If you fly over New England in an airplane, it looks like a patchwork of farm, forest and town, irregular and haphazard. Our roads are very much the same way. Stretches of smooth pavement are rare. Potholes, patches and gravelly shoulders more or less define the riding here. So when we’re designing a road bike, we often start there, at the road surface, and we think about what kind of a bike will work best.
An Axiom is a starting point, an idea that leads to other ideas.
Our Axiom road bikes, and very specifically our flagship Axiom SL, are designed to be on the road, the real road as we experience it rather than some theoretical road, which is somehow always smoother and more uniform than real life offers.
When we started Seven, we had already designed and built around 40,000 titanium road bikes, so we had this experience of what Ti was good at and how to get the best out of it, and we were convinced that as we grew and expanded what we were doing, the Axiom line would be exactly that, a foundational idea from which all our other bikes might flow.
No single bike tells the story of Seven Cycles as thoroughly and completely as our Axiom SL, the double-butted, all titanium road frame we have been building in almost the exact same way since 1997. We have built more Axiom SLs than any other bike, and each year, despite whatever new bike we might have out or what might be hot in the larger bike market, orders for the Axiom SL remain steady and strong.
The hallmarks of the Axiom SL are a double-butted tubeset, s-bend chain and seat stays, an engraved seat top, and 6-4 titanium plate dropouts, also etched with our logo and refined in structural layers to minimize weight and maximize strength.
To some degree, it’s all about controlled compliance, determining how much flex there is in the frame and where those flex points are. A butted tube is thicker at its ends, tapering down towards its midsection. Where the taper begins and how much material is removed along the length of the tube give it a unique character, stiffer or more compliant. By very careful butting and by moving those points strategically, we can produce a bike that handles and feels exactly how a rider wants it to.
The S-bend chain and seat stays in the rear triangle of the frame play their part, too. Titanium’s ability to flex along the length of the stay means that the Axiom’s rear end works as a classic suspension system, effectively holding the rear wheel on the ground, which makes the bike smooth over bad pavement. It also means stable descending, a sense that the bike is rooted in each corner, even at high speed.
And that’s what we want, a bike that will stick to the road, any road, while remaining comfortable and stable. That’s the starting point. That’s our Axiom.