U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix
U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix
Designed and built with Velosmith Bicycle Studio, a Seven Cycles retailer in Wilmette, Illinois. Velosmith brought the Seven to the Chris King Open House. The Radavist took some fantastic photos at the Open House along with many beautiful bikes. Seven was fortunate to be part of it. Thank you, Velosmith, Chris King, and The Radavist! Photographs by The Radavist.
We had been thinking about the 622 XX for 14 years before we built the first one. In 1998, it just didn’t seem possible. There wasn’t the breadth of carbon tubing we have today, and the design was maybe too far over the edge from what we were already doing at the time. We wondered if the market was ready.
We put away our sketches.
We came back to them in 2005. Carbon fiber had come a long way, and we were thinking about how we could incorporate the material of the moment into a great, custom bike. Instead of building the 622 XX then, we poured our energy into designing a custom carbon platform, a whole new way of building bikes, from the ground up, and we built those bikes for seven years before returning to our original design idea.
The key to the whole project is the lugs. Lug work has a long heritage. There was a time, when all bike builders were still working exclusively in steel, that the quality of a builder’s lugs was the measure of their skill. A lug had to be beautiful, but it also had to serve its purpose. Form had to follow function.
The titanium lugs in the 622 XX are as thin as they can be while maintaining durability and compliance. They take the edge off the frame’s carbon tubes, which on their own provide more than ample stiffness. We added some aesthetic flourishes, too. A tapered 7 at the head and seat tubes, geometric cut outs at the other junctions. When people first see the bike, these are the things they notice.
The carbon tubing in the bike comes from a partner in Utah and is filament-wound to our exclusive specification. Each layer of material has been chosen to produce very specific ride characteristics. Filament-wound carbon, as opposed to its roll-wrapped equivalent, provides a consistent, accurate quality.
The name for the bike comes from the Periodic Table. 6 is carbon. 22 is titanium. And, by merging them into one number, we are expressing exactly what we want the bike to be, a true union of the materials, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
The 622 XX is either a carbon bike that doesn’t feel plasticky, or it’s a Ti bike that is lighter and stiffer than any that came before it. Or maybe it’s a new bike, a bike that makes use of the best materials, that borrows something from the heritage of bike building but leverages the technology of the moment to produce a ride that is at once light, stiff and comfortable.
Summer miles happen on the road. The early roll out catches the crickets and the heavy dew that settles just before dawn. Voices seem loud before cars join the party.
We meet at the coffee shop, as if there is any other place to meet, warm light spilling from the windows. And we mill in the parking lot and adjust our sleeves, retighten our shoes. Continue reading “Summer Miles”
If you fly over New England in an airplane, it looks like a patchwork of farm, forest and town, irregular and haphazard. Our roads are very much the same way. Stretches of smooth pavement are rare. Potholes, patches and gravelly shoulders more or less define the riding here. So when we’re designing a road bike, we often start there, at the road surface, and we think about what kind of a bike will work best.
An Axiom is a starting point, an idea that leads to other ideas.