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Current Lead Times: Simple-Custom Framesets: 1 week. Full Custom Bikes: 7 weeks.

U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix

The Overlooked Awesome, Part II

Belt drive chainring on a Seven
Belt-Drive Compatibility

The Overlooked Awesome is an attempt to highlight all the things, beyond geometry, that a custom bike can deliver. In Part I, we talked about the rider-specific tubeset. Here, in Part II, we want to highlight options.

Every rider comes to a new bike purchase with a set of features in mind. Maybe they’re looking for a disc-brake road bike with fender mounts for rain/winter commuting. Maybe they want an old school cyclocross race bike in their team colors. Maybe they want a bike they can do some light touring on, but can also use for a weekly group ride with friends. Or, a mountain bike with rack mounts that lets them ride single-track during the week, and go bike-packing on weekends.

Seven low mount disc
Low-Mount Disc Brake Tab

All those different purposes can be addressed with specific features, whether part of the frame design, an add-on, or aesthetic, as with paint or custom decals.

For bikes that straddle categories, it can be hard to find a production offering that meets all your criteria. Seven doesn’t force you to make compromises. We build what you want.

Seven rocker dropouts
142 x 12 Thru Axle Rocker Drop-Out

We can build a frame with cable routing for multiple brake types. We can paint your bike any color you want or order a screen printed custom decal. We can add rack and fender mounts to any frame, build a rack for the specific panniers you want to use, adapt the rear triangle to  take wider tires. We offer multiple headtube sizes, bottom bracket shells and seat post diameters. When it comes to options, the choices are infinite, and most of them are no additional charge.

Your bike should fit perfectly. That should go without saying. But more than that, your bike should deliver the set of features you want, without compromise because your best ideas produce your best riding, the most fun, your peak performance, and the comfort you want when you’re out on the road or trail.

That’s what we want to give you.

Read more about our 5 Elements of Customization, check out our paint gallery, or see some common frame options.

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The Overlooked Awesome, Part I

Custom is a bad word, not like the ones that get a ten-year-old sent to the principle’s office, but one that can mean too many things, or not enough. The common perception is that a custom bike has custom tube lengths and angles, that a good fit is the primary benefit. But we do so much more to personalize a bike for a Seven rider. Maybe the most important custom element in a Seven is the rider-specific tubeset.

We have riders who are 6 feet tall and weigh 150lbs, and we have riders who are the same height and weigh 250lbs. Each of them wants a comfortable ride that performs well.  To achieve similar ride characteristics for each rider we pick a tubeset that accounts for their differences. This seems obvious to us. A custom bike should fit perfectly, of course, but it should also feel perfect, and that means selecting the right tubes for wall thickness and diameter.

With our double and ultra-butted frames, we can go even further in personalizing ride feel for the individual, refining the tubes to make them more compliant and lighter. This is three steps of refinement beyond geometry, and we feel these steps are integral to delivering a real custom bike. Rider-specific is core to our philosophy, an extension of what we wrote about last week regarding women’s specific bikes.

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Perfect Circles

Circles is a different kind of bike shop. Nestled into a busy neighborhood in Nagoya, Japan, Circles is a multi-level celebration of cycling and cycling culture that includes a high-volume service center, a paint shop, a clothing store, a breakfast cafe, and at any given moment another business that springs from the mind of its owner, Shinya Tanaka. Shinya is a dreamer, a guy who spends as much time thinking about where cycling fits in Japanese society as he does about what bikes to stock in his shop, and we have enjoyed working with him to augment what we are doing in Japan. From his office at Circles he also runs a nationwide distribution network called SimWorks.

During a recent visit, he brought a photographer and videographer to capture what we do, so that he can share his passion for hand-made bikes with his already ardent customer base.

Here are just a few of the images they captured.

All photos by Ryota Kemmochi.

See more about Circles, SimWorks and Seven here.

 

On the Road: Evergreening Sedona – The Bike in Detail

Bike riding is fun, and exploring the world by bike is another order of fun, however…when you’re taking on desert terrain, bike packing, being prepared is a serious business. For our week in and around Sedona, we outfitted our Evergreen SLs with a slew of specialized componentry and accessories. The double-butted Ti frames themselves are ideal for this kind of trip, super-durable but also comfortably compliant, so they serve as the perfect platform for this kind of trip.

1. S&S Couplers – The frame’s S&S couplers allow it to be broken down and packed into a travel case that does not incur additional baggage handling fees from the major commercial airlines.

2. Mechanical disc brakes – The mechanical (i.e. cable actuated) disc brakes can incorporate cable splitters, which make packing and re-assembly easier.

3 . Prototype light mount at fork race w/ Schmidt Edelux II generator headlight.

4. Light and Motion Gobe bar mount lights (x2) – More light = better.  And they’re 100% waterproof.

5. Third water bottle – More water = better…especially in the desert.

6. Porcelain Rocket saddle bag – Expanding saddle storage for tools and parts. You never know what you’ll need, except that sometimes you do.

7. Drivetrain – 44/26 front chainrings coupled to 12/32 rear cassette for long days climbing technical terrain.

8. Son 28 generator disc hub – For battery-free lighting.

9. Clement MSO X’Plor 40mm tires – Big for comfort and traction.

10. Camera, Garmin 1000 & Garmin 810 – Hands free movies and pictures, plus navigation, plus back up navigation.

11. Prototype rear compression rack w/ compression bags – This versatile rack is collapsible for easy packing, and features a Ti “web” ideal for strapping bags and other equipment to. Not yet available for purchase, this is the first iteration in what we foresee being a long design cycle. Sea to Summit Compression Bag (x2) – Adaptable storage for all your desert exploration needs.

12. Ortlieb handlebar bag – Food and other necessaries, at your fingertips.

Email us to learn more about the Sedona Evergreens and Seven’s other travel bike options.

 

 

 

Short Term Review

The level of customization here at Seven Cycles as witnessed by our Editions of One, as well as other unique creations we’ve highlighted, can sometimes overshadow the fact that we also spend a lot of time thinking about, designing and building race bikes.

Early on here at Seven, I decided I wanted a new race bike and after much deliberation on model and material, I decided on an Axiom SL, our benchmark model and in my opinion, the ultimate evolution of the titanium road bike.

With the help of Neil Doshi in our Performance Design Team, I worked through our Custom Kit exactly as you would, in order to come up with what you see here. Seven’s Fit Methodology (SFM), a comprehensive, data-driven system resulting from a 18-year study of ergonomics, biomechanics and kinesiology, drove the process that resulted in positionals and frame geometry perfect for me. The bike is not all that different in terms of fit from the bikes I have been riding and racing for years, but the small tweaks resulting from the process are a noticeable and quantifiable improvement.

The oversized tubing selected for this bike allows it to easily achieve the UCI minimum weight of 6.8kg. In fact it is lighter than both my previous carbon and aluminum bikes. As one would expect from a bike with such massive tubes, it has an amazing amount of drivetrain and torsional rigidity, tracks solidly over mixed terrain and unimproved roads and is abundantly confident during spirited efforts, changes in tempo and hard cornering.

The paint scheme is a peak at one of the many new finishing offerings our team is working on for the coming season. To my eye it appears forceful, yet refined and elegant. I let our own Jordan Low from our Paint Department choose the colors and could not be happier with the results.

Our oft repeated motto here at Seven is, “One bike, yours.†I could not be happier that this one is mine.

one inch chainstays
Bare titanium chain stay: easy to clean and chain slap won’t chip the paint.
front end
The over sized tubes make for a stout, race ready ride.
Axiom SL race
Ready to roll.