U.S. Built Bicycles in Titanium and Carbon-Titanium Mix
U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix
Painted frames get prepped, then hung on the rack just outside the odd looking, seemingly out of place, paint booth. Its silver walls look like nothing else in the building. A sign hangs above the door that reads “time machine.”
Continue reading “On Framebuilding: Part Four – Paint”
People who tour our factory almost always comment on the brute elegance of the lathes and mills we use to build our frames. It’s a hodge-podge of heavy equipment drawn from old brick buildings like ours all over New England. Many of these machines have been working at their daily tasks for more than 50 years.
Skip Brown, who builds all our specialized fixturing, also maintains our fleet of behemoths. He shows up with the sun each morning and makes his rounds, oiling, aligning and cleaning. Skip says he can smell a well-cared for machine, just from the freshness of the oil scent wafting above it.
Seven Cycles sits in a squat, red brick building in Watertown, MA, six miles from downtown Boston and a stone’s throw from the Charles River, which ribbons through the city and out into the western suburbs. Just up stream from us is the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation, and not even a mile further on is the former site of the Waltham Manufacturing Company.
Continue reading “Something in the Soil, Something in the Water”
For all our love of the bicycle, it is but a tool. We’ve heard from cycling advocates, green activists, and city planners how the lowly bicycle is the most efficient method of multiplying energy, of moving through the world that humanity has yet devised. We may nod, but in our bones we know that misses the point. We love the bicycle not because it is efficient but because it makes us efficient. We see the world; we flow through it like water down a river and we move, yes, we move like birds happily tethered to the earth, as if being still is a theft of freedom.
Seven’s hometown is Watertown. It’s well-named because we’re nestled against the infamous Charles River in Massachusetts.
We have some beautiful views along the shaded river.
It’s good to be home.
