INSPIRATION AND IDEAS

CONTENTSFirst, the Idea .................................................................................................................................................................... 2

Everything is Possible ............................................................................................................................................... 4

Something in the Soil, Something in the Water ................................................................................... 6

The Bikes We Build .................................................................................................................................................... 8

The 5 Elements of Customization .................................................................................................................10

Framebuilding .............................................................................................................................................................. 12

Our Daily Ride (1) ......................................................................................................................................................24

The Axiom ...................................................................................................................................................................... 26

Summer Miles ...............................................................................................................................................................28

622 slx ................................................................................................................................................................................. 30

Our Daily Ride (2) ......................................................................................................................................................32

To the Woods .................................................................................................................................................................34

Re-Inventing the Wheel ....................................................................................................................................... 36

Sola ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 38

Riding the Dirt Riding the Gravel ................................................................................................................ 40

Evergreen .........................................................................................................................................................................42

Our Daily Ride (3) ..................................................................................................................................................... 44

Mudhoney ....................................................................................................................................................................... 46

Traction Action ........................................................................................................................................................... 48

The Morning Hustle ............................................................................................................................................... 50

Cafe Racing .....................................................................................................................................................................52

Experience, Craft and Skill ..................................................................................................................................54

For Riding .........................................................................................................................................................................56

FIRST, THE IDEA

without the inspiration to go somewhere. This part of

the process, the beginning, is crucial. Fix the idea in

your head. Keep your eyes on the destination.

The best bikes are made of these things.

Before a frame drawing gets made.

Before a tube gets cut.

Before the welding torch burns brightly.

The kernel of the idea is in what the bike needs to do,

where it wants to take you next.

The whole bike is contained in the path it will travel, all

the details falling out of the necessities of the ride.

Will it be fast? Will it be comfortable? Will it have

wheels like this and handlebars like that?

What is your idea? And when can we build it?

There is no bicycle without the idea of a bicycle,

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EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLEWhen a bike company talks about research

and development, most people think in

terms of products, new bike models, new

components. But when we look at our R&D

plan, the discreet projects are much smaller.

For example, we have redesigned the drop

outs on our road bikes a dozen times over

the life of the company, evolving, refining

and improving with each iteration.

New bike models, such as they are in the

world of custom building, mostly come out

of these smaller projects, the accumulation

of progress coalescing into a vision for a

new bike. Very seldom have we set out to

design a bike from the ground up. Innova-

tion, in our experience, takes the form of a

series of breakthroughs that can be

put to good use. There is no flash of

lightning, no thunder clap.

It’s not unlike the experience of a long,

testing ride. You can’t cover 50, 100 or even

200 miles all at once. You have to ride each

mile as best you can, and see how it all

comes together at the end.

But if that description of the process lacks

some of the magic, some of the creation

myth, of conventional imagination, the pow-

er of daily research and its steady gains still

fill us with awe. Tools, like Solid-

Works and 3D printing,

let us give

shape to ideas that seemed static on paper

or equations that tumbled silently through

spreadsheets.

Most of us are not formally trained en-

gineers, but our collective bike building

experience comes to more than 250 years

and more than 40,000 frames, most of those

here at Seven where we build one bike at

a time, by hand. In just the same way the

miles pile up, we focus on each bike, the

bike in front of us at the moment, and then,

over a period of years, we establish a legacy.

By now, we have collected and crunched

data on every aspect of our craft,

the fatigue life of our

materials, their tensile strength, deflection

properties under load. When we work

tubing on a lathe or mill, we know what we

are aiming for in the final product, both

in the practical experience of riding and

in the physical properties of the object.

Science and craft, engineering and art, are

not incompatible.

In fact, engineering and art teach us similar

lessons. That form will follow function if

you let it. That the end point for either one

is an asymptote, vanishing in the distance.

And that, given a vision and the right expe-

rience, everything is possible.

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Seven Cycles sits in a squat, red brick building in Watertown, MA, six miles from downtown Boston and a stone’s throw from the Charles River, which ribbons through the city and out into the western suburbs. Just up stream from us is the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation, and not even a mile further on is the former site of the Waltham Manufacturing Company.

In the 1890s, Waltham Manufacturing was at the epicenter of America’s first bike boom. They built singles, tandems, and even larger bikes, some of which could accommodate 5 and even 10 riders. The Museum of Industry and Innovation displays many of these bikes.

More than a century later, we carry on the tradition of New England bike building. Our own factory is located in a mill building from that same era. The mills and lathes on our shop floor come from the beautiful old manufacturing spaces that cluster along rivers all over the region. Vaulted ceilings and tall windows characterize these build-ings, making them as attractive today as they were in their prime.

It was the age of disco, the 1970s, when bikes boomed again in America, and a few intrepid souls resurrected the New England bike building trade. Peter Weigle, Richard Sachs and Chris Chance were among those visionaries who came before us. Merlin Metalworks, where many of us here at Seven began our life’s work, was part of the second wave, and of course, what we do is built on that foundation.

SOMETHING IN THE SOIL, SOMETHING IN THE WATER

Even now, young builders who have worked here in our shop have gone on to establish themselves in their own spaces. Many came before us, and many will come after us.

Maybe there is something in the soil, some-thing in the water, an urge to build things

that carries on from centuries past. Maybe we could build bikes someplace else, but we know they would be different.

We believe that where something is made matters. We believe that something of this place and something of our people inhabits

each bike we build in our red brick factory along the river. And we feel very lucky to be playing our small part in this big story, the story of bike building in New England.

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THE BIKES WE BUILD

When people find out we build custom bikes, they ask, in the grocery store, at the school drop off, at the donut shop, “What kinds of bikes do you build?” And we pause, as you do when the answer is much larger than the question, and then we say, “Well, all kinds, road, mountain, commuter, cyclo-cross, whatever people want.”

