Framebuilding – Seven Cycles

Myth vs. Material

At Seven, we adhere tightly to the philosophy that form follows function. That’s why when designing a bike, we start with its mission and work back to the frame material selection.

We believe there are no bad materials, just bad applications.

We recommend the same approach when choosing your bike. Instead of first deciding upon a frame material, consider, “What do I want from my bike? How do I ride?” Crit racing, charity rides, touring, fast club rides, randos, solo rides, mixed surface explorations, all of the above? The answer can help lead you to the right material—and it may surprise you.

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Tools of the Trade: Part One

People who tour our factory almost always comment on the brute elegance of the lathes and mills we use to build our frames. It’s a hodge-podge of heavy equipment drawn from old brick buildings like ours all over New England. Many of these machines have been working at their daily tasks for more than 50 years.

Skip Brown, who builds all our specialized fixturing, also maintains our fleet of behemoths. He shows up with the sun each morning and makes his rounds, oiling, aligning and cleaning. Skip says he can smell a well-cared for machine, just from the freshness of the oil scent wafting above it.

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The Five Elements of Customization

We are, all of us, trying to get back to that moment, when we were two, or five, or ten-years-old, of first pushing off and feeling the freedom, the joy of riding a bike. The 5 Elements are meant to get us there, to strip away the fear and focus on the idea for a new bike.

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The Language of Custom

Custom is not a secret language developed in shops and factories where there are initiated whispers in hushed tones about the craft of metal work. Custom is not a collection of technical terms that necessitates the reading of obscure manuals or classes in physics to understand.

If you’ve ridden a bike, you can speak the language of custom.

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Something in the Soil, Something in the Water

Seven Cycles sits in a squat, red brick building in Watertown, MA, six miles from downtown Boston and a stone’s throw from the Charles River, which ribbons through the city and out into the western suburbs. Just up stream from us is the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation, and not even a mile further on is the former site of the Waltham Manufacturing Company.

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