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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

Tag: Production Process

The Overlooked Awesome, Part V

The Overlooked Awesome is about all of the great things you can get out of a custom bike beyond the perfect fit. Check out installments I, II,  III and IV.

Part V is about the future. Time, as nearly as we can tell, is uni-directional, the present sprawling relentlessly forward into the future. We get older. Our interests change. How and where we ride changes, too, our relationship with the bike.

So when we design a new bike, we think about how it will be ridden in 5 years, in 10. We make lifetime bikes, so we think about how the rider will change in their lifetime. We design in adaptability. Will a road bike become a commuter? Will a commuter be ridden on tours? Will a trail bike do some bike packing?

There are all sorts of ways to future-proof a frame design. For example, we can make a headtube a little longer, rather than depending on spacers to achieve a desired bar height. That leaves the rider the option of adding spacers later, when maybe they are less flexible. This the fit-related future.

Or maybe we’re working on a cyclocross race bike that the rider will eventually use as a winter commuter. We add fender mounts. This is the use-related future.

Many of these things are simple to do, but our experience is that when people buy a new bike, they buy the bike they want right now. As designers and as builders, it’s our duty to help them think about the longer term, and to make sure we are designing in as much value as they can get from their Seven over its entire lifetime.

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Picking Tubes

There is a practical side to picking the tubes for a custom bike frame, and there is an aesthetic side. There is a science, and there is a craft. What we think will match the rider’s preferred ride feel, sometimes doesn’t match the rider’s stated desire for “fat tubes,” which can be very stiff. As with all things custom design and build-related, finding the right balancing points make all the difference. The key to success, then, is having enough options to create a balance. We have a whole wall of different-sized tubing, steel and titanium and carbon, multiple diameters and wall thicknesses, and then in many cases we butt those tubes to further refine the bike’s ride feel.

But backing up, we take a lot into consideration when picking the tubes for a rider’s new bike. Some of it is formula, knowing what has worked for rider’s of a given size for a given style of riding. But then you have to consider their aesthetic preferences too, how aggressively they want the frame to handle, how comfortable they want to be. You make little adjustments to the tube spec, based on experience. This is the craft part.

Matt O., our production manager, says, only half-jokingly, that when he specs tubes for a bike, he looks at the rider’s profile and asks how that rider is different from him in size and/or in the way they want their bike to feel. Then he adjusts from what he would build for himself.

There are also factors like racks and fenders to consider. Will the supporting tubes take additional weight and strain. We adjust for that.

We say that every Seven is different. Every one is unique, and that is pretty literally true. There are so many levels of customization that goes into each bike. The tube set is just one of them, but it’s a valuable one. It’s part of what makes the difference between any old bike, and your bike.

The Overlooked Awesome, Part III

In the last installment of The Overlooked Awesome we talked about options, paint being just one of them. But paint deserves more than that. As one of the most powerful ways to personalize your bike, paint (and custom decals) can motivate and inspire. Cursory research suggest a good looking bike will motivate you to ride more and will spark more stop light conversations than an off the shelf bike.

We became known for our polished Ti bikes, and that was an aesthetic that served (and continues to serve) us well. It’s classic. But as custom builders we are always looking for new ways to add more value to the process of building a bike just for you, and paint has become a big part of that. Each year, we paint more bikes than the year before.

We offer a lot of stock paint options, each of which can be personalized with different color choices. There are 23 stock colors in our palette and another 23 in our legacy color archive. We offer 17 different stock paint schemes as well. By the time you pick your colors, your scheme, and your decal, you can see the opportunity to create something special is strong. We can also mix custom colors for you, and we provide color matching services if you know what you want but are having trouble identifying it.

It’s probably not a great idea to talk too much about beautiful paint though. It’s better to just show some of what’s possible.

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Busy Hands – Seven Cycles Factory Tour

Our friends from SimWorks visited us in the fall and made this video. What is fascinating here is how universal the language of bike building can be, and how our own processes (and people) look when they’re reflected back to us.

Thanks to SimWorks and our friend Ryota for making us look so good.

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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