Tag: reviews
What Mountian Bike Magazine courtesy of bikeradar.com: Seven Cycles Sola 29 SLX Frame Review
by Justin Loretz
The most comfortable frame I’ve ever ridden and by default the most enjoyable too.
Quality like this doesn’t come cheap, though.
The Holy Grail, the Golden Fleece, the Ark of the Covenant, a basic understanding of the workings of the female mind – man’s search for each of these things is as fruitless as it is eternal. But one item, which until recently was on that very same list, has been found, at least according to What Mountain Bike’s Justin Loretz. He reckons his custom Seven Sola 29er is the most comfortable lightweight hardtail in the world. Here’s why…
The frame
My Sola 29 SLX was born in Watertown, Massachusetts, USA, in a small but perfectly formed workshop in Walnut Street. It’s the place where Seven Cycles reside and perform some pretty clever frame building magic.
When you order a custom frame, you need to know what you want. I love riding hardtails and I knew I wanted a lightweight frame designed for 29in wheels. However, I didn’t want a steep angled, ‘built to ride like a 26er’ bike or one that would jack-hammer my fragile spine to pulp (I’m 40 years old and have two blown/fused vertebrae in my lower back).
Why a 29er? I’ve raced and ridden 29ers side-by-side with scores of 26in wheeled bikes and hands down, a 29er goes uphill faster. I believe it’s down to the way torque is delivered to the rear contact patch, with the larger wheels smoothing out spikes in your power delivery and providing enhanced traction. As a result, you can get away with using a lighter and faster rolling ‘summer spec’ rear tyre all year round. For a cross-country speed demon, this is a win-win situation. Of course, if you’re convinced you want 26in wheels, Seven can do that too.
With help from the guys at Seven I quickly settled on the Sola 29 SLX as being the right base model for me. Light and lithe are the page tabs it’s filed under – perfect for my spinning, accurate and mildly aggressive riding style, but not so good for stiffness obsessed heavyweights. To nail the geometry I measured up a few bikes that I’d ridden and liked for different reasons, namely a Scott Scale 29er and Niner Air 9 Carbon, to boil down my measurements. The geometry had to deliver a ride that was both fast and stable. It had to be able to confidently chase full- suspension bikes down hills and through testing singletrack, and happily drift on loose fireroads.
In the end, I went for a 71.5° seat angle and 68.5° head angle – slack compared to the current trend for 29er front ends that are as steep as those on road bikes, but I prefer to give steering input from the saddle rather than having ‘shopping trolley’ steering at the handlebar. With the guys from Seven I double, triple and quadruple checked everything – never a bad thing to do before the ‘go’ button is pressed, especially on a frame as expensive as this. Undoing welds is nigh-on impossible, so it’s worth getting it right.
With the design nailed all I had to do was wait. And hope. And dream. And then wait a little longer. One thing is for sure – buying custom isn’t for the impatient. Bespoke ‘one bike at a time’ builders like Seven will take the time it requires to do their jobs and that could be a month or it could be three. However long it takes, they’ll keep you informed along the way. Eventually the Seven Cycles box will arrive on the back of the UPS truck and I defy anyone not to have an elevated heart rate and sweaty palms as they pop it open.
As soon as I laid eyes on the raw, unbuilt frame I knew I’d been sent exactly what I’d asked for. The only question that remained was whether its geometry was going to ride the way I predicted it would. I built it up with a 100mm-travel RockShox SID XX fork and SRAM X0/XX bits. Wheels are either Fulcrum XL29s, Bontrager RXL29s or ENVE Carbons depending on the ride/mood I’m in, and finishing kit is a work in progress, with Control Tech Ti Mania and Easton parts popping up, as well as an AX Lightness Daedalus seatpost.
Suffice to say the bike as built is sexy, surgical and sleek. The natural silver-grey sheen of titanium is extremely attractive. When it’s washed it’s like a surgeon’s blade, when it’s dirty it looks like it was made for mud. Dirt just makes it look more handsome – a bit like the rider!
The ride
The ride, the ride… Oh if only I could plug you into my central nervous system. You’d see why I get home late, leave for work early and have an idiotic grin on my chops the entire day. Seven use their lightest Cirrus MTB titanium tubing on the SLX and the way it transmits vibration from the ground to your brain is like nothing else I’ve ever ridden, and I’ve ridden a lot of bikes in 20 years of testing. I was stunned to silence in 20 yards – that’s a new record for me.
