U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix
U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix
This is Robert’s new Sola SL 007, a mountain tandem perfect for the Hawaiian back roads and trails Robert wants to explore. The final build looks great.
He says:
I finally got all the parts for my tandem and put it together on the weekend. Took it for it’s maiden voyage today on a short ride here in Maui. It is perfect. Thank you again.
Now I can plan my next project…
Speak soon
Robert
This is Adam’s Sola SLX 29er. We built it with Ed and the crew at Web Cyclery in Bend, OR. A bead-blasted decal and new XTR Di2 keep this bike clean and simple, a really nice build. Thanks for working with us, Adam!
He says:
Thank you Seven! Everything is done except the final stem cutting. Notice the wires coming out of the steerer tube. Thank you so much for a very professional and pleasant experience. I will enjoy this bike for many, many years to come!
Thank you,
Adam
P.S Look for it at Sea Otter in the Pro Men’s field!
The Big Ideas, as a series, is about this whole bike building project we embarked on in 1997 and the foundational ideas that make what we do possible. The first installment was about Single-Piece Flow (SPF). The second installment was about Just-in-Time manufacturing (JIT).
This week we explore the 5 Elements of Customization.
It is all well and good to tell someone you can build their ultimate bike, but if they don’t have the vocabulary to tell you what that bike should look like, you’re no closer to that bike existing than you were before you met them. The 5 Elements give riders a useful way to think about customization.
The 5 Elements are the language of Single-Piece Flow on the bike shop floor.
1) Fit & Geometry – Think of the upper half of the bike, the points where you touch the bike, saddle height, set back, reach, bar height. These are the angles and centimeters that address different riders’ size, proportions, age, style and health (injuries). We address these, at the shop, through a bike fitting, and then follow up with body measurements that allow us to consider that fit in terms of your new frame’s geometry.
2) Handling and Performance – Think of the lower half of the bike. This is where we fine tune for rider weight, comfort, handling and riding conditions. Bottom bracket drop, fork rake, chainstay length, all these things affect how the bike feels. If you tell us you want your bike to be stable or quick handling, we can produce those characteristics through fine tuning of handling and performance features.
3) Tubing & Materials – We work in steel, titanium, and Ti/carbon mix. We start from the beginning when designing a bike for you, choosing a material that speaks to the kind of riding you do, then we go further, picking a tube set, in that material(s), that matches your specific preferences for stiffness and/or comfort, then we go further still, refining your rider-specific tube set through tube butting processes to accomplish the most personalized on-bike experience available from any custom builder, anywhere.
4) Options – Brake types, rack and fender mounts, decal colors and placement, paint, cable-routing, couplers, chain or belt drive component optimization, the configurations and permutations are close to infinite. This is how you dial the bike in. This is how you meet ALL your goals for your new bike, without compromise.
5)The Future – This is how we make our design as durable as our materials. We plan for the rider’s aspirations. Racing? Touring? Commuting? How does the bike age with the rider’s body? Is it adaptable? How do we keep the bike useful for the rest of the rider’s life?
You don’t have to be a bike designer to collaborate with us on the design of your new bike. You just need to be able to express your preferences in simple terms and let us map them onto the 5 Elements of Customization.
We built this Axiom SL in 2002, for a customer who has since worked with us on two more bikes. This winter, he decided he wanted to update the look of this bike after 13 years on the road. He sent it to us to strip and repaint. This is what it looked like when we got it, not bad for its vintage, not bad at all.
We tell our riders we’re building them a lifetime bike, that they’ll still be riding it in decades. We think it’s one of the big selling features of a Seven, but in the excitement of getting a new bike, few really appreciate the value of the long term. You can’t blame them, they’re getting a new bike.
But now, 18 years into our bike building adventure, we are seeing bikes coming back for refinishes and repaints, and we send every one back out the door looking as good as it did when it was new. Many of these frames are a decade or more old.
There’s a story in this that resonates with these times: about quality, about not making disposable stuff, about caring for and fixing things instead of throwing them away and buying something new.
Here is the after shot of the bike above:
We hope we’ll see it back again in 10 or 15 years for another update.
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.