titanium – Page 3 – Seven Cycles

Ambi’s 622 SLX

This is Ambi’s new 622 SLX with integrated seat post (ISP), 44mm headtube, and Di2 shifting perched against a guard rail in the Marin headlands looking down over the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco. We built it with our friends at City Cycle.

Ambi says:

My bike is finally completed and she had her first 40+miles today up and down SF hills and the Marin Headlands, even saw family of deers too. She rides as mean as she looks, and as good, as fast…super stiff, awesome downhill, uphill, cutting corners..you name it! That over-sized head tube looks insane!

Effortless! Now i need to be in shape all the time to keep up with this bike.

Thanks again for all your help and please thank Jordan and all Seven crew who helped made my dream bike. Can’t wait to ride again. You guys are awesome! I am eyeing a Ti Axiom or Cafe Racer in the future. But in the meantime this bike is so awesome!

Titanium/Carbon Mixes – The Best of Both Worlds

If you were to take a carbon fiber tube and wrap it against the wall, then hold your ear to it, there would be little if any sound emanating from the tube. If you did the same test with metal, it would sing like a tuning fork. The same holds true for frames, metal sings and carbon whispers. These two qualities make for very different experiences on the road. Carbon bikes, like our Diamas line, make pitted and potholed roads feel like you are pedaling over wall to wall carpeting; smooth, with very little feedback. Metal bikes, like the Axiom, Resolute, Sola, and Mudhoney, on the other hand, provide constant feedback keeping you in tune with the surface of the road. Once we start customizing and manipulating tube sets, we can alter how compliant or how stout the frames will be, but the material dictates how the road’s vibrations will be relayed to the rider.

There is a gap between whispering and singing, and to some, that’s where the perfect bike resides. By adding carbon tubes to a titanium frame, or vice versa, we can fabricate a bike that hums, bridging the gap between the two materials.

The idea of a titanium frame paired with carbon seat stays for the intended purpose of soaking up road vibrations was a notion that Seven pioneered and first implemented with the Odonata back in 1997, and though there have been some updates and improvements the same basic model exists today, now known as the Elium SL.

The ride of a ti/carbon bike is so pleasant, that we offer them in road, cross, and mountain bike disciplines.

The Life Cycle – Abridged Version

Every few weeks a freight truck wends its way down our steep, angled driveway to drop off two or three of these long wooden boxes. They contain raw titanium tubing in 18 foot lengths, all different gauges. The process of loading the unwieldy boxes onto a four-wheeler and moving them past the shipping department, through paint and into the machining area, one at a time, is something like a tugboat pushing a long cargo barge up the narrow, jagged length of the Mississippi River. It takes a strong sense of spatial relations and a fair amount of experience.

Wall of titanium tubing

The boxes get unpacked and the various tubes sorted by size into these vertical bays. This is our vault. This is our wine cellar. This is where the process of building a new bike begins, Matt O’Keefe standing here in front of the stock, a customer’s order in his hands, selecting the assortment of tubes that will go into their new bike.

We cut down the lengths to size, before butting each tube to give a very specific ride feel and handling characteristic. Then we miter the ends to fit together just so, tolerances hovering somewhere near the thickness of a human hair, the raw tubing shedding material in small increments, becoming a bike.

The modified tubes collect in small cardboard boxes, the frame builder working through a series of work cells, each with several mills or lathes in it, each set up for a very specific job, until the tubeset is complete. Then they get jigged up, so we can test the build against the frame drawing, refine any last details.

Eventually, you get one of these. There are, as you can imagine, some important intervening steps, but this is the abridged version of the story. Suffice it to say we weld, machine, finish, polish and decal, before we get to this point. Sometimes we paint.

What titanium doesn’t make it into the frame gets carefully collected in a barrel, building up over time into a strangely beautiful pile of titanium squiggles and spirals. The recycler comes by to pick these up and return them to the mill where the process starts all over, a closed loop of magic from which we extract custom bicycles.

The end..

Working with Titanium

We wrote about steel the other day, and how the accepted wisdom regarding steel tube sets simply doesn’t match the reality. Today, we want to address titanium. Interestingly, while riders have believed for years that the type of steel a frame is made from is supremely important (we agree), they have simultaneously assumed that titanium is just titanium, that it’s all the same.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Seven uses mainly US-milled, Cold Worked – Stress Relieved (CWSR) titanium in our custom frames. We do that because no other titanium available today has a longer fatigue life or higher tensile strength. We know that’s true because we have a fatigue tester here in our shop and regularly submit tubes to rigorous testing. Pushing materials to their breaking point is a great way of finding out how good they are, and our research indicates that the titanium we source is the strongest available and maintains that strength over significantly longer periods than the titanium available from mills in Asia.

We always want to use the best materials, because we want to build the best bikes, but we also have a commitment to lifetime warranties that prevents us from cutting corners with lower quality products. When you buy a custom Seven, you put your faith in us to produce a bike that will fit like a glove, corner on rails and last forever. American CWSR titanium allows us to repay your faith with a frame of uncompromising quality.

Compliance

One of the magical things about titanium is the consistency with which it maintains its shape. Subjected to the sometimes punishing forces of riding on road and trail, no other material currently in use in bike frames will find just the right amount of compliance to cushion all those blows, and yet spring back, perfectly, to its original place.

In today’s seemingly inexhaustible (and yet exhausting) search for stiffness in every aspect of bicycle construction, compliance is undervalued.

Think of your typical trail ride. Rocks and roots create chatter. Downed tree limbs punctuate the route. Twists and turns and ruts and stumps, it’s all there. And so, your job, as the rider, is to smooth it all out. You use your body to turn the bike this way and that. You soak up big hits with your knees flexed, shifting your weight forward and back, side-to-side.

The stiffer your frame is, the more of the force has to be dissipated by you, the rider. When you ride titanium, the frame will actually help you with the work by flexing along with your movement, soaking up its own share of the barrage of forces at play as you roll down the trail.

And, those same properties that help you smooth out the trail, produce the same magic on the road as well. A titanium frame works with you in ways that other frames won’t, leaving you comfortable at speed, over greater distances, by eating potholes and road debris, cushioning road chatter and flexing microscopically through turns.

At Seven, we believe that steel and carbon also have strong places in frame construction, but our ongoing investment in and commitment to titanium come from a belief that, for most riders, the compliance a Ti frame offers is a key part of enjoying the ride at whatever speed, over any distance, on any surface.