The Seven has continued to leave me stunned in the three months and 800 miles we’ve been together. I’ve a mental Rolodex of how hundred of bikes have performed over my standard singletrack test loop. On the Seven, it takes a physical effort to wipe the smile off my face. I’m able to glide over terrain that normally makes hardtails feel hard and harsh, and in the big ring, spinning up what are normally horrible drag climbs I’m able to remain seated instead of resorting to the saddle-hover needed on most other hardtails.
As you turn the pedals you get the standard titanium frame feeling of having half-flat tyres, which takes a bit of getting used to. But there’s more. Seven have created a hardtail frame that feels more like a full-suspension one. When you hit bumps, the frame only transmits what feels like half the impact. It’s not just the rear end that soaks up the hits, either – the front end feels like it stretches a fraction and the whole chassis feels moulded to the ground.
Asked by other riders what the Seven feels like to ride I’ve found myself using terms like alive, dynamic, forgiving, even smooth and plush – two words normally reserved for full-suspension bikes. It doesn’t hurt that it weighs 21lb – a great weight for a 29er, which enables big ring, full gas riding whenever you feel like laying it down. On group rides my buddies now know that if I show up on the Seven they’re in for hurt.
In fact, the only one who’s not getting hurt is me. The comfort of the thin titanium tubes means I can indulge in rides where the time spent riding is the time I have available, not the time I can physically endure. I think comfort as a target for bike manufacturers has long been overlooked. Sure it isn’t as sexy a sell as ‘the stiffest’ but if you can’t bear to sit on the thing after a few hours, what’s the point? Over the course of a long ride it can add up to leave you fresher and more able to belt out the watts when other riders are beaten.
The trade-off is in chassis stiffness. To make a titanium frame that’ll build into a 20lb bike with a focus on comfort, you have to be prepared to give away something. Some would undoubtedly find this specific Sola SLX too soft, but for me it’s as stiff as it needs to be. Hammering it, it doesn’t ghost shift, there’s no brake rub and the frame doesn’t feel mushy. I’d say it’s 95 percent accurate at cross-country speeds.
That percentage would be higher if it had a tapered-steerer-compatible head tube and oversize bottom bracket (since delivery, Seven have begun offering BB30 as an option). But if it had those things, other details like the size and thickness of the main tubes would have to be adjusted and it would be heavier and maybe not as comfortable, getting away from the core reason for doing it this way. Besides, would I really notice the five percent increase in accuracy? Look at it this way: the Sola isn’t anyway near as stiff as my 2011 Niner Air 9 Carbon but it’s three, maybe four times as comfortable. Perfect for me.
I simply haven’t ridden a better bike for my kind of wide ranging cross-country/trail riding than the Seven Sola 29 SLX. A custom frame like this doesn’t come cheap and the top-end build pictured here would cost in excess of £6,000 – enough to buy two or three full-suspension trail bikes. But you can’t judge a bike like the Seven like that. It’s what one of my riding buddies described as the “wife bike” – the one you want to settle down with.
Singletrack Magazine: Boutique Titanium, Seven Sola Reviewed
Seven Cycles were born out of ex-employees of Merlin Titanium, (one of the first modern companies to start building with titanium, back in the ’80s). Merlin’s chief MTB designer Rob Vandermark, and several other important folk, left Merlin to set up Seven in 1997 and haven’t really looked back. They initially made just Ti frames, but moved into also making steel and now carbon frames as well. They’re based just outside Boston, Massachusetts.
The Detail
Our test frame is a production Sola frame, but with a custom paint job. Paint is an up-charge option on all Ti Sevens—but you’re equally welcome to leave it bare if you wish. We weren’t that sure about the paint to start with, but stacked against the other Ti bikes on test, it certainly stands out and is a welcome change to the utilitarian dull gray of a plain Ti frame.
For two grand, though, you’d want the beauty to be a lot more than skin deep though. Looking over the Seven, there’s a lot of simplicity and neatness going on. The seat collar is big, but neat. The dropouts are sculpted but not ostentatious and the welds and tube diameters seem ‘just right’.
