The Hand Finish
You can get your custom Seven painted just about any way you want. Still, for our bare Titanium bikes, we prefer one finish and only one finish, and people wonder why.
Just to describe what we do, so you have some context: First we take the best US-milled 3-2.5 Titanium tubing available, and we cut, butt, miter and cope it to look like a bike frame. Then we load it into a frame jig and weld it together, checking alignment 17 times throughout the process. Finally we face and thread the bottom bracket, before passing the complete frame to our finishers.
That’s when the fun starts.
The finishers take the frame and wheel it out with a buffer. The first pass eliminates discoloration around the welds. Then they go at it by hand with some Scotchbrite, before adding decals, head badge and any other accessories on the build sheet. Each bike takes roughly two hours to finish. It takes a certain amount of patience and strong forearms.
The result is a clean, lustrous look. We like that it exposes every last piece of craft we’ve put into the frame. You can see the quality of the tubing, the quality of the welds. It lays bare our process.
The reason it’s the only finish we offer is that it’s the only one that will hold up over the lifetime of the bike. If you scratch it, you can Scotchbrite it out and return it to new. Beat it up over time, we can fix it. There is no point in the future of one of our frames that we can’t restore its original shine. This is not true of any other Titanium finish we’ve seen or experimented with.
As with everything we do at Seven, “by hand” just seems to yield the best result.