Seven Cycles – Page 108 – U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix

Ride Cycling Tours: A ‘Cross Bike… Why?

by Whit Bazemore

Seven in the woods

Mixing it up: some high alpine cx bike riding outside of Bend.

Back in 1999, when I got back into cycling, I was at my favorite bike shop in Indianapolis contemplating buying a road bike. I hadnâ€™t had a road bike since 7th or 8th grade, waaay back in â€™77 or â€™78, so I had a lot of catching up to do. I had already started to get serious about mountain biking (or so I thought â€” a rookieâ€™s definition of serious is actually way wide of the true meaning of the word.) Cycling had become more than a way to rehabilitate my injured legs though, it was a healthy obsession.

Mountain biking in Indianapolis was limited to less than 15 miles of trail in town, half of which was soon cleared for an invisible shopping center which, to this very day, is still not built. The â€œgoodâ€ mountain biking (and it really is good) was a 92 mile drive south, and is something a group of us did somewhat regularly on Saturdays. It was far away and, yes, it took all day to do a three hour ride. Hence the need for a road bike. I was assured by my cycling friends I could ride all over town, more or less.

I had bought a Seven mountain bike, which I loved, so getting a Seven road bike was an easy sell for me. But one of the guys I regularly rode with and who also happened to work at the shop, a guy named Ross, suggested a â€˜cross bike. What?

With my race car driver mentality, a â€˜cross bike made no sense. I had a state of the art mountain bike, that I still crashed way too often, and I wanted â€“ no â€“ needed, a state of the art road bike. Compromised performance was not in my vocabulary. â€œIt is fun,â€ he said, pointing to his own Seven â€˜cross bike leaning in the corner. â€œIt is a blast.â€

Fun for me was knowing that my machine was the most efficient possible, as my cycling fitness was not up to par with most of my riding friends, which sadly, is still basically true today. Lets just say I was on the rivet on almost every ride. I did not need a heavier, less efficient bike (on the road) making me any slower than I already was. I also did not need a skinnier tire on the trails, either.

Fast forward to 2007, now living in Oregon, I decided that the hundreds of miles of fire roads criss-crossing the National Forests around Bend would be perfect for a â€˜cross bike. So I had Seven (who else?) weld me up a straight gage Ti frame. That the frame sat on a hook in the garage for more than a year before I built it, says a lot about my then lack of appreciation for the discipline.

But â€˜cross racing in the Northwest is a very big deal, and once I realized that everyone had a â€˜cross bike, in addition to road and mountain bikes, I built the bike and rode it on some single track. Wow. Ross was right. The â€˜cross bike IS fun. There is something about it I really like. The fact that it is rigid, the fact that you have to pay extra close attention to your line, that there is less room for error, the contact patch is smaller â€“â€“ and best of all, that it weighs only 16.5 lbs. are things that appeal to me. I love railing tight single track on it, as fast as I can go. And to say the bike (not me) climbs like a mountain goat is an understatement.

It was only a matter of time before I started racing â€˜cross. And although the bike is awesome, â€˜cross racing is about as tough a sport as there is. I find it extremely difficult, and not a race goes by that I donâ€™t ask myself why am I doing this. It is truly that hard. Racing is a way to push yourself past limits you could not otherwise get past. It is 45 minutes of pure hell and I mean that. There is no hiding, no sitting in. If you slow down, you get passed. It is not fun. The fun comes afterwards, when you realize that you just killed yourself and for what? For the beer afterwards? For camaraderie with teammates? For the self satisfaction of giving 100% and knowing that each pedal stroke at this ungodly effort is making you a stronger cyclist? Maybe.

For the record, I usually finish about mid pack in the Master B category and have never had so much fun not winning. I usually can not wait for the next race. But even better, I ride my â€˜cross bike on all of our local single track â€“ all hundreds of miles of it. Just today, I did a 3 hr, mostly single track, â€˜cross bike ride. It was 35 degrees and snowing on and off. The bike was perfect, the trails were perfect, and so was the ride. I find myself thinking, â€œman, I love this bike!â€

So Ross, thanks for the recommendation. Good advice, even 13 years later!

Whit

Love to Ride

Our new brochure is done, and we are maybe a little too excited about it. We are bike builders after all, not marketing people. But once a year we take on the project of reinventing the company in print. It’s an odd job for us, but as a company we always take the approach, ‘if you need something, make it.’ So we sit down at our desks and we write about our bikes and about bike building. We take pictures. We lay it all out. We pour ourselves into the task and agonize over all the little design decisions, the same way we would with a new bike.

And then the printer delivers it to us on a pallet, in boxes of 50. Imagine if Santa drove a forklift.

