Seven Cycles – Page 109 – U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix

The Weight of Experience

We have every order that’s ever been phoned, faxed or emailed to us here at Seven. When a rider orders a second or third or eighth bike from us, we pull their archived orders and combine them so we can factor everything we know into the new build. Building one bike at a time, this one of the ways experience accrues.

We keep all the orders in manilla folders, one for each bike, in a long line of file cabinets, alphabetized and labeled by year. Each order is mirrored in our database, but we keep the paper because it helps us capture every detail and have hard back up for power outages or digital meltdowns.

There are 30 cabinets spanning our history. Pull the orders out and you’d get a pile 240 feet high. Altogether, they weigh roughly 5,000 lbs (2275kg). More than two tons.

This is the weight of our experience. We don’t know a ton about custom bike building. We know two tons.

Gran Prix of Gloucester CX II – Photos by Matt O’Keefe

Gran Prix of Gloucester CX – Photos by Matt O’Keefe

Seven founder and production manager Matt O’Keefe has a long history behind the camera. Here are some recent black-and-white film shots he took at the Great Brewers Gran Prix of Cyclocross at Stage Fort Park in Gloucester. Stay tuned for the color shots. Find more here.

The “New” Look of Seven: Paint

How do you control the look of your product line when your whole business is predicated on letting riders customize every aspect of the bikes you build for them?

For good and obvious reasons, Seven Cycles has come to be associated with the bare titanium frame aesthetic. In the ‘90s, when we started building custom titanium frames for people, this was very much the current look. And even now, for many people, the classic look of hand-polished Ti is where bike style begins and ends. It has been a good look and a good association for us, even though it belies the depth of customization available from our paint team.

Today, we are painting approximately 30% of our customer frames, with schemes ranging from the standard paneled look to the exotic and unique.

As a custom builder–and painter–it can be very hard to have any control over your frame aesthetic and people’s perception of you. We paint what people ask us to paint. Much of that is influenced by the schemes we display on our website, but our customers’ influence bends and shapes our own ideas, so that the whole thing becomes a big collaboration, a good one.

The challenge is evolving the look of your bikes to make sure you’re always contemporary. To that end, we’ve replaced 10 of our 20 stock colors and have revised the paint gallery on our web site to display some of the more cutting edge work we’ve done over the last year.

The hope is that by giving our customers some new choices and infusing the process with more ideas, we can take the next step in the collaboration and, together, define the new look of Seven Cycles.

Neil’s Big Orange Monster CX

Performance Fit Designer Neil has ideas he just can’t let go of, and he always has a project going, so none of us was too surprised when he started pushing around the concept for a new monster CX bike based around our Expat S frame set. We had done one for our old friend Chipps Chippendale at Singletrack magazine, so that build was fresh in mind.

We were on our regular Friday shop ride, mountain bikes on local trails, and that ride always presents the challenge of breaking off at the end and getting to work on time, or at least on-time-ish. So Neil got to thinking of good solutions, and this is the result.

The 29-inch wheels allow him to crush it on the trail. The on-board bag takes care of commuter essentials. The disc brakes make it an all-weather beast. It rolls fast across town with a stiff, compact geometry and a rigid steel fork.

The orange paint with red and black accents is an homage to the Bridgestone XO-1 Neil grew up coveting, and we did a custom decal (see left) that echoes the famous Bridgestone decal from that great builder’s hey-day. If you’re going to nerd-out, go all the way, right?

The XO-1 was originally sort of the slow-roller in the Bridgestone line-up. It came with a moustache bar and an upright riding position. It’s a short step from there to the wide drop bar associated with modern monster cx set ups. The disc brakes and fat tires just complete the re-think of this classic bike.

We saw our friends from River City Bicycles at the Interbike trade show in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, and they asked what weird, wacky stuff we were tooling on in our spare time. Well here it is guys, a throw-back Monster CX commuter.