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

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.

Graeme Fife – The Elite Bicycle

To correspond with journalist and author Graeme Fife is pretty special, not only because of his gorgeous prose and encyclopedic knowledge of this cycling universe we live in, but also because he cares so much about the stories he tells. You might be familiar with some of his work including Rapha’s Great Road Climbs, The Tour de France: The History, The Legend, The Riders, and The Beautiful Machine, or his features for Rouleur magazine.

Lately, we have been in touch with him because he is planning on including Seven Cycles in his new book titled The Elite Bicycle, with photos by the inimitable Gerard Brown. We had Gerard here in the Spring, when we had a long, rambling conversation about what it means to make things.

Graeme told us just recently, “I love New England – I had three great rides on Cape Cod when I first came to New England in 2003 – I’d seen the beach from an aircraft flying into NY and decided that I would swim there one day. The friends in RI who loaned me bike and motor for my trip have a condo up in NH and we rode the Kanc one day, next day past where Robert Frost lived – glorious roads. First ride we did, we stopped at a cafe somewhere in the loom of Mt Washington and the guy at the counter asked me where we’d come from. I said I don’t know. So where are you going? I don’t know. It was a bit queer but expressive of the sense of complete freedom, somehow.”

Be on the lookout for The Elite Bicycle for more great writing from one of cycling’s literary legends..

100 Best Bikes: Seven Parcour S

Zahid Sardar

Seven Cycles founder Rob Vandermark and his team have been making custom-butted and straight-gauge seamless titanium bike frames, alongside high-modulus carbon-fiber, filament-wound carbon fiber, and steel road, track, mountain, and tandem frames in Massachusetts since 1997. A custom titanium stem and mountain bike handlebar, a carbon-fiber road fork, as well as aluminum handlebars, stems, and seatposts made on site distinguish Seven bikes, which can be ordered off the shelf or customized. Options such as cable routing, water-bottle mounts, paint color, and decal color at no additional charge make the offerings unique. Seven selects the right tube diameter and wall thickness to suit a rider’s weight, age, and riding terrain, and builds every frame to order. Reaming, chasing, machining, welding, finishing, and painting are done under one roof. All this explains why Seven bikes are not cheap; even the Seven Parcour S, a beautiful fixed-gear commuter bike with Integrity straight-gauge titanium framing and handlebars, carbon fork, fenders, track dropouts and special sandblasted decals, comes with a heavy price tag. It won’t rust, even if you leave it outside all year long. A Brooks saddle, Mavic 26-in or 29-in wheels, Michelin tires, and SRAM Omnium cranks are other options.

Grand Prix of Gloucester Cyclocross

Finally, some mud. Also known as the New England World Championships, the GP of Gloucester is part of “holy week” in our local cross world, and this year we had what some might call perfect cross weather, gray and drizzly and a little bit raw.

The Grand Prix of Gloucester is considered one of America’s best cyclocross races, and it was well attended by riders and racers from all of the country and the globe. For Seven Cycles this is a hometown event and our bikes could be found in nearly every race category throughout the weekend. From factory employees in the amateur categories to our sponsored professionals in the men’s and women’s UCI Elites, our Mudhoney’s were ridden hard and fast through the perfectly wet and muddy conditions featured in Gloucester this weekend.

The course was classic Gloucester; it opens with an uphill stretch of pavement through the start/finish, winds up past the beer garden steps and then dives down into muddy off-camber chicanes. There were barriers (of course) and wide-open power sections through the grass. Gloucester has one of the steepest and meanest loamy rocky run-ups in cross where anyone who is really running is a lot fitter than me. There were deep mud holes and ever-changing slippery lines twisting through the trees, and day two featured a sand section that crosses the oceanfront beach at Stage Fort Park. Spectators could watch the race and catch some amazing views of this classic New England seaport from atop a giant rock – a prominent feature in the park and a major attraction for the young ones in the crowd.

The UCI Elite women’s race featured no less than four women racing on our bikes – nearly ten percent of the field and three of them were top-ten finishers this weekend. Mary McConneloug posted 5^th and 8^th place finishes, and Mo Bruno Roy was 11^th and 4^th. Overall this was an outstanding weekend of racing for Seven Cycles.

– Joe W.