Project Bike – Seven Cycles

Snowward Bound – The Four-Season Sola 2×2

The Four Seasons Sola covered in snow shines it's warm light into the night

We look forward to a good snowfall, especially one that sets up overnight leaving a fresh, untouched blanket in the local woods. Having just released the Four-Season Sola 2×2, we were anxious to get it out into some “conditions,” and our New England weather obliged.

Cyclist rides a snow forest trail in the night

We opted for 27.5″ x 3″ tires and our Seven Adventure Bar. Snow riding calls for keeping your weight back and balanced over the wheels. This was a heavy snow and the temperature was high enough that what was on the ground had a high ice content. We didn’t let that bother us, snaking in and out of familiar trails made entirely new by sagging of branches and obscuring of rocks.

A 'Four Seasons' painted Sola + SL top tube covered in snow

The bike was flawless, a perfect match for the pristine pre-dawn. Rides like this both exhaust you and recharge your batteries at the same time.

The Four-Season Sola 2×2

Design Mission: Create the most capable four season bike possible. As cyclists we are keenly aware of the weather and the many challenges it presents. Any cyclist who lives in an area that experiences four true seasons, like our home here in Massachusetts, will want a bike capable of tackling whatever the weather throws at them.

After building about a dozen variants of a year-round bike, we packed all our experience and research into this one broad-use, high-capability bike.

For summer and fall, with 29er mountain tires, the bike is a fast and agile race-ready bike, setup for technical single-track and short, punchy climbs. In the winter and spring, with 27+ 3” tires, the bike can do anything and go anywhere, with or without studs, in snow, ice, mud, or frozen terrain.

The Sevenduro 2×2 Scrambler

The Sevenduro 2x2 at night

Well, that’s a mouthful, but it’s a bike with a LOT going on. The basic idea with this project was to build a massively versatile machine that can maximize performance across a range of ride types. The knock on some multi-purpose bikes is that they’re not great at any one thing. The 2×2 Scrambler aims to be great at many types of riding.

Here is what it’s for and how we optimize for each thing.

For this specific design project we optimized for these two distinct ride functions:

A bike ideally suited for fast gravel and dirt road riding in hilly terrain (Sevenduro mode)
A bike optimized for New England mixed terrain riding: sections of singletrack with equal sections of paved roads — and a bit of everything else thrown in (Scrambler mode)

These two bikes are very different in function, and therefore design. How do you get this to work? Beginning with tire choice and wheel diameter decisions, the optimal design produces a frame geometry that allows for versatile rider position, fine tuning for each type of riding.

With this Evergreen 2×2 we have two hot-swappable modes. The first configuration is a pure gravel riding setup for the 700c wheels, we call it the Sevenduro Mode — because it’s designed for endurance gravel rides. It’s lightweight and provides a perfect gravel balanced rider position.

night shot of a bike's drive train with a dropped chainstay

For the second hot-swap configuration we’ve optimized for 650b riding. We’ve tagged it the Scrambler Mode — named after a type of bandit off-road motorcycle race. The Scrambler Mode has a flared drop bar for better trail handling, wider grip stance for more control, a shorter stem for slighter reach and improved body language control, and slightly higher front end to facilitate rolling over logs and other adventure obstacles.

There is a ton of new tech in this bike, features that make it a great travel bike, a worthy race bike, an all-weather commuter and adventure rig. Read more on the specifics here.

Portable Technologies & a Workhorse Axiom Disc

Seven Workhorse Axiom disc

In our last post we walked through some of the features and technology in the Ultimate Axiom Disc. Halo bikes, like that one, serve some important purposes for us. The first one is to showcase, in as dramatic a way as possible, the killer bikes we’re capable of producing. More importantly, they serve as launching points for new ideas that we know we’ll incorporate into more “practical” builds, like the one above.

Seven Ultimate Axiom Disc

This is the Workhorse Axiom Disc. It incorporates the show bike’s One-Inch Fixed Chainstays, Active Race Design Geometry, and All Out Speed Kit into a more budget-oriented, everyday riding (and maybe racing) package.

Don’t get too hung up on the racing piece. The vast majority of our riders aren’t trying to win races, but they do want to go as fast as they can, given their abilities. We understand. It’s fun.

What we want to do is develop technology that is portable, across bikes and categories, whether full-tilt race bike, or go fast group ride bike.

River City Bicycles and the Spirit of ’77

River City Bicycles owner Dave Guettler is something of a spiritual leader in our industry. He has managed, over a couple of decades, to show the way forward, to inspire people with his passion for cycling, AND to build the best shop in Portland, OR.

Dave is also a basketball fan, and when RCB invited us to build a pro-baller size bike for them as an homage to the Blazers’ 1977 championship team, we felt honored and excited.

Seven Axiom SL, custom built for a rider of enormous stature, with black white and orange striped graphics

Of course, no one does it like RCB, so they took our Evergreen S frame and finished it with basketball leather bar tape.

A closeup of grippy bar tape of an orange-brown color

Check out this cool video they made about the inspiration and final build:
Pro Build Collection – ’77 Seven

From the shop:

This is the first in our Pro Build Collection film series and it’s an all-star. We build lots and lots of incredible custom bikes at River City Bicycles because, let’s face it, we love bicycles. You know what else we love – basketball! Dave Guettler, River City Bicycles founder and owner, is a fan, Trailblazer season ticket holder, and has seen many Blazers come through the store as customers. Dave wanted a bicycle in store for the next Trailblazer, or any customer that tall, and the result is a titanium road bike built to commemorate the 1977 NBA Championship won by the Portland Trailblazers.

Seven Cycles perfectly executed a clean, stylish frame build and our service department spec’d it with top-tier components from Shimano, Enve Composites, and Portland’s own Chris King Precision Components. For the finishing touch we turned to Walnut Bespoke Leather Designs from Nehalem, Oregon who created basketball leather bar tape, tool roll strap, and pant cuff bands. Let’s go Rip City!