paint – Page 4 – Seven Cycles

Things That Last – Before and After Axiom repaint

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.

Sam’s Flying Tiger Airheart

Our friend Sam from Cycle Boutique Thailand wanted a fighter plane theme for his Airheart, so he asked