Except that’s not the half of it.

The truth is that categories like road or mountain have stopped meaning much of anything. We build road bikes, and some-times that means a narrow-tired race machine and sometimes that means a fendered, long-distance randonneur.

What’s that? Randonneur? You can’t use the word randonneur at the donut shop.

So categories break down. Road is an umbrella that covers so many distinct and exciting types of bikes that before you know it, you’re in another category altogether, maybe cyclocross, maybe commuter.

If it’s ridden on pavement is it a road bike? If it lives on the trail is it a mountain bike? It’s hard to know how to define a custom bike. We are not constrained by shelf space or model year, by component choices or paint scheme, by pavement or dirt.

People come to Seven, often, because the thing they want can’t be captured in a word or two. Maybe they want a road bike, but they want the option to add fenders and racks when they’re not riding with their fast, weekend group. Maybe they want a cyclocross racer, but they want to be able to convert it to a winter-time commuter when the season is over.

We build road bikes, sure. That’s what we say at the grocery store, or at the barber shop, but we also build all the bikes in- between the road and the trail, the race course and the school drop off. Those are the kinds of bikes we build.

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We are, all of us, trying to get back to that moment, when we were two, or five, or ten-years-old, of first pushing off and feeling the freedom, the joy of riding a bike. The 5 Elements are meant to get us there, to strip away the fear and focus on the idea for a new bike.

THE FIVE ELEMENTS OF CUSTOMIZATION

As we design your bike in the present we want to think of ways your needs might change over time. Perhaps you race now, but want to tour later. Maybe you anticipate moving to another locale, with different surfaces to ride. We want, whenever possible, to anticipate those changing needs and build adaptability into our designs.

The Future

Think of the top half of the bike, where the saddle floats in space and how long a reach it is to the bars, how many hand positions you have, where the saddle sits on its rails. These things are supremely important. They are, in many ways, the ultimate arbiters of comfort. For some, this is what custom bike building is about, just geometry, how tall, how long. But this is only a beginning.

Fit and Comfort

This is where compromises evaporate, where the call for fenders or disc brakes gets answered, where you get to personalize every aspect of the bike. Infinite colors and unique paint schemes become possible. Different wheel sizes, front and rear racks, decal place-ment or component choice. It’s all here, and it’s all available.

Features and Options

When thinking about how you want your bike to be, we like to start at the material level, recommending a tubeset that matches your ideas for comfort, performance and feel. Each material we work with can be refined still further to give very precise ride characteristics, both through tube choice and by modifying those tubes in highly technical ways.

Tubing and Materials

Handling and Performance

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element

element

element

element

elementThink of the lower half of the bike, the bottom bracket height, the wheelbase, the fork rake and resulting trail. All of these things effect how the bike feels when you’re on it, bombing twisty descents, churning up steep inclines, moving and shaking through a group of riders. By describing to us how you want your bike to feel in those visceral moments, the ones when you feel most alive on your bike, we can tailor the geometry and tubeset to deliver very specific characteristics. This is where we go beyond fit and get into ride.

Collated in an ordinary manila folder are the details of your new bike. Body measurements, preliminary sketches, notes, revisions, and final drafts are all there, as is the signed con-firmation form perched right on top. To non-cyclists, a loose sheaf of papers like this might not get the blood flowing, but it works for us, and probably does for you, too.

This paperwork, after all, is the blue-print to a bike that has never been seen before, a bike designed to make your favorite rides even better, a bike specifi-cally for you.

Matt O’Keefe, our production manager, takes that ordinary folder from the design team and walks it back to the shop floor.

Your ordinary folder turns extraordinary when it gets passed to a frame builder who spreads the paperwork out on the desk in the machinists’ office. Looking over the confirmation form, the idea that spawned your bike begins to shine through. Each detail reveals a little more about you, and a little more about how your bike will be ridden.

With these pieces of information dancing in the frame builder’s mind, a build sheet comes to life. It contains a CAD drawing, a tubeset specifica-tion, tube diameters, wall thickness or carbon fiber orientation, brake routing and type, and every other detail related to the construction of your bike. All the information, from the length of each tube to the color of the final decal, are on that build sheet.

Next comes a non-descript, cardboard box, three feet long, 6 inches wide.

With the drawing in hand, the builder slowly fills that box with a bike. The first part added to the box is the drive side drop out, which is important for two reasons. First, it will have your serial number stamped into it with hammer and anvil. More importantly though, this is the moment when your bike officially transforms from an idea to a physical reality.

We are underway.

FRAMEBUILDING

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to create the shapely “s” bend curves in the chain and seat stays.

Each machine makes its own distinct sound and competes for air space with the music streaming from the radio. Lathes spin end-lessly, shaving off material as they go. Belt sanders remove tiny burs from tube ends, with a high-pitched grating and a shot of sparks, the entire process a symphony for eyes and ears.

Our cut-off lathe, an olive drab monster that sits at the edge of the machining area, was made in Cleveland, where Bardons & Oliver are still making manufacturing equipment. This one came from a barn out in Franklin, MA in 1998, the first machine we bought when we moved to our Watertown factory. We brought it home on a flatbed truck.

BARDONS & OLIVER CUT-OFF LATHE

Standing on end, extending from floor to ceiling 20 feet up, hundreds of steel, carbon, and titanium tubes form a wall that isolates the machining department from the rest of the production floor. Behind that wall, hulking lathes and mills, some of them built nearly seventy years ago, refine the raw metal parts of your frame to exacting tolerances. Presses, tube benders, fixtures, vices, anvils, files, and adjustable jigs fill in the surrounding gaps, a metal landscape, no breeze, no sunlight.

A lone strand of ivy, growing from a strate-gically placed mason jar, is the only green to be found, and yet the whole department buzzes with life.

