Bryan saw something in my expression and invited me over.
“Check it out!”
Clamped in his final machining stand was a yet to be finished, and very raw 622 SLX. He popped it out and handed it over. Until this morning I had not seen a 622 in the flesh, let alone held one.I basked in its aura for a bit, maybe a little too long.
“Well?” he asked.
Still stunned by the frame’s lithe beauty, I had forgotten to pay a compliment to one of its craftsman and could only muster a fleeting thought. Had I not been in a trance, I would have told him just what I was thinking,
Everything is different than I expected. The lugs are miniscule and oh-so-shapely. The matte finish looks appropriately industrial, but in the right light, the filament-wound fibers twinkle.
My word! They twinkle!
Deceptively lightweight yet surprisingly beefy. Elegance and power rolled into one. Mamacita.
But in the heat of the moment, all I could say was, “it’s awesome.”
A Seven Cycles 622 SLX road bike (www.sevencycles.com). I’m an avid cyclist. This bike is new for the 2012 model year for Seven and it is their lightest production frame to date. Each Seven bicycle is custom made in Watertown for the rider’s specific body type and riding style. It’s a beautiful marriage of carbon and titanium. Or an Evoluzione Range espresso machine from Rocket Espresso is the Ferrari of espresso machines and would be a perfect addition to my home kitchen.
We talk about customization a lot, but the word itself means so many different things to so many different people it becomes sort of meaningless, another bike industry buzz word that flies around but seldom lands. We thought it might be a good idea to explain howWE customize a bike using the Bicycling magazine test bike we built for Joe Lindsey as an example.
The truth is we didn’t want to send Joe an Axiom SL, initially. When he got in touch with us we were just putting the finishing touches on the 622 SLX, and the opportunity to put our newest creation into a big magazine was exciting.
But Joe didn’t want a purpose-built speed demon. He was more interested in versatility and timelessness, so we arrived, together,at the Axiom SL. It’s light, but not the lightest. It can race, or it can tour. And it showcases our double-butting process, one of the ways we tune ride characteristics to the rider.
Joe filled out our Custom Kit, a small pamphlet we developed to capture all the ideas a rider has about his or her new bike, and also to learn some things the rider might not mention otherwise. It starts with personal information, name, age, and weight, but also occupation and geographic location. We ask about what people do, so that we can get a sense for their everyday ergonomics. Do they sit at a desk all day or are they more active? Clues like this tell us a lot about how a rider will approach their new bike. Where they live gives us some idea about the roads they’ll ride, the hills or the flats, the quality of the surfaces.
6 is carbon. 22 is titanium. SLX is our lightest, fastest configuration for any bike. Put it all together and you get a feather-light, vibration-eating road machine. The titanium lugs give it suppleness. The Ti drive train connects you to the road. The carbon tubing manages to dampen vibration and give the structure stiffness without adding any extraneous weight.
Oh, and it looks cool.
The 622 bridges the gap between our Elium SLX and our A6 carbon platform. It sits right in the sweet spot between the neutral comfort of the best carbon frames and the liveliness of their titanium counterparts.
When we designed the 622 we threw a couple of our common design restraints right out the window. First, the cost. It’s normal for a bike maker to start with a price point and design to it, weeding out prohibitively expensive bits and pieces at the outset. We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to see what this bike could be without thinking about what it would cost.
The key is the lugs. The titanium lugs we use for the 622 are at once our thinnest, most supple, shortest and most intricately carved. They let us do things with custom geometries that steel or carbon lugs wouldn’t allow. We wanted to strike a balance between the ultimate utility of these lugs and the artistic possibilities that remained. What we came up with is a light, elegant design with custom ‘7’ cutouts that make our hearts sing every time we see them.
The other thing we wanted to do was push round carbon tubes to their ultimate performance capability. Round tubes give you customization options that shaped tubes don’t. By wedding the round carbon top, seat and down tubes, as well as the seat stays, to titanium lugs we allow the bike to give the fullest expression of Seven’s 5E customization. We can build for any tube angle. We can accommodate a wide range of tube thicknesses. We achieve maximum durability.
This is a light bike that doesn’t demand a light rider.
We have long held that weight isn’t the most important thing about a bicycle frame, that talking about weight short changes the aspects of bike building that are really important. In this case, however, we have built a bike that achieves everything that’s important to us, fit, feel, performance, aesthetic appeal, versatility and durability, while also being feather light.
