Bike Build – Page 4 – Seven Cycles

Core Strength

Your coach will tell you that a strong core gives you a better platform to pedal from, that it takes strain off the rest of your musculature and contributes to endurance in ways that are palpable, if hard to measure.

Seven is a strong, independent business. After nearly twenty-years of building bikes we are fortunate to be able to make our own decisions, guided by the same mission we’ve always had, with only our customers to answer to. We have successfully navigated the stormy seas of several economic booms and busts. We have seen the industry change through two full decades.

Just as on the bike, on the shop floor.

Consistency, King

Design, Build, Deliver, Improve. It’s easy when you write it down like that. It’s another entirely to do the work, every day, year after year. We have had the fortune to work with a lot of young frame builders, many of whom have gone on to start their own companies, and one of the things we try to get across is that consistency is what’s important.

The longer you deliver, the more you improve, the more people trust you to deliver and improve. As we round on 19 years doing what we do, these things occur to us more and more.

Is the bike a metaphor for everything? It’s good to be fast, but it’s better to keep pedaling, to stay on the bike year-round, to push through fatigue and doubt to finish a long ride, to have the effort of what you’re doing turn into the enjoyment of what you’re doing.

Building bikes is like that, too.

Marc’s Axiom S Fixed Gear Road Bike

This is Marc’s Axiom S. He wanted it dead simple. Track dropouts. Campy Pista crank. It’s not a track bike, but it has that seething-with-speed thing that track bikes have, while being set up for round-town road riding. Our friends at Velosmith did the build, and it definitely reflects their refined sense of what a bike should look like.

The Headbadge

This is our headbadge. It’s one of the very last things to go on a Seven before it leaves our door. Laser-cut and bead-blasted, we think it adds a classy touch to hand-polished titanium, filament-wound carbon fiber and painted steel alike.

It starts flat, like this. Then we clean it up the bead blaster, and we bend it in a hand press depending on the diameter of the bike’s headtube, either 1-1/8″ or 44mm. There is a long and rich tradition of headbadges on handmade frames that goes back more than a century, and it’s one of the small things that we think makes a Seven a Seven.

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.