Building Your Titanium and Carbon-Titanium Bikes in the USA for 28 Years
U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix
This one is local, built with the fine folks at Landry’s. We painted it just a few weeks ago, and never imagined it would get built out like this, but Willie has the Christmas spirit.
He says:
This Santa rides ‘SEVEN’ reindeer!!!! Very very different but I love it. Responsive comfortable and much smoother than I would have ever imagined with Ti. Feels like an extension of my body, and no discomfort anywhere.
Thanks Merry Christmas to me and you guys.
Willie
This is Ralf’s Axiom SL. We built it with the good folks at Ride Studio Cafe in Lexington, MA. Now Ralf lives in Japan. He sent us this photo, and the note below:
Enjoying the backyard of my new home, Tokyo/Japan, on the most wonderful bike ever built. – Ralf
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.
In the last installment of The Overlooked Awesome we talked about options, paint being just one of them. But paint deserves more than that. As one of the most powerful ways to personalize your bike, paint (and custom decals) can motivate and inspire. Cursory research suggest a good looking bike will motivate you to ride more and will spark more stop light conversations than an off the shelf bike.
We became known for our polished Ti bikes, and that was an aesthetic that served (and continues to serve) us well. It’s classic. But as custom builders we are always looking for new ways to add more value to the process of building a bike just for you, and paint has become a big part of that. Each year, we paint more bikes than the year before.
We offer a lot of stock paint options, each of which can be personalized with different color choices. There are 23 stock colors in our palette and another 23 in our legacy color archive. We offer 17 different stock paint schemes as well. By the time you pick your colors, your scheme, and your decal, you can see the opportunity to create something special is strong. We can also mix custom colors for you, and we provide color matching services if you know what you want but are having trouble identifying it.
It’s probably not a great idea to talk too much about beautiful paint though. It’s better to just show some of what’s possible.
When our own Craig Gaulzetti built himself a new road bike, he knew just what he wanted. This is his Axiom SL race machine with oversized headtube/tapered fork, long stem (painted to match), short chainstays, 1″ in diameter, and an aggressive race geometry.
As a rule, we don’t pay much attention to the the professional cyclists competing at the Pro Tour level. We don’t believe what happens at that level is particularly relevant to even the most serious cycling enthusiast, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t love and build race bikes every single day. We build a lot of race bikes here at Seven. To us, when built specifically for the individual, this type of bike is the most efficient, fun and amazing form of transportation on the road. Our race bikes are built with none of the compromises inherent in large scale batch manufacturing. Our processes allow us to build a perfect bike for the intended rider each and every time. We take into account over 100 distinct data points and call upon our collective experience of having designed and built over 30,000 custom bikes with every bike we build.
A race bike is, in many ways, the ultimate sporting good. With a moderate amount of fitness, anyone can ride it for hours without pain or discomfort. The skill set required to operate a racing bike is, despite what a lot of magazines might tell you, rather minimal. Crochet or SCUBA diving or tennis or skateboarding all require far greater diligence, coordination and skill. As a tool, it can bring the casual user fitness and fun or the professional victories and wealth.
In a world where even the best cyclists in the world are racing on machines designed first and foremost as commodities, we try to do more with our bikes. Each and every one is purpose-built for the needs and desires of the person who will ride it.