Seven Cycles – Page 113 – U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix

Seven in China

We just heard from our good friend William Ko at Shenyang, our Taiwanese partner. He recently returned from a two-week trip to China where Shen Yang organized an exhibition and race.

It is always interesting (and thrilling) to see our bikes in distant locales. Through great partnerships, like ours with Shenyang, we have consistently been amazed by what our brand can mean to people all over the globe.

Today, when so much of the import/export traffic seems to be one-way from China to the US, it is particularly cool to know that we can bridge the gap between our cultures just by doing what we do, which is bike building.

Seven Cycles Represented at Shenyang

William has put a lot of work into promoting high-end cycling, both in Taiwan and in China. He is as passionate as we are about what we do, and we’re lucky to have him represent us. In 1997, when we were just setting out on this adventure, we dreamed of sending bikes to all seven continents. It’s part of why we chose the name Seven to begin with. To see these pictures now is humbling in all the very best ways.

It tells us that we’ve achieved much of what we set out to do, but also that the opportunity to build great bikes for people is even larger than we initially believed.

Team Kenda Seven No Tubes at 2012 USA Cycling MTB CC National Championships!

Mary McConneloug and Mike Broderick took the 2012 USA Cycling Mountain Bike Cross-Country National Championships in Sun Valley, Idaho by storm last weekend!

On Saturday, July 7, Mary raced to a podium finish taking the 5th position in the Women’s Pro Cross Country race. Later in the afternoon Mike put in a solid performance finishing 17^thoverall in the Men’s Pro Cross Country field. On Sunday morning, Mike raced to a 12th place finish in the Pro Men’s Super D and returned in the afternoon to take 19th place in the Pro Men’s Short Track Cross Country race. Mary raced in Sunday afternoon’s Women’s Pro Short Track Cross Country field and took a podium spot and bronze medal in her race!

Here is what Mary had to say about the races in sunny, parched Idaho:

“It is high and super dry out here with little chance of badly needed precipitation. The XC course consists of a single steep fire road climb that sorts everything out before dropping us into a no passing single track descent. It makes for some hard racing at this altitude but it was a good weekend and we are both stoked to be healthy and fit!”

At Nationals, Cycling Dirt interviewed Mike about his IMX SL 29er. Mike raced all of three races on this bike, and we are happy to hear he’s satisfied with its performance.

Seven Cycles Shop Ride – Vermont’s Kingdom Trails

Who can say what summer was made for, but rolling out of the shop on Friday night and winding our way up to East Burke, VT, with an eye on a long Saturday trail ride in Vermont’s Kingdom Trails, we had a sense of the order of the universe. We were unmistakably doing the right thing.

The northern woods are cooler than the roads around our Watertown factory, so we had the perfect escape from the heat. Some trails. Some beer. Lots of good food. More reminders of how lucky we are to do what we do, building and selling bikes all week, riding them on the weekends.

It never fails to amaze how good it is to ride trail you’ve not ridden before. While some of us were intimately familiar with the treasures on offer at the Kingdom Trails, others were discovering them for the first time. It’s like learning to ride again in all the best ways. It makes it easy to show up for work on Monday morning, inspired to do it all again, maybe even better this time.

Team Seven Cycles: Scott L.’s Sola 29er

Team Seven Cycles member and long time Seven ambassador, Scott Livingston, picked up two new Sevens last week. Scott was really fun to work with on these builds because he knew what he wanted the bikes to do, but was open to collaborating on a lot of the details.

We designed a Sola 29 SL belt drive single speed for Scott to ride in the single track of his home state of Connecticut. The bike would also see action at the Vermont 50, which Scott has done something like 12 times. Scott knew the bike would be single speed, 29″ wheeled, rigid, and light. Together we arrived at Rocker drops, Gates carbon belt drive, 44 mm head tube, tubeless wheels, and tapered carbon fork.

I was blown away with how well the bike came out, and I think Scott was too. The only time I have been to the Vermont 50, it was a terrifically muddy affair. Should that be the case this year, Scott will be pedaling away on a mud-proof belt drive train, or when the climbs get too steep, portaging an ultra light 19 lb hard tail. It’s the perfect bike to challenge and excite him at a race that he knows so well.

Stay tuned for a post about Scott’s Axiom SL Commuter!

-Dan V.

Data, Experience, Passion, Results

When we set out to build custom bikes on a timeline measured in weeks rather than years, there were a litany of challenges to overcome. Chief among them was how to bring all of our collective experience to bear on each frame. Because of the scale and speed of what we do, making sure each person working on a Seven frame had the benefit of the years of frame-building work that had come before, became a real arbiter of our long-term success.

There are usually 10-15 people working on our factory floor. About a third of them have been engaged in frame-building for more than twenty-years. Another third fall in the 10-20 year category, and then finally we have a handful just embarking on their bike industry careers. Everyone who works here, regardless of their experience, brings a passion with them. That passion may be for high-end paint finishes, or for precision welding, rather than the “it’s all about the bike” mentality, but passion is one thing you can’t teach. To work at Seven, you have to bring a certain level of motivation with you. The rest we can teach.

And when we say teach, what we really mean is that we can show you the way we do things. In order to transfer the knowledge and experience of our most seasoned staff, we created highly-defined systems based on real-world data. We can’t impart five, ten or fifteen years of experience to people walking through the door, but we can build it into our way of doing things, so that those who are motivated to learn to do things the right way can replicate our results while they’re on their way to becoming veteran craftspeople, when muscle memory takes over.

We romanticize the craft of what we do all the time, but the truth is that, while important, craft alone would not let us achieve what we set out to do. We are a long way from the one-person workshop, cranking out single frames in stoic silence. We certainly have a crew of builders here who could step into that shop and build those bikes, but what we have tried to do is bring riders the same, full-custom experience you might expect from a single craftsperson, but without the long wait that comes along with the that type of custom work.

Doing what we do requires passion and drive. Those things are a given. One of the greatest sources of pride for us is that we are also data-driven, systems oriented, and customer focused. We founded this company with the goal that every Seven embody the breadth and depth of our experience, expertise, skill, precision, knowledge and commitment to the customer no matter who builds it.