There’s a lot of titanium bike history gone into this Seven. The tubing is seamlessly double butted and the seatstays feature long ‘S’ bends—both innovations developed while Rob Vandermark was at Merlin. Ironically the ‘S’ bend stays were to increase mudroom but also to give more power to cantilevers. The ‘S’ these days is much longer and results in parallel stays with an elegant kick out at the dropouts. The Sola is Seven’s butted titanium frame (the unbutted Verve is £ 1600) and comes in at barely more than 3Lbs for a 16in frame, so it’s no real surprise that it built into the lightest bike on test.
With our stock Shimano XT build and 80mm Manitou R7 forks, the Sola builds into a bike on the verge of ‘impressively light’ and a lighter, leaner or bigger, chunkier build would be easy depending on your penchant. At around 241lbs though, it felt just right for high speed blasting.
The components are a similar spec to the build on the Moots—good old reliable XT shifters, transmission and brakes, with Shimano XT wheels. They can be run tubeless, but we were keeping to our stock Kenda tires so ran tubes. The only other differences were with a Hope stem and a Thomson seatpost instead of the Moots Ti items on the Moots (there’s something very satisfying about the ‘zzzip!’ of the machined ridges on a Thomson post as it slides into a precisely reamed seat tube.
The paint is very wet looking and obviously many coats thick—this can be easily seen where it ends and the Ti frame starts showing. There’s a I mm step there, protected by a shaped vinyl strip—I suppose there’s not much else they could do here, but it would make sense to get a few spares to protect the vulnerable paint ends from chipping.
The paint has already shown signs of wear, despite helicopter tape in high risk areas. The stop-free center of the top tube is already showing scratching from the brake hose and there are a couple of other scuffs.
The Ride
Like all the bikes here, there is none of the expected ‘angels singing’ ride experience. At their best, all Ti bikes ride like ‘a bike’ and buying one won’t make you a faster rider unless it’s because it inspires you to ride bikes more. The Seven falls into that category. It’s simply a wonderfully inspiring bike to ride.
The light weight of the Seven can be felt in a couple of ways—riders used to regular steel hardtails were climbing hills a couple of gears higher, but those used to more burly trail bikes found the Sola to be just on the edge of ‘too light’ on faster descents as it can get bounced around a little. The racer boy 80mm forks (the other bikes had 100mm) that the frame was designed for meant that the Sola was happier on fast, twisty trails rather than rock fests, but it still coped admirably with some slow, thrutchy stuff. Technical climbs were particularly fun as the combination of light weight and surefootedness made slow and steppy stuff fun again.
In terms of flat-out speed and performance on high speed singletrack, the Sola was a joy to ride. Throw it into comers, lean it over and big ring it out the other side. I even found myself dropping back from the ‘pack’ just so I could wind up another sprint. There was a definite ‘snap’ to the ride and changes in speed just needed a moment’s notice.
The Sola is definitely a bike that won’t let you walk past without an appreciative look and on the trails it won’t let you go home until you’ve gone further than you were intending to. I could fault the scufflness of the paint job, but there’s nothing to stop you saving money and having a bare frame anyway. Besides, if you’re going to have a bike for ten years, it might as well gain a few scars and wrinkles- after all, the owner is certainly going to… which we have been very fortunate to draw upon. Plus, I think there is a very good work ethic out here.”
Best Bike: Verve by Seven, with S and S Machine Coupling
Wallpaper Magazine
Naturally, in the circumstances, we were a little nervous. At Wallpaper* we are of the firm opinion that the Massachusetts custom builder, Seven Cycles, makes the best titanium-framed bicycles in the world. We think the understated Verve model is one of the most elegant mountain bikes in existence. We spent ages agonising over the Etruscan blue detailing we wanted for our award winner and then, having at length chosen the desired hue, we asked the manufacturers to do one more thing for us – to cut their precious bike in half. But they were absolutely delighted to do so.
In fact, Seven Cycles is one of the élite bike manufacturers that have helped support the launch of our favourite cycle accessory of the year: a beautifully engineered system, by S and S Machine, for joining two bike halves – separated for ease of transportation – back together again. It shouldn’t really work (at first, experts reckoned the frame would never be as good again once it had been sliced), but the process genuinely makes no difference to ride quality. Handy instructions on the S and S website (www.sandsmachine.com) mean that assembly and disassembly is easy for even the most mechanically challenged among us, while the carrying case that the bike fits into can be taken as hand luggage on airlines. We won’t ever be leaving home without it.
Procycling Magazine: Double Take