Frame builders work the floor, moving from one machine to the next, flipping levers, sliding gauges, and taking measurements at each step. Yellow hole saws go round and round, coping each tube to fit precisely with the next. The machinists’ arms pump up and down forcing the red hydraulic press

When the performance is over and each of your frame’s parts is machined to absolute perfection, the bike takes its true shape for the first time. The non-descript, oblong box slowly empties as the builder, CAD drawing in hand, loads the frame jig. Head and seat tube angles are locked in place, distances measured, each tube inserted fills in the puzzle until, there, assembled for the first time, hangs your frame.

And the ensemble sings.

TOOLS OF THE TRADEPeople who tour our factory almost always comment on the brute elegance of the lathes and mills we use to build our frames. It’s a hodge-podge of heavy equipment drawn from old brick buildings like ours all over New England. Many of these machines have been working at their daily tasks for more than 50 years.

Skip Brown, who builds all our specialized fixturing, also maintains our fleet of behemoths. He shows up with the sun each morning and makes his rounds, oiling, aligning and cleaning. Skip says he can smell a well-cared for machine, just from the freshness of the oil scent wafting above it.

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After a moment of appreciation, the frame builder disassembles your frame, puts it back in the box, and wheels it, jig and all, to the welding department.

Six tables form the circumference of the welding area. Unlike the back and forth, on-their-feet movement of the machinists, welders work more like laboratory scien-tists. Instead of operating multiple, massive machines all at once, they set up shop on

a broad metal desk with all of their tools within arm’s reach. A torch, argon purge hose, different lengths and widths of filler rod, metal blocks that serve as heat sinks, clamps, and of course the welding mask are all there.

Welding desks are divided by heavily tinted plastic curtains to protect the eyes of pass-ers-by from the bright light of the torch. It’s much quieter in welding, too. Music, talk

radio, and podcasts play through head-phones, not speakers. The arc flows from the torch with a whisper of argon gas. Desks are far enough away from each other that chatter happens only at the alignment table.

The welding department has a much dif-ferent feel than machining, where metal is being cut, filed and sanded. Everything is clean in welding, including the bright white

floor. In welding, everything gets cleaned in a two-stage acetone bath, then handled with white cotton gloves. Tools, fixtures, and surfaces are spic-and-span. They have to be.

The welder loads your pristine tubes in the frame jig once again so they can be tacked together. Small spot welds hold the tubes in place after it’s removed from the jig, making it easier to weld freehand.

Duff’s were made in Haverhill, MA, just up the road from us. They are smaller than most mills of that vintage, and many of them went to hobbyists half-a-century ago. We like them because they’re more easily moved than their larger cousins, and they take up less floor space. Their distinctive green paint also livens up the shop a little. Our favorite Duff reams Titanium stems to perfect roundness.

DUFF VERTICAL MILLS

This lathe, built in 1942, came from a local trade school who were upgrading their equipment. We use it to repair parts for

the other machines on the shop floor as well as to build fixtures that will be used to streamline the production process.

MONARCH LATHE

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With two nods of the head, the welding mask drops, shielding eyes from the pierc-ing light. In the right hand, the torch, in the left, the filler rod. When the frame is proper-ly purged, and the desired temperature is reached, the filler rod flows into the junc-tion, where it melts and leaves a small round puddle. Each little droplet adds strength to the weld, a lifetime bond.

The finished weld looks so uniform that you might not realize the welders work in short increments, sometimes only a centimeter-at-a-time, before the frame has to be lifted, spun, flipped, or adjusted. It’s a testament to their skill and artistry that the finished product looks so smooth, like one continuous flow.

Considering a frame’s alignment is mea-sured in thousandths-of-inches, the welder has to monitor the straightness of the frame throughout the process. Through frequent inspections, welders can make micro adjust-ments along the way, ensuring the straight-est frames possible. The tightest tolerance, keeping the bottom bracket parallel to the top tube within 0.005”, is roughly the height of two pages of copy paper lying flat on

your desk. The tighter the tolerance, the more predictably the bike will handle.

We take great pride in tight tolerances.

The welder will spend several hours on your frame and components. Upon completion, pending the final inspection of the master welder, a frame builder takes it away for final machining and finishing.

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Final machining completes the frame, making it ready to assemble into a fully functioning bike. The head tube, ever so slightly distorted from the heat of the welding torch, is faced and reamed on a vintage, Massachusetts-made lathe.

The bottom bracket, still just a thick walled tube at this point, is threaded and machined in the CNC, the largest ma-chine in the building. Seat tube notches get cut, and carbon fiber tubes are fitted into the frame if we are building a titani-um/carbon model.

Your frame has been through a lot at this point. The raw tubes pulled from the rack in machining have been cut, filed, sanded, tacked, aligned, welded, reamed, faced, and threaded. When the builder puts your frame in the finishing stand, it could, technically, be assembled into a bike, but it wouldn’t be as pretty as it will be when we’re done with it.

There are cutting fluids dried on it. Around each weld is a hazy discoloration from the heat. Metal bits left over from its final moments in the CNC machine are stuck inside the seat tube.

If machining feels walled in, and welding is like a lab, the finishing department has the feel of an open-air quad. Big windows fill the room with natural light. The fluorescent lights are at their brightest here, which is useful for decal alignment and detailed inspection.

Instead of immobile machines, or wide metal desks, there are single tier bike stands equipped with small lightweight tools, drills with Nylox wheels, and thin strips of sandpaper and Scotch-Brite. The scratchy wheels of Nylox power through the unsightly discolorations and remove any other surface grit. The sound of the wheel on titanium is a constant.

When the entire frame has been wheeled, it gets polished with Scotch-Brite, the way you would shine a valued pair of leather shoes. This final touch imparts a bright, uniform look. Decals are applied, and small parts are secured. The entire frame is coated in a light furniture polish, and then a laser cut, stainless steel head badge gets bolted on.

