Featured Option – Page 3

Working with Titanium

We wrote about steel the other day, and how the accepted wisdom regarding steel tube sets simply doesn’t match the reality. Today, we want to address titanium. Interestingly, while riders have believed for years that the type of steel a frame is made from is supremely important (we agree), they have simultaneously assumed that titanium is just titanium, that it’s all the same.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Seven uses mainly US-milled, Cold Worked – Stress Relieved (CWSR) titanium in our custom frames. We do that because no other titanium available today has a longer fatigue life or higher tensile strength. We know that’s true because we have a fatigue tester here in our shop and regularly submit tubes to rigorous testing. Pushing materials to their breaking point is a great way of finding out how good they are, and our research indicates that the titanium we source is the strongest available and maintains that strength over significantly longer periods than the titanium available from mills in Asia.

We always want to use the best materials, because we want to build the best bikes, but we also have a commitment to lifetime warranties that prevents us from cutting corners with lower quality products. When you buy a custom Seven, you put your faith in us to produce a bike that will fit like a glove, corner on rails and last forever. American CWSR titanium allows us to repay your faith with a frame of uncompromising quality.

Compliance

One of the magical things about titanium is the consistency with which it maintains its shape. Subjected to the sometimes punishing forces of riding on road and trail, no other material currently in use in bike frames will find just the right amount of compliance to cushion all those blows, and yet spring back, perfectly, to its original place.

In today’s seemingly inexhaustible (and yet exhausting) search for stiffness in every aspect of bicycle construction, compliance is undervalued.

Think of your typical trail ride. Rocks and roots create chatter. Downed tree limbs punctuate the route. Twists and turns and ruts and stumps, it’s all there. And so, your job, as the rider, is to smooth it all out. You use your body to turn the bike this way and that. You soak up big hits with your knees flexed, shifting your weight forward and back, side-to-side.

The stiffer your frame is, the more of the force has to be dissipated by you, the rider. When you ride titanium, the frame will actually help you with the work by flexing along with your movement, soaking up its own share of the barrage of forces at play as you roll down the trail.

And, those same properties that help you smooth out the trail, produce the same magic on the road as well. A titanium frame works with you in ways that other frames won’t, leaving you comfortable at speed, over greater distances, by eating potholes and road debris, cushioning road chatter and flexing microscopically through turns.

At Seven, we believe that steel and carbon also have strong places in frame construction, but our ongoing investment in and commitment to titanium come from a belief that, for most riders, the compliance a Ti frame offers is a key part of enjoying the ride at whatever speed, over any distance, on any surface.

The “New” Look of Seven: Paint

How do you control the look of your product line when your whole business is predicated on letting riders customize every aspect of the bikes you build for them?

For good and obvious reasons, Seven Cycles has come to be associated with the bare titanium frame aesthetic. In the ‘90s, when we started building custom titanium frames for people, this was very much the current look. And even now, for many people, the classic look of hand-polished Ti is where bike style begins and ends. It has been a good look and a good association for us, even though it belies the depth of customization available from our paint team.

Today, we are painting approximately 30% of our customer frames, with schemes ranging from the standard paneled look to the exotic and unique.

As a custom builder–and painter–it can be very hard to have any control over your frame aesthetic and people’s perception of you. We paint what people ask us to paint. Much of that is influenced by the schemes we display on our website, but our customers’ influence bends and shapes our own ideas, so that the whole thing becomes a big collaboration, a good one.

The challenge is evolving the look of your bikes to make sure you’re always contemporary. To that end, we’ve replaced 10 of our 20 stock colors and have revised the paint gallery on our web site to display some of the more cutting edge work we’ve done over the last year.

The hope is that by giving our customers some new choices and infusing the process with more ideas, we can take the next step in the collaboration and, together, define the new look of Seven Cycles.

Serrano

This is our new Serrano Green on an Axiom S headed for the shipping dock. This, and a number of other new stock colors, are available now for paint-loving customization. See the full spectrum on our paint page.

Hand Finish

The Hand Finish

Frame Refinish - after — Frame Refinish-after

You can get your custom Seven painted just about any way you want. Still, for our bare Titanium bikes, we prefer one finish and only one finish, and people wonder why.

Just to describe what we do, so you have some context: First we take the best US-milled 3-2.5 Titanium tubing available, and we cut, butt, miter and cope it to look like a bike frame. Then we load it into a frame jig and weld it together, checking alignment 17 times throughout the process. Finally we face and thread the bottom bracket, before passing the complete frame to our finishers.

That’s when the fun starts.

The finishers take the frame and wheel it out with a buffer. The first pass eliminates discoloration around the welds. Then they go at it by hand with some Scotchbrite, before adding decals, head badge and any other accessories on the build sheet. Each bike takes roughly two hours to finish. It takes a certain amount of patience and strong forearms.

The result is a clean, lustrous look. We like that it exposes every last piece of craft we’ve put into the frame. You can see the quality of the tubing, the quality of the welds. It lays bare our process.

The reason it’s the only finish we offer is that it’s the only one that will hold up over the lifetime of the bike. If you scratch it, you can Scotchbrite it out and return it to new. Beat it up over time, we can fix it. There is no point in the future of one of our frames that we can’t restore its original shine. This is not true of any other Titanium finish we’ve seen or experimented with.

As with everything we do at Seven, “by hand” just seems to yield the best result.