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Current Lead Times: Rider-Ready Framesets: 3 weeks. Full Custom Bikes: 7 weeks.

Building Your Titanium and Carbon-Titanium Bikes in the USA for 28 Years

Category: Articles

Love to Ride – The Photographers – Natalia Boltukhova

Five riders in Seven Kits ride in a meadow

You will notice right away that Russian-born photographer Natalia Boltukhova can’t sit still. With a camera slung round her neck she is all action, all energy, and that energy lights up her photos, which, coincidentally, tend to be of other folks who can’t sit still.

Upon moving to the United States in 2006, she immersed herself in New England’s gritty/beautiful cyclocross scene. She not only races cross but also keeps her hands full during the season taking beautiful photos at races. And while Cyclocross is one of her busiest times of the year behind the lens, she shoots full time for her own Tiny Russian Studios and showcases her cycling work under the Pedal Power Photography moniker.

Natalia’s photos have been featured in several magazines, newspapers, and on book covers, and she has even released her own coffee table book on New England Cyclocross titled Beer. Cupcakes. Moustache. She is currently working on a documentary project titled Woman Warrior about female fighters (MMA boxing, wrestling, etc).

We really enjoyed working with Natalia on the Love to Ride project. You will be seeing more of her work in the future. Count on it.

Dan V on a fast descent on rough trail

Red Kite Prayer: Shimano Dura-Ace 9000: A First Look (excerpt)

by Padraig622

In an unusual and forward-thinking move, Shimano had editors from a few different media outlets submit a frame set ahead of the introduction for Shimano’s techs to build with a new group. I reached out to my friends at Seven Cycles to see if they might be able to help. We’ve been discussing a review of the 622 frame for most of this year; I’ve been slow to get them my measurements for a custom frame. Fortunately for me, they had this particular 622 built for stock for Ride Studio Cafe, the studio/cafe operation Seven owns in Lexington, Mass. It’s conceivable that a custom frame will fit me better than this, but I’m so accustomed to making stock stuff work, I have no complaints with this so far.

The Weight of Experience

filing cabinets labelled 2007, 2007 cont.

We have every order that’s ever been phoned, faxed or emailed to us here at Seven. When a rider orders a second or third or eighth bike from us, we pull their archived orders and combine them so we can factor everything we know into the new build. Building one bike at a time, this one of the ways experience accrues.

We keep all the orders in manilla folders, one for each bike, in a long line of file cabinets, alphabetized and labeled by year. Each order is mirrored in our database, but we keep the paper because it helps us capture every detail and have hard back up for power outages or digital meltdowns.

There are 30 cabinets spanning our history. Pull the orders out and you’d get a pile 240 feet high. Altogether, they weigh roughly 5,000 lbs (2275kg). More than two tons.

This is the weight of our experience. We don’t know a ton about custom bike building. We know two tons.

The “New” Look of Seven: Paint

Antsy scheme in serrano, graphite, and snow white

How do you control the look of your product line when your whole business is predicated on letting riders customize every aspect of the bikes you build for them?

For good and obvious reasons, Seven Cycles has come to be associated with the bare titanium frame aesthetic.  In the ‘90s, when we started building custom titanium frames for people, this was very much the current look. And even now, for many people, the classic look of hand-polished Ti is where bike style begins and ends.  It has been a good look and a good association for us, even though it belies the depth of customization available from our paint team.

Today, we are painting approximately 30% of our customer frames, with schemes ranging from the standard paneled look to the exotic and unique.

Seven Brassard detail

As a custom builder–and painter–it can be very hard to have any control over your frame aesthetic and people’s perception of you.  We paint what people ask us to paint.  Much of that is influenced by the schemes we display on our website, but our customers’ influence bends and shapes our own ideas, so that the whole thing becomes a big collaboration, a good one.

The challenge is evolving the look of your bikes to make sure you’re always contemporary.  To that end, we’ve replaced 10 of our 20 stock colors and have revised the paint gallery on our web site to display some of the more cutting edge work we’ve done over the last year.

The hope is that by giving our customers some new choices and infusing the process with more ideas, we can take the next step in the collaboration and, together, define the new look of Seven Cycles.