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If the frame is being painted, the finisher stops short of decaling and affixing those small parts. Painted frames get prepped, then hung on the rack just outside the odd looking, seemingly out of place, paint booth. Its silver walls look like nothing else in the building. A sign hangs above the door that reads “time machine.”

The mixing room, one of the three chambers that make up the booth, has a floor spattered with colorful droplets, like a canvas documenting every frame we’ve ever painted. Every color, and there are

probably a few hundred million, can be mixed in that little room.

The sound of the paint mixer is just like the one you hear at the hardware store. Just a few ounces of paint will cover a bicycle frame. They get mixed and poured into a cup, loaded in the sprayer, then hooked to the compressor in the spray room.

The spray room is entirely white. Your frame, masked and primed, is clamped into another stand. With the flick of a switch, the room’s filtration system is activated, and

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Bridgeport’s have been so popular that vertical mills are often called Bridgeports, even if they were made by another manufacturer. Ours come from the ‘60s and ‘70s. We use them to cope the tubes in the front triangles of our frames, making half-moon cuts at each tube-end in anticipa-tion of the welder’s torch.

BRIDGEPORT MILLS

ooo-woosh! New employees look up to see if the booth really is a time machine.

Safe in mask and protective suit, the painter sprays your frame, back and forth in even, swooping passes. Complex schemes require several trips to the spray room, so it’s not always easy to see just what the paint job will look like until the masks are removed in the drying room next door.

It’s not uncommon to see employees peeking in the window to see what beautiful colors and schemes people have dreamt up.

When the paint and clear coat have dried, the frame is carried back to the finishing department where a frame builder will give it the final touches.

Every day, finished frames leave our shop floor and find their way into cardboard boxes destined for riders all over the world. You are never far from this process. Your name, your information, travels with your bike each step of the way. The builders know you in some small way and take great satisfaction, knowing you will ride what they build.

Running the length of the floor is a hand-made wooden rack with slots for fourteen bikes. It looks worn but sturdy. Hooks, above the rack and along the walls, can hold another twenty or so bikes. There is a single, stand-alone, wooden rack too, but this one has additional support specifi-cally to hold Kirk’s heavy bikes upright. At the end of the lot, against the wall, is a repair stand we use for anything from last minute fixes to complete overhauls. All in all, there are over four hundred square feet of floor space dedicated to employ-ee parking here at Seven Cycles. We wouldn’t need so much room, if we didn’t have so many commuters.

Tim’s bike, adorned with yellow fenders, always hangs from the first hook. Lau-ren’s handlebar is impossibly narrow. Matt O’s bike has a most burly front rack. Neil, Matt S, and Jake all use a genera-tor hub to power their headlights. Mary always has a level top tube, no matter the bike. Mike seems to ride a different bike every single day, how big is his collec-tion? Skip’s bikes have the least amount of pizzazz, but have been exposed to the most torque. We can tell who is at work, and who is getting lunch, just by looking at the bikes.

OUR DAILY RIDEMatt O’Keefe

Production Manager

Tim DelaneyMaster Welder

Kirk TegelaarGraphic Designer26

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 founda-tional 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 AXIOMThe hallmarks of the Axiom SL are a dou-ble-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, effec-tively holding the rear wheel on the ground, which makes the bike smooth over bad pavement. It also means stable descend-ing, 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.

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SUMMER MILES

Summer miles happen on the road. The early roll out catches the crickets and the heavy dew that settles just before dawn. Voices seem loud before cars join the party.

We meet at the coffee shop, as if there is any other place to meet, warm light spill-ing from the windows. And we mill in the parking lot and adjust our sleeves, retighten our shoes.

For a quarter mile or more we are a disorga-nized mess, everyone finding their position, settling in the saddle. And then we are together, a unit.

The paceline strings out quietly as we all come up to temperature, people pulling off the front to keep from doing too much too soon. The joking starts at the back and moves up the line. Only the pair with their faces in the wind remain quiet, their breath coming quick as we pick up speed.

We’ll go like this for an hour, get some dis-tance behind us, before one shoots off the front to take the town-line. Then gaps start

to open on the climbs. We slow down, even in the flats.

One has to break off to get to a kid’s soccer game. Another hasn’t quite worked up to this distance yet. The last out are the racers, tuning up for the Wednesday night crit, the Saturday road race.

We finish as a subset of ourselves, all of us solo acts as we hit our driveways or the steps up to the apartment.

Still others of us are mainly meditators, which is to say, we ride alone most of the time. No one to pull for, but also no one to draft behind. Riding time is thinking time. No need to ask the group if the unanticipated detour is worth exploring. No need to clear departure time.

Our fitness is our own. Our speed is irrelevant. We don’t dislike the group, but we ride to know ourselves better, to bring ourselves more clearly into focus.

We do that on the road, one mile at a time.

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We ride to know ourselves better, to bring ourselves more clearly into focus. We do that on the road, one mile at a time.

We had been thinking about the 622 SLX for 14 years before we built the first one. In 1998, it just didn’t seem possible. There wasn’t the breadth of carbon tubing we have today, and the design was maybe too far over the edge from what we were already doing at the time. We wondered if the market was ready.

We put away our sketches.

We came back to them in 2005. Carbon fiber had come a long way, and we were thinking about how we could incorporate the material of the moment into a great, custom bike. Instead of building the 622 SLX then, we poured our energy into designing a custom carbon platform, a whole new way of building bikes, from the ground up, and we built those bikes for seven years before returning to our original design idea.

The key to the whole project is the lugs. Lug work has a long heritage. There was a time, when all bike builders were still

working exclusively in steel, that the qual-ity of a builder’s lugs was the measure of their skill. A lug had to be beautiful, but it also had to serve its purpose. Form had to follow function.

