Articles – Page 68 – Seven Cycles

Assabet Technical School Visits Seven

Neil Mansfield is a friend of Seven and was a coworker of ours back in the day when several of us worked at Merlin. He has since become a favorite teacher to many kids at a technical high school in the suburbs west of Boston, where he teaches welding, metal fabrication and blacksmithing. Every year Neil takes a group of very excited students on a field trip to Seven. The kids are not only excited to be out of school, they genuinely seem to enjoy spending time with us in the shop. They ask lots of questions: everything from how much a frame costs to how to get a job at Seven when they graduate. The highlights every year are our welding demo and Skunk, our resident bicycle chopper gang leader.

Departures: Must-Have Bikes for 2011

By Glenn E. Bo

Halcyon

After a memorable winter that bestowed an unusually high amount of snow upon us here on the East Coast, country and city roads now beckon, and they have never looked more appealing. If you’ve spun the winter away on a stationary bike or are still hibernating in a gym, awaiting warmer weather, give yourself a nudge and head over to the nearest bike shop. Even if you’re content with your current ride but have yet to roll it out the door this season, a visit pays dividends, for there’s nothing like the smell of a bike shop in spring to motivate oneself to hit the road. A caveat: The scent is intoxicating and you may return home with a new bike, which is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if it’s one of the bikes featured here.

If you’ve ever longed to throw your legs across a custom bicycle, 2011 is the year to realize your dream. Custom-built frames, tailored to your body and riding style compete effectively on price with higher-end offerings from larger manufacturers, provided the components are selected wisely. Clothes are tailored, cars are optioned and living spaces are fashioned to suit one’s personality, so why overlook something as personal, functional and beautiful as a bike? There’s a new crop of builders creating stunning machines that won’t require riders to be on a waiting list for years.

No one bike does everything well (though some come close to being great all-around performers), so if you can have only one bike in your stable, be sure it’s designed around the type of riding you do most often. While we lust over the latest carbon and custom offerings just as the Tifosi do with the release of each new Ferrari, we know that staying focused yields a two-wheeled companion that will see the most use and deliver the most enjoyment over the long haul.

We were once told that “adults don’t take three-hour bike rides—only kids do.” But choose the right bike and three hours will seem like child’s play. Whether you’re new to road riding, an enthusiast looking to upgrade or a club rider seeking more performance, the bikes on this list merit attention and will perform admirably. It doesn’t hurt that they also have looks, performance and personality to boot. The only thing they lack is you.

Made-to-Measure: Seven Cycles Halcyon

Touring cyclists, take note: This could be the last bike you’ll buy. Seven only sells frames and, in tandem with your local dealer, you provide it with all the measurements and data it needs, in addition to completing its exhaustive questionnaire, to tailor a frame specifically for your body. When completed and shipped to your dealer, you choose the optimum components to complete the bike. Seven also utilizes manufacturing methods dedicated to minimizing environmental impact for a truly green ride. Specify cantilever brakes for assured stopping power—that is, if you ever want to stop.

Berlin Show Bike

Berlin Bike full

Designed specifically for the city of Berlin, this urban bike is equipped to do anything in the city. This Elium SLX show bike is one part commuter, one part urban bike, one part utility bike, and three parts style.

For the commuter, this bike includes:

Belt drive for an extremely low-maintenance drive train
Internally geared hub
Full fenders and belt guard modified and painted to match the bike

For utility purposes, this machine has:

Integrated custom titanium rear rack
Custom titanium double kickstand
Lighting system uses a hub dynamo generator

The style of this bike is very utility-urban:

Unification of titanium and carbon fiber
Integrated headlight and taillight
Very stylized custom Seven Tiberius handlebar
Every element of the bike is customized, tailored painted and matched in some way

For urban riding, this bike provides:

Compact titanium custom flat bars
Super light construction- even with the fenders and rack

Cycling Silk Blog: Explaining Borders to the Birds

Crossing a swift river while pushing a heavily loaded bicycle in rain gear, barefoot — Kate and her Seven Traverse Icy Waters

In the world of strict plans and fixed agendas, detours are just distractions. But on the Cycling Silk expedition, detours often prove the destination – and not just because we frequently get lost. So when KuzeyDoga, an award-winning Turkish NGO, invited us to explore their biodiversity conservation projects in the borderlands of eastern Turkey – wooing us with wild animals, wide open spaces, and a visit to a Turkish bath – we knew it would be worth diverting from our intended route for a visit. After all, we hadn’t showered in a week. Continue reading “Cycling Silk Blog: Explaining Borders to the Birds”

Cycling Silk Blog: What is Wasteland, What is Wilderness

This is the third in a series of articles documenting Cycling Silk, A year-long research expedition across Asia.

There are places you can get to by road, and there are places you can only get to by being on the road, a state of mind you can carry, with concerted effort, to almost any context. Even a train swaying drunkenly on its tracks across Kazakhstan as men sway drunkenly through it, past aisles of people stacked in sleeper bunks like produce on shelves – some fresh, some overripe, some way past expiration.

After nearly a month of chasing down elusive visas, a month of spinning wheels that weren’t our bikes, we definitely belonged in the latter category. Getting sanction to cycle the Silk Road through Central Asia is the modern equivalent of the Great Game, a kind of diplomatic chess where enigmatic rules change on a dictator’s whim, where checkmate is risked with every move to a new country, especially a new ‘Stan. With Cycling Silk we couldn’t apply for visas ahead of time, since at our pace, on a trip this long, they’d expire before we arrived. So we’ve had to snag them along the way, which at times has meant intense frustration and desperate tactics to get where we’ve wanted to go. And there’s nothing like banging your head on borders to learn how impenetrable these arbitrary barriers can be.

The biggest hassle was Uzbekistan, a notoriously closed-off country with a special disdain for independent travellers who might well ride their bikes off the beaten track and write about it afterwards. When our Uzbek ‘Letter of Invitation’ (a prerequisite for applying for a tourist visa) didn’t arrive in Azerbaijan on time, we were forced to fly across the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan; take a 72-hour train ride across the ninth largest country in the world; spend a week waiting in embassy lines and filling out forms in Almaty; and then board that same 72-hour train back to the Caspian Sea coast. Continue reading “Cycling Silk Blog: What is Wasteland, What is Wilderness”