyclocross titled Beer. Cupcakes. Moustache. She is currently working on a documentary project titled Woman Warrior about female fighters (MMA boxing, wrestling, etc).
We really enjoyed working with Natalia on the Love to Ride project. You will be seeing more of her work in the future. Count on it.
