Seven Cycles – Page 57 – U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix

Going Far

Last week we talked about Going Up, the process of designing a climbing bike. This week we look at what goes into a long distance bike, which might be a century bike, a touring bike or might be a full-blown randonneuring machine. We build these on our Axiom platform or our Expat platform typically, but as with everything we do, it’s custom, so the features are more important than the model name.

These sorts of bikes usually have comfort as their primary design goal. Performance remains important, so drivetrain stiffness is still desirable, but one of the keys to performing over long distances and after many, many hours in the saddle is comfort.

Comfort in this regard isn’t just about how the rider feels in the moment, but how fresh he or she can remain. Muscles that have not been pummeled by an overly stiff frame for eight hours are better able to sustain effort in the 9th and 10th hours of pedaling. There is the next day to consider as well. On multi-day tours, the need to wake up in the morning rested and recovered can be the difference between fun and misery.

Titanium is a particularly good material for long distance bikes, and our ability to refine this tubing for the individual rider means we can keep those riders fresh and comfortable according to their own preferences. The tube butting process consists of removing material along the length of the tube to make it strategically compliant. The more aggressively the tubes are butted, the more compliant the frame becomes, the better it soaks up chatter and impacts from the road. Steel also shares these properties, just at a slightly greater weight.

As with the climbing bike we discussed last week, there are a number of factors to balance, comfort and performance being the most obvious. Stability and handling are also critical to a good long distance bike, a more relaxed geometry, a longer wheelbase. You want to be able to ride hands free to rest hands and shoulders. You want good handling at low speed, even carrying a load, which brings us to features and options.

Touring bikes used to have cantilever brakes as a default, because they let you run a wider tire with a fender, but the advent of better medium reach fork/brake combinations and disc brakes have radically improved braking performance and given riders more options for bike set up. The touring triple has given way to the compact double crank, with wide range cassette to achieve the same gearing ratios. Rack and fender mounts are very popular on long distance bikes too, as are our custom racks, which can be built to fit the specific bags, panniers and lighting systems you want to run. Dyno hubs and front facing light mounts keep riders going into the night.

It is well-nigh impossible to get a great long-distance bike off the shelf. The unique attributes that keep a rider comfortable over long periods of time with the features and options and component choices that suit them make each of Seven’s “Go Far” bikes special.

Seven at Syllamo’s Revenge

Syllamo’s Revenge is a 50 mile mountain bike race that takes place annually in the Ozark Mountains of northern Arkansas. 50 miles is a long way to go on a mountain bike, but it’s even longer (not technically, but certainly effort-wise) when you’re racing single-speed as our friends Hart and Boomer were. They were 1st and 2nd place in the single-speed division, left and center in the photo below. We built both their bikes with our friends at Outdoors, Inc in Memphis.

Hart’s picture and words below:

Seven team,

I just returned to Memphis from north central Arkansas having completed “Syllamo’s Revenge” for the 7th year in a row. This was the first year on a Seven as I took delivery in December from the good folks at Outdoors, Inc. Joel worked with you guys to get me setup on the perfect rig, and keeps it running smoothly and reliably. The conditions were great and I finished 2nd overall and 1st single-speed feeling tired but not nearly as beat up as in previous years. I credit the Custom Ti frame for the difference. I am very pleased. This is my third race on the bike and I am happy to report the Seven has put me on the top of the podium in each of the three.

Thank you guys for an awesome bike!!!

Picture attached. (I’m in the center. Boomer also rides a Seven and is standing to my right.)

Warmest Regards,

Hart

New Bike Day

New bike day is a special day, even if you spend all day, every day building bikes. Our own Bradford Smith, Drifter extraordinaire, built himself a new bike a few weeks ago, and he’s got that little kid gleam in his eye ever since.

Never one to dream small dreams, Brad’s idea was to put together a machine he could race cross country on, and by “cross country” of course we mean literally across the country. The Trans-Am Bike Race leaves June 6th from Astoria, OR and ends in Yorktown, VA.

Here he is the night of final assembly in the MM Racing service course with good friend Matt Roy, master mechanic and cross-country racing accomplice.

And here is the bike below, ready for a shake out ride, packed for travel. Stay tuned for a lot more updates on this particular adventure.

John’s 622 SLX

Here’s a 622 SLX we built with our friends at Bean’s Bikes in Berwyn, PA. This Ti/carbon machine is finished with our Lug Deluxe paint scheme with a special “rattlesnake” finish on the carbon that shows a different color depending on the light and the angle you’re looking from. The decals are a custom Glitter Gold outline.

Going Up

Greg LeMond said, “It doesn’t get any easier; You just go faster,” about gaining fitness on the bike, though it’s often construed as a succinct description of becoming a better climber. Up is always up. Our gravity is constant. So the challenges are all with the rider, to get stronger, to ride smarter and, on some level, to choose the right bike.

That’s where we come in.

A good climbing bike combines several basic characteristics, hopefully in perfect balance: lightness, stiffness and perfect fit. Each of these aspects of the bike have been fetishized in the past as stand-alone arbiters of quality, but we know from long experience that there is never one thing that makes a bike great. In good design, a subtle balance of features is key.

Lightness is perhaps the most obviously desirable trait of a climbing bike. The less weight the rider needs to carry up the hill, the easier it is to go fast. We can lighten a bike through tube butting, removing material from the tubeset strategically. We can also add in some carbon fiber, which isn’t necessarily lighter than a butted titanium tube, but can be light while also maintaining stiffness, making it strategically attractive.

That brings us, not coincidentally to stiffness, which is also desirable. Transferring maximum power from the pedals to the rear wheel will get you up faster, or at least more efficiently than losing power through an overcompliant drive train. Here, weight and performance work against each other a little. Stiffening usually adds weight. Again, we have to find a balance point.

Finally, fit. When you are climbing, you need to get oxygen to hard-working muscles. Getting oxygen is directly related to your ability to open your chest, to take in more air, and that is a function of fit. Finding optimal top tube length for comfort and performance is a key part of our process.

What we try to do with every bike is to understand what it wants to do, where it wants to go, and how it needs to feel, and to find the various balance points throughout the design to deliver the best ride for the person who will ride it. Every design goal is achieved through multiple aspects of frame design, and that is why getting a custom bike, rather than something off-the-shelf, is a collaboration between the rider and the builder, purpose built and personalized at a deeper level.