The titanium lugs in the 622 SLX are as thin as they can be while maintaining durability and compliance. They take the edge off the frame’s carbon tubes, which on their own provide more than ample stiffness. We added some aesthetic flourishes, too. A tapered 7 at the head and seat tubes, geometric cut outs at the other junctions. When people first see the bike, these are the things they notice.

The carbon tubing in the bike comes from a partner in Utah and is filament-wound to our exclusive specification. Each layer of material has been chosen to produce very specific ride characteristics. Filament-wound carbon, as opposed to its roll-wrapped equivalent, provides a consistent, accurate quality.

622 SLXThe name for the bike comes from the Periodic Table. 6 is carbon. 22 is titanium. And, by merging them into one number, we are expressing exactly what we want the bike to be, a true union of the materials, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The 622 SLX is either a carbon bike that doesn’t feel plasticky, or it’s a Ti bike that is lighter and stiffer than any that came before it. Or maybe it’s a new bike, a bike that makes use of the best materials, that borrows something from the heritage of bike building but leverages the technology of the moment to produce a ride that is at once light, stiff and comfortable.

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The 622 is a bike that makes use of the best materials, that borrows something from the heritage of bike building but leverages the technology of the moment to produce a ride that is at once light, stiff and comfortable.

Jake BridgeComputer Guy

John LewisSales and Marketing

Neil DoshiPerformance Design Lead

Matt SuttonBike Builder

Staci SommersPaint Manager

Mike SalvatoreLead Machinist

The Little Tennessee River gets backed up at the Fontana Dam forming an emerald green reservoir that has been on my mind since the beginning of summer. Along the shoreline, long leaf pine needles blanket the forty miles of single track that meander through a North Carolina State Recreation Area named Tsali. It was there that I fell in love with mountain biking on a chilly Octo-ber day, seventeen years ago.

Tsali was my first experience leaning into banked corners, involuntarily launching over whoop-de-do’s, and trail riding from sun up to until sun down. Whipping through the woods amidst the peace and quiet of the natural world turned out to be my definition of fun. Mountain biking was the first activity that I discovered, and liked, on my own. My parent’s provided me with

TO THE WOODSthe means, but the adventure was uniquely mine. That trip to North Carolina was just the start. From there I rode everywhere I could; the Smokies, the Blue Ridge, Pisgah, Monongahela, the Appalachians, the Saw-tooths, Yellowstone, the Tetons, the Colora-do Rockies, the Metacomet Ridge, and even Dooley’s Run right in my parents’ backyard. No matter the location, the thrill was the same. I was hooked.

After college graduation, I took a summer job leading mountain bike trips from out west, and ended up staying for the year. I can’t recall if I put pressure on myself, or felt it elsewhere, but when the year came to a close, I determined it was time to follow a more traditional post graduation path. I packed up, headed home, went back to school, and got a job. I’m sure everyone has

experienced it, but in the blink of an eye thirteen years flew by without me so much as throwing a leg over a mountain bike. Within that time frame I gave “my” moun-tain bike back to my father, and picked up road biking on the side.

For all intents and purposes, I am no longer a mountain biker. V-brakes have been replaced with discs. Triple chain rings, flat bars, and bar ends are all gone. 26” wheels look out of place in the sea of 27.5’s and 29ers. Judy Butter is no longer the answer to stiction. My full finger gloves are too small. People say “shred” instead of “ride.” I haven’t seen a Grateful Dead sticker on a bike in years. Mountain biking, it seems, has passed me by.

It took a road ride last April, in Greenwich, Connecticut to rekindle my interest in getting back on the trail. The ride leader was guiding us through winding hills and beautiful countryside, but for the first time in a long time, my mind drifted off to the woods. I don’t recall how, but the topic of Tsali came up As chance would have it, another rider had been there too, and had equally fond memories. We shared stories and fawned over the trails, the pine needles, and that glorious lake. Somewhere on the silky smooth roads of Greenwich, I decided that it was time go off road once again.

When winter’s chill dwindles, and trails begin to reemerge from beneath the snow, my new mountain bike will be ready to ride. Who is coming with me?

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RE-INVENTING THE WHEELWe came up on 26” wheels, as did everyone who got into mountain biking in its initial heyday. Of course, the first mountain bikes were modified cruisers with drum brakes that would get hot enough to curl hair or pop popcorn if you kept them pointed downhill for too long.

The evolution of those bikes was quick and purposeful. Geometries shifted forward to keep the rider enough over the front wheel to make climbing easier. What goes down, after all, must eventually go back up. Tires got knobbier. Cantilever and then linear pull brakes came into fashion. They stopped better and stayed cooler, meaning you could really count on being able to stop, which was nice given the preponderance of trees in the woods.

Every step down the mountain bike’s timeline there has been a tension between the purists who like it as it is, and those who want to push the design forward, deeper into the purpose of the ride. And maybe no transition brought out that tension more clearly than the emergence of the 29” wheel.

For many who had learned to handle their bikes on the smaller wheel size, the 29er seemed like cheating. Sure, it took ob-stacles more easily. Sure, it rolled faster through smooth sections of trail, but maybe it wasn’t as nimble as its smaller forebearer. Suddenly, the fine skills we’d all developed on 26” wheels were made somewhat obso-lete by the physical advantages of the 29er.

At Seven, we remained agnostic.

When 650b, the 27.5” wheel, re-emerged (it had been popular before), we were more eager to try it than skeptical that we were simply being asked to do something new for the sake of doing something new. We’d seen this progression before and had full faith that riders would work out what was best for them out on the trail.

The conventional wisdom was that 27.5” struck just the right compromise between 26” and 29”. It’s logical that a size right in between would give you some of the

nimbleness that riders thought they were missing with 29ers and the improved rolling speed and obstacle clearance that so many loved about larger wheels.

