When a bike company talks about research and development, most people think in terms of products, new bike models, new components. But when we look at our R&D plan, the discreet projects are much smaller. For example, we have redesigned the drop outs on our road bikes a dozen times over the life of the company, evolving, refining and improving with each iteration.
New bike models, such as they are in the world of custom building, mostly come out of these smaller projects, the accumulation of progress coalescing into a vision for a new bike. Very seldom have we set out to design a bike from the ground up. Innovation, in our experience, takes the form of a series of breakthroughs that can be put to good use. There is no flash of lightning, no thunder clap.
It’s not unlike the experience of a long, testing ride. You can’t cover 50, 100 or even 200 miles all at once. You have to ride each mile as best you can, and see how it all comes together at the end.
But if that description of the process lacks some of the magic, some of the creation myth, of conventional imagination, the power of daily research and its steady gains still fill us with awe. Tools, like SolidWorks and 3D printing, let us give shape to ideas that seemed static on paper or equations that tumbled silently through spreadsheets.
Most of us are not formally trained engineers, but our collective bike building experience comes to more than 250 years and more than 40,000 frames, most of those here at Seven where we build one bike at a time, by hand. In just the same way the miles pile up, we focus on each bike, the bike in front of us at the moment, and then, over a period of years, we establish a legacy.
By now, we have collected and crunched data on every aspect of our craft, the fatigue life of our materials, their tensile strength, deflection properties under load. When we work tubing on a lathe or mill, we know what we are aiming for in the final product, both in the practical experience of riding and in the physical properties of the object. Science and craft, engineering and art, are not incompatible.
In fact, engineering and art teach us similar lessons. That form will follow function if you let it. That the end point for either one is an asymptote, vanishing in the distance. And that, given a vision and the right experience, everything is possible.