U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix
U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix
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.
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.
There is no bicycle without the idea of a bicycle,
without the inspiration to go somewhere. This part of the process, the beginning, is crucial. Fix the idea in your head. Keep your eyes on the destination.
The best bikes are made of these things.
Before a frame drawing gets made.
Before a tube gets cut.
Before the welding torch burns brightly.
The kernel of the idea is in what the bike needs to do, where it wants to take you next.
The whole bike is contained in the path it will travel, all the details falling out of the necessities of the ride.
Will it be fast? Will it be comfortable? Will it have wheels like this and handlebars like that?
What is your idea? And when can we build it?
The roll-top door at our shipping dock makes the same sound now it made in 1997. The electric motor makes a loud click and then there is a drone and rattle as the door’s wheels trundle up and down their tracks. It’s one of those familiar, even comforting sounds that attends daily business here at Seven.
And maybe opening doors just seem more poignantly symbolic on the first work day of a new year. The door rolls up, low winter sun streams in, bike parts, titanium tubing, and people follow. Late in the day, bikes go out.
The bike season is funny. By some loose consensus it starts October 1st and runs through the end of September. But in real life, there is nothing quite like the turn of a new year, right?
After 22 years of bike building talking about new dawns feels dramatic. What we can say for certain is that no year (or season) ever looks quite the way we think it will. Riders bring us new challenges. The industry churns up new technologies and trends, and the one constant is just the group of us, building bikes, which makes for a nice constancy and safe place to sit and ponder how we can best respond to all the ideas we’ll hear, how best to present all the ideas we’ll have.
We’re excited. The bicycle is still a miracle machine. It’s still fun to ride. And every day people call us up with great ideas for new bikes for themselves. We look into the near future and see a busy year of bike building.