This year we have taken a fairly radical departure from the brochure strategy of past years. Instead of taking pictures of all the different bikes we build and trying to write something brief but captivating about each one, we decided to step back and document how and why we do the things we do. Rather than showcasing the end of our work, the bikes themselves, we thought to highlight the beginnings of our work, the methods, reasons and inspirations behind every Seven. What we used to do in 30 pages, we have expanded to 60 pages this time out. It is substantial.

We have titled the new book “Love to Ride.” There were about 20 alternate titles, none of which felt big enough, but this one, “Love to Ride,” hung in the air while we thought it over, testing it against the task at hand, until we smiled and knew it was right.

At root, we build bikes because we love to ride. Every frame that leaves our shop is aimed directly at that love. We want to give every Seven rider a bike they love to ride. That is the method. That is the reason. That is the inspiration. Everything that comes after is detail.

For the complete list of contributors, visit our credits page.

You can order your copy here.

Dan’s Steel Mudhoney

This is Dan’s new, steel Mudhoney with a paint scheme he designed himself and we liked so much we made it one of our standard offerings. We call it ‘Antsy,’ because once this frame got to the paint team, Dan checked in on it every fifteen minutes or so until it was done.

It is safe to say Dan is the fastest guy in the building, and he built this bike to race, not just to embarrass us all on the regular Wednesday night Battle Path ride. The basic idea here was to build a light steel racer he could go hard on during the season, but would keep on the road year round. The 44mm head tube and integrated head set give the bike a modern look, and the paint feeds that same vibe.

So this is really a balance of traditional materials and design with a more contemporary aesthetic. The geometry is “American cross,” with a lower bottom bracket and slacker head tube angle. The paint scheme says, “I’m probably faster than you.” And he is.

Stripped Down

You would never design a whole bike build around a handlebar, except for those rare instances where someone hands you a Ti riser bar and leaves you to think about what its best use might be. This is another one of Neil’s projects, and the bar in question wasn’t so much the inspiration for the build, but rather the final piece of a puzzle that had been assembling itself somewhere in the dark recesses of his brain for some time.

He had the frame, acquired at a Seven employee auction a few years back. It had a short life as his every day mountain bike, but he found the geometry left him more upright than he liked to be over root and rock here in our New England woods, so it was in his “parts bin.”

Neil’s parts bin is like most people’s garage, just to paint you a picture.

There was also a Forward Components Eccentric Bottom Bracket, an external solution to retrofitting a single-speed drive train from a company that is no longer. These are the sorts of things Neil collects, and of course, because we have a wide assortment of lathes and mills, he and Mike were able to machine the arms of a Deore crank to work with the EBB in this configuration.

Add in a set of Avid mechanical disc brakes and a pair of Schwalbe Big Apple tires, and you have a balloon-tired, throw-back BMX, an over-sized version of the bike many of us cut our dirt-jumping teeth on.

Now this bike lives in our indoor parking lot, and it gets taken out for lunch on the regular. And just like those bikes we all grew up on, it loves to jump curb cuts and bunny hop flower beds on its way to picking up delicious sandwiches or just practicing wheelies in the parking lot.

Joe’s Disc CX – Mudhoney SL

This is Joe’s Mudhoney SL, disc CX race bike. Joe didn’t need a new bike to race CX with, but he built one, because he’s restless and he couldn’t get disc brakes out of his head.

While he was at it, he thought he’d move to a tapered fork with a 44mm head tube, and finish it out with custom decals, silver with a red outline.

We can’t vouch for every one of Joe’s design decisions on this bike, it’s his bike and no one else’s. We will say that he’s finishing closer to the podium this year than he was last year. Draw what conclusions you may.

“I really wanted to race with disc brakes this season,” Joe says, “so most of my focus has been on how the braking is different and better from my cantilever brakes. You ride so many dramatically different surfaces during a single race, the way your brakes work, from surface to surface, is a big deal. I noticed with cantis that I got pretty unpredictable results from the road to the grass to the mud. I’d pull the lever and see what happened, and then react to that.”

Obviously, that’s part of the charm of racing cross, or at least it has been. After so much talk last season about the emergence of discs, still only about 10% of racers seem to be running them, versus more traditional cantilever set ups.

Joe says, “The main difference with the discs is that they’re predictable. You grab a fistful of lever, and you stop. If anything, I am finding I can roll faster into turns and technical sections, because I know better what it’s going to take to slow down.”

The counter argument, the reason to stay with cantis, is the weight penalty. Today’s discs with their heavy calipers and rotors can add as much as a pound to your race day rig. Joe still hasn’t decided what he thinks about the added weight.

“I know the bike is heavier,” he says, “but I’m not sure that’s a problem for me in race situations. Maybe, because I can carry more speed into the barriers or the run ups, I’m less aware of carrying more weight on my shoulder or pushing it around the course.”

Whatever the case, we are building a lot more disc CX bikes this season than last. Whether those are race bikes, gravel grinders, or all-weather commuters, it’s a set up that is working for Seven riders all over the world, and we expect to see a lot more, on the road, if not on the race course.