Building Your Titanium and Carbon-Titanium Bikes in the USA for 29 Years
U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix
All week I daydream about a single, ordinary group ride. Saturday morning I wake up before the alarm clock, whirl up a sweet, creamy smoothie, jump on my bike and pedal over to the meeting spot five minutes from home. I have no interest in sleeping in since I found this ride.
More than a format, randonneuring is a culture highlighted by long routes and camaraderie. Rando legend Melinda Lyon suggested that, first and foremost, randonneurs are always polite: you can ride hard, but your speed remains secondary to consideration for everyone, whether it’s another rider, a course volunteer, a motorist, a citizen with no affiliation with the event, or your own safety. In races, other riders try to drop you; in randonnees, your company is a welcome part of the journey. The course itself is the daunting competitor.
When people find out we build custom bikes, they ask, in the grocery store, at the school drop off, at the donut shop, “What kinds of bikes do you build?” And we pause, as you do when the answer is much larger than the question, and then we say, “Well, all kinds, road, mountain, commuter, cyclocross, whatever people want.”
Except that’s not the half of it.
Seven Cycles sits in a squat, red brick building in Watertown, MA, six miles from downtown Boston and a stone’s throw from the Charles River, which ribbons through the city and out into the western suburbs. Just up stream from us is the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation, and not even a mile further on is the former site of the Waltham Manufacturing Company.
Continue reading “Something in the Soil, Something in the Water”
For all our love of the bicycle, it is but a tool. We’ve heard from cycling advocates, green activists, and city planners how the lowly bicycle is the most efficient method of multiplying energy, of moving through the world that humanity has yet devised. We may nod, but in our bones we know that misses the point. We love the bicycle not because it is efficient but because it makes us efficient. We see the world; we flow through it like water down a river and we move, yes, we move like birds happily tethered to the earth, as if being still is a theft of freedom.