We built a number of frames around the 27.5” standard and rode them. And maybe it’s because we love bikes, all bikes, but our experience was good. We loved the handling of the mid-sized wheel. It took us back to our roots but also vaulted us forward with better obstacle clearance and speed. It worked.

What we learn over and over in bike building is that there is no right solution for every challenge. It is not necessary to tie yourself to one style or technology. In fact, the fountainhead of custom building is the idea that you can craft a very specific bike for every rider, one that answers to that person’s experience and needs, and that when you pay attention to those things, the right solution is always available, without tension and without compromise.

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SOLA

No bikes we have built have seen more of the world than our Sola series mountain bikes.

The root-strewn, birch-dotted Belmont Woods near our shop, over the wooden foot bridge and into the small trail system we’ve used as a test patch for more than a decade.

Up to Vermont’s Kingdom Trails, serpentine single-track through bright pine forest.

The long, slow climb up California’s Repack Trail in the shadow of Mt. Tamalpais, the birthplace of mountain biking, with switch-back after switchback through sandy, sun washed soil.

Raced at Sun Valley, Idaho across Bald Mountain and at Monte Ste. Anne in Quebec, in the heart of the Laurentian mountain chain, a long, low rambling set of peaks north of the St. Lawrence River.

Through the upland savanna near Pietermartizburg, South Africa in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, inland from Durban on the southeast coast of Africa.

In the high mountain valley basin out of Tafi de Valle, in the north of Argentina, where thick, green subtropical forest gives way to the wide expanse beneath the Sierra del Aconquija.

At the Trans-Andes Challenge in Chilean Patagonia, craggy, stone teeth towering above glossy, green lakes.

In Germany’s Black Forest and the south of France, northern Italy and the high mountains of Portugal.

Over the Wawa Dam, outside Quezon City, Phillipines, where the trail hugs cliff faces and fords streams beneath dark, jutting promontories.

All along the paved paths that weave in and out of Seoul, among the bike clubs who gather there.

In the sprawling national parks outside Canberra, Australia and traversing the north island of New Zealand, past the waterfall to the high peak that peers down to the coastline.

We called ourselves Seven, in part, because we wanted to build bikes to be ridden on all Seven continents. It was an aspiration, a dream.

And it is coming true.

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RIDING THE DIRT, RIDING THE GRAVEL

This is what it’s all about.

Wet mud, packed dirt, dead leaves, grass and moss.

Small rocks, big rocks, large roots or clusters of thinner ones spidering across.

Sand, downed branches, puddles, streams.

Steep in both directions, flat, wide and narrow, wooded and meadowed, farmland and forest, rollers and flats.

Smooth, swooping and fast.

Tooth rattling.

Slow, grinding and endless.

Sometimes there are deer. Sometimes there is an aid station.

A tent full of people, numbers pinned on, laughing. Beer sloshing. Food on paper plates.

Or alone in the woods, taking it in, finding the flow of the ground beneath your wheels, stopping to look at beautiful things.

Adventure is no kind of name for a category, but this style of riding, part mountain, part cyclocross always amounts to just that, adventure.

Some days, it’s all we want to do.

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We got bored. Honestly, that’s what happened. They say that necessity is the mother of invention, but boredom is proba-bly the father.

We had been riding the road since early spring, piling up the miles, thrashing each other on short, sharp group rides and telling the same jokes over and over on long rambling adventures out into Boston’s furthest western suburbs.

Bikes and asphalt. Asphalt and bikes. Fast and slow and in-between. Together and alone and on and on through the summer until just rolling along had begun to lose its lustrous charm.

We began incorporating dirt.

Of course, gravel road races and randonees have exploded in popularity in recent years. Until recently, however, riders were just bringing along cyclocross bikes to attack the problem of long distance, dirt riding. In some ways, what we were doing was recreating events like that, but closer to home and over distances that we could cram in after a day of building bikes back at the shop.

It probably goes without saying that when you take a skinny-tired bike off-road, it changes the game. Bike handling becomes much more important, choosing the right line. The net result is that your focus shifts from your legs and your cadence to making sure you survive the 30 feet of dirt or gravel right in front of you.

Time can pass very quickly when you ride this way. We started plotting our courses based entirely on how many sections of dirt road or single track we could string together.

EVERGREENAnd that’s where Evergreen came from. We’d been purpose building versions of our other bikes, the Mudhoney, the Expat, even the Axiom, for folks who were riding this same way, but it took the intersection of the big, popular events and our everyday group riding to help us see the potential for a better-defined, drop-bar adventure bike.

The beauty of being a custom bike builder is that you can ride all the things you dream up. If you’re not happy with the way your cyclocross race bike feels after 30 miles of grinding through the woods, then you can

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We started plotting our courses based entirely on how many sections of dirt road or single track we could string together.

change it. You can give it a less aggressive geometry. You can give it disc brakes. You can plan for better lighting.

Evergreen is a bike we’ve been building for years. It’s been evolving under oth-er names. Slowly, it has defined its own purpose. Immediately, it is exactly what we always wanted.

Brad SmithBike and Rack Builder

Lloyd GravesBike Builder

SJ BrooksFinal Machinist/Finisher

Ryan WilsonProduct Dev/Finisher

Mary AridaBike Builder/Finisher

Matt MasuzzoFinal Machinist/Finisher

Mudhoney is a film by Russ Meyer released in 1965. The plot is convoluted, the action melodramatic and tawdry. “Passion debased by lust…leaves a taste of evil,” shouted the original movie poster. A sloppy, ridiculous piece of celluloid, from beginning to end.

Mudhoney is also a rock band, one we like a lot. They are loud and a little sloppy, as all good rock bands are. They pioneered a dirty, heavily distorted style that was a seminal influence on many of the biggest bands of the ‘90s. They named themselves after the ridiculous movie.

MUDHONEYFinally, Mudhoney is a bike, a cyclocross race bike. Here in New England, cyclocross is also sloppy and ridiculous. Our autumns are wet and muddy. Our spectators are loud and unruly. Part carnival, part bike race, a good cyclocross event tends toward chaos.

Mudhoney, in all its incarnations, is born of that chaos.

When you engage it, when you swoop down into a muddy turn and hope your tires hold the line, when you plunge into a sand pit and force yourself to keep pedal-ing, keep pedaling, keep pedaling, those are the instants when the Mudhoney is there for you.

You can almost hear the music in your ears, the crowd chanting and heckling, and you and the bike are one, over the barriers, on the run up, off camber,

through the switchbacks, the sound and motion bleeding together into a ridiculous, smile-plastering mess.

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Part carnival, part bike race, a good cyclocross event tends toward chaos.

TRACTION ACTION

What you need, in the mud, through the sand, over grass, in tight corners, off camber, in the rain or in the snow, is traction. This is cyclocross, and your ability to keep your rear wheel on the ground and your tires engaged makes all the difference between success and failure. Racers obsess over the right tire pressure for the particular conditions on race day. “What are you running?” is a common greeting in the parking lot before the bike even comes off the roof rack.

Gray sky and muddy parking lot and boots and wool hats. Riders warming up, silently, on course and all around its edges, nervous at the effort they know they’ll put in.

The announcer’s bellowing call muffled but urgent. Someone is passing. Someone else is falling back. Necks crane to follow favorites, hard to find in the strung out pack, the serpentine course forever turning back on itself. A rider has missed the first barrier, fallen, sprawling in the gap. A worried gasp goes up, then laughter, then applause as she remounts and rides on.

When we design a cyclocross bike, we are really designing a system for keeping the wheels on the ground. Handling, comfort and agility are all important, but ultimately they are secondary concerns. Without traction, none of them matter. The rear triangle of the bike’s frame, formed by the

seat tube, seat stays and chain stays, acts as a de facto suspension system, cantilevered off the front triangle.

A food truck generator growls into the cold afternoon air, and people line up for something to make them warmer. Kids duck and dodge at their parents’ feet, mud boots to their knees, pushing through bodies to the course’s edge, just to see what the big deal is. Mechanics under tents along the perimeter tune derailleurs, let air out of tires, add a little back. Racers try to joke away their nerves, every face broad with a smile, twenty minutes to the start.

There are many ways you can build the rear triangle of a bike to improve traction.

First, material choice is important. We only put steel or titanium chain stays into our cy-clocross bikes because these materials both offer us a natural compliance that carbon fiber doesn’t have. Metal chain stays will flex as they work their way over rough ground, giving just that little bit more traction than a stiffer, carbon fiber chain stay would. Carbon fiber can make sense in other areas of the bike where you are trying to save weight or add stiffness, but metal makes the most sense in the chain stay.

The bell lap sounds and everyone rushes to their places. Cheering rises above the lonely generator. The announcer’s voice goes hectic and strained, and then, into the finishing straight come the leaders, wear-ing their mud spatter and straining at their handlebars. It is a crying shame, maybe the great tragedy of bike racing, that someone has to win, no…that many have to lose after

they’ve given every ounce of themselves, after they’ve hurled themselves up that fin-ishing straight with hope in their hearts.

Shape is also important. Our double S-bend stays dissipate forces traveling back up to the rider, the big jolts that come from hitting obstacles like roots or rocks, the bumps you encounter when transitioning from pavement to grass or grass to sand, and the high frequency vibration that any uneven surface throws up at you. Muting all these forces makes the bike more stable and predictable, two of the main ingredients of good traction.

After the race, heaving over their front tires, all the racers think back over the preceding seconds and minutes. What happened? Where did they go wrong? How could they have gone faster? Friends rush to their sides to slap backs, broad grins piercing the bubble of fatigue. A water bottle. Sometimes even a beer. And then the long, slow ride back to the car, or maybe to the team tent.

The post-race craic is what they really come for, verbal replays of key moments in the day’s fun. The topic of tire pressure comes up again. No one thinks they got it right. No one ever does, except maybe the winner.

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8:22 AM- After several cups of coffee, I bundle up and step out into the hallway. Which bike will it be today? It looks cold and wet outside. I choose my trusty Seven Cafe Racer — full fenders to stay dry, integrated generator lights for the dark ride home, and wide tires track in the wet.

8:24 AM- I dart through a maze of neigh-borhood streets. I see familiar things: a man walking a giant shaggy dog, a crossing guard who waves to me, children walking to school. I like being part of this kinetic morning routine.

8:30 AM- A brief stretch on a busy street and I turn past a cemetery. In the mornings, this stretch is deserted. There is a series of sweeps and turns that I take low and fast. A hard right, a roundabout, a gentle left, and a rolling hill. I slow for a group of geese in the road. They lazily waddle away.

8:37 AM- I join the Charles River Bike Path. This path is a disjointed series of dirt and pavement that follows the famous river.

8:43 AM- I cross over the Charles via the Blue Heron bridge. The long wheelbase and fat tires of my bike grip the slippery wet wooden slats nicely.

8:46 AM- Ding, ding! I ring my bell as I pass a runner. From years of riding in the city, I’ve learned no matter how nice the bike, every one can use a bell.

8:51 AM- The quiet path gives way to a bustling Watertown Square. Watertown Square is a special kind of place in the morning. Six congested arteries, including the Pike, lead into this cramped intersection pinched by the Charles River. Traversing this small sector in a car can take 10 min-utes on a wet morning like this. On a bike, it can take 20 seconds with the right combi-nation of timing, luck, and gusto. I get lucky today and make every light in a timed series of sprints. My adrenaline is off the charts as I roll through the home stretch.

8:55 AM- I slow as a distracted driver makes a hurried right turn in front of me. Bike commuters develop a keen radar for subtle clues. The slight whine of a car’s brakes indicates an intention to turn. A head shift in a parked car means a door is about to open. An out of state license plate could mean erratic stops as the driver finds his bearings. Reading these clues helps to keep you safe.

8:59 AM- Weaving through the neighbor-hood around Seven Cycles, I approach the only hill of note on my commute. I pretend I am launching a kamikaze attack just like the late climber Marco Pantani. In the drops, I finally crest the hill, legs burning.

9:03 AM- I turn into the Seven parking lot, panting and sweating on this cold day. I feel good inside. I think this is going to be a good day.

THE MORNING HUSTLE

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No single category of bikes is more varied and weird than commuters. From the stripped down, whisper light, speed demons that carve up city streets, to the trawl-ing men o’ war with racks, panniers and fat, all-surface tires that haul all things useful to stores and offices, the modern commuter bike takes on a million forms. Everyone has their idea of what the perfect utility bike looks like, and we build them all.

The term cafe racer originated as an insult among motorcycle racers. It was a term for riders who didn’t actually race, but rather spent most of their time parked outside motorway cafes. Then, of course, builders embraced the idea of machines specifically designed for quick, short trips, and a whole new style of motor-cycle was born.

That we should build a bicycle called the Cafe Racer harkins to that same confluence of cycling and coffee culture, a pairing we have readily

embraced if not fully understood.

Is it that the earthiness of coffee speaks to the cyclist’s innate appreci-ation for the outdoors, or is it simply because we depend on the caffeine for a little extra power in the pedals? Is it that bike trips need to have be-ginnings, middles and ends, destina-tions, that cyclists need central places to meet up before rides, and that cafes are convenient?

The name works on multiple levels. The original café racers, motorcy-cles produced in England, Italy and France, were highly stylized expres-sions of their riders’ personalities, just the way modern day commuter bikes are. No other bike evokes its rider in quite this way. Just as owners begin to look, comically, like their pets, the commuter bike too takes on the distinguishing features of the person who will pedal it. The inner workings of their minds take the form of racks and flat handlebars, or hammered fenders and a headlight.

CAFE RACING

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Building a tandem puts all of our bike building experience, craft and skill to the test. Very small imperfections of fit or alignment can be magnified over the length of the frame. In some sense, a tan-dem really is a merger of two bikes, one for the captain and one for the stoker.

Riding a tandem is a bit like that merger, too. It is not simply riding two bikes in one plane. Each rider is dependent on the other in very much the same way building the front of the bike is depen-dent on building the rear of the bike. The two have to cooperate, and it works best when that cooperation is precise and seamless.

First we machine the entire frame, start-ing from great lengths of straight tubing. Our job, of course, is to preserve that straightness, even as it intersects the two parts. So as we load the tubes into their frame jig we have two riders in mind. The system can’t be closed as with a single bike. It has to stay open.

Openness is key to being smooth and fast on a tandem. The captain has to be open to the effort, the power put in by the stoker, but also to the faith that comes from behind. The stoker has to be open to the judgment of the captain. Where to steer, how much to brake, the stoker gives up a lot of control to be part of this team.

Of course, the frame really comes together in welding, as they all do. First we put the front end together. Alignment is checked laboriously, meticulously, because the finished front end will only project back into space. Think of the front of the bike as the source of a light that will shine backwards, illuminating the stoker’s compartment. When the front end is done its rays cast back, looking for a companion.

The nice thing, the thing you can easily take for granted, is that every tandem order we receive begins with a rela-tionship between two people, spouses, friends, partners, and the bike is an expression of that connection.

The moment of truth for the build arrives when the rear of the frame comes together, finally, with the front, the whole becoming more than a sum of its parts. By the time we take the side panel off the CNC machine to fit the oversized bike in for final machining of its bottom bracket, we have confirmed it will work, front-to-back and side-to side.

And then it’s up to the riders to work out their own alignment, to find the language to communicate out on the road or trail, to put all of their own expe-rience and skill to the test, to see if they can make the bike more than the sum of its parts, too.

EXPERIENCE, CRAFT AND SKILL

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Every Seven is for riding. There is never a moment in the conception, design or build-ing of a bike that we don’t think of it rolling through the world. This may seem obvious.

And yet, some people will treat a custom bike, a hand-made bike, as a precious thing, something to hang on a wall, something to stand back from, to admire, or worse, something they don’t need, that they’re not worthy of.

And we say…a bike built just for you is spe-cial, but it is not precious.

FOR RIDING

There are no pedestals. There are no spotlights. There are no private parking spots or museum guards.

Our shop floor sparkles with tiny shards of steel and titanium, carbon dust and dry epoxy. We wheel out barrels full of small scrap to be recycled. Every finisher’s hands are grayed with metal dust and machine oil. The painters bear traces of color on every-thing they wear. They can’t help it.

Bike building is a dirty business, the sweat of creation, the cinder and grit of hard work.

All of it aimed at putting a bike out into the world. To ride.

If it never gets dirty, if it never falls down, if it never gets rained on, what is it?

The pictures we get from Seven riders all over the world sustain us. Invariably, they are smiling, there with their bike. Wherever they are, Manilla, Ann Arbor, London or Seoul, the bike has delivered them there. And that is satisfying.

Also, too, some bikes come back for refin-ishing, a professional clean and polish, and it’s good to see the years of use, a mixture of chain lube and road dirt calcified near the bottom bracket, the whip and lash of riding showing on the stays. And then we go to work and bring the frame back to newness. We apply fresh decals and return it to its rider.

To be ridden. To ride.

If it never gets dirty, if it never falls down, if it never gets rained on, what is it?

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Tell us about your ride.

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Watertown, MA, USA

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