Seven Cycles – Page 105 – U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix

Compliance

One of the magical things about titanium is the consistency with which it maintains its shape. Subjected to the sometimes punishing forces of riding on road and trail, no other material currently in use in bike frames will find just the right amount of compliance to cushion all those blows, and yet spring back, perfectly, to its original place.

In today’s seemingly inexhaustible (and yet exhausting) search for stiffness in every aspect of bicycle construction, compliance is undervalued.

Think of your typical trail ride. Rocks and roots create chatter. Downed tree limbs punctuate the route. Twists and turns and ruts and stumps, it’s all there. And so, your job, as the rider, is to smooth it all out. You use your body to turn the bike this way and that. You soak up big hits with your knees flexed, shifting your weight forward and back, side-to-side.

The stiffer your frame is, the more of the force has to be dissipated by you, the rider. When you ride titanium, the frame will actually help you with the work by flexing along with your movement, soaking up its own share of the barrage of forces at play as you roll down the trail.

And, those same properties that help you smooth out the trail, produce the same magic on the road as well. A titanium frame works with you in ways that other frames won’t, leaving you comfortable at speed, over greater distances, by eating potholes and road debris, cushioning road chatter and flexing microscopically through turns.

At Seven, we believe that steel and carbon also have strong places in frame construction, but our ongoing investment in and commitment to titanium come from a belief that, for most riders, the compliance a Ti frame offers is a key part of enjoying the ride at whatever speed, over any distance, on any surface.

Bike Builders

First there is Skip who opens the shop early. He uses the pre-dawn to make his rounds, cleaning and lubing all the machines on the shop floor. He spends all his days maintaining our tools and building new fixtures. Skip is the bike builder who builds no bikes.

Next through the door is Mike or Chad. Mike is our lead machinist. He does the CAD drawings of frames that guide us as we move from tube set to finished frame. Chad hits the finishing department and tries to work his way through whatever didn’t get done the day before. He fires up the drills and fills the air with the whirring noise of things being built.

Jennifer and Rob arrive. Inventories get sifted through. Parts orders get readied. Rob sorts a stack of folders, orders for new bikes with designs from Dan or Neil already done. He evaluates their work, makes notes for changes, improvements.

The welders, Stef, Tim and Yoshi, show up. They wheel the freshly prepped tubes from machining into their own department and assemble them in the frame jigs. Gas lines get fitted to the jigs. Oxygen gets purged. Joints get tacked and then checked for alignment.

Painters come, too, Staci and Jordan. They pull primed frames from the drying booth and begin sanding out imperfections or begin masking for top coats.

In the office, the blinds slide noisily aside and Karl sits down at his desk, cracks his email to see what’s come in over night, questions from shops from all over the world. Orders get pulled off the fax machine. The coffeemaker stirs to life.

Throughout the morning, the rest of the crew rolls in, Matt and Mary, Dan and Nick and Lloyd, Seth and Lauren, Sutts. The whirring sounds rise and fall. Compressors fire and shut off, and frame-by-frame the boxes fill up in shipping.

Big Doings

Jordan, putting the finishing touches, on a steel Resolute SLX 007 tandem.

Sixteen Candles

Sunday, January 6th marked our 16th year in business. It’s kind of a big deal, though we’re just here, building bikes, like we always are.

We told Rob it was our 16th Annivesary, and he said, “Ok.”

Jennifer was more expansive. Things were different in 1997. We didn’t know if a “medium sized” bike company could even exist. We didn’t know if the world wanted as many custom bikes as we wanted to build. Along the way we’ve had to reinvent the way we do things a thousand times. We’ve had to solve a million problems. Reflection comes naturally at any milestone.

We have a joke here at Seven that if something feels too hard to do, then we must be doing the right thing. We think about myriad obstacles overcome, and of course we think about all the riders who have our bikes, the people who have made these 16 years possible.

We’re just going to spend the day building bikes, but your support demands we take a moment to say, “Thank You.”

Love to Ride – The Photographers – Kristof Ramon

The excitement of a bike race is very rarely captured in the single click of a camera’s shutter. There are so many intimate details in the course of a day, a story that starts before the whistle blows and continues long after the finish. The story is told by faces of pain, in loss or injury, or even in moments of extreme joy. There are nervous glances and rituals behind the scene, environments of beauty, tranquility and sheer chaos.

Kristof Ramon has an eye for such intimacies. His photos of large bike races such as the Paris Roubaix and most recently the Ironman 2012 World Championships evoke emotion while simultaneously giving us context for what is happening in the shot. His ability to capture the very essence of what it means to be a cyclist and athlete makes him a story-teller as much as a taker of pictures. His photos tell both action and the in-between; the glamour and the grit.

We were honored to be able to use one of Kristof’s photos for the Love to Ride project, a haunting portrait of Seven-sponsored racer Mo Bruno Roy at the 2011 World Cup Cyclocross in Namur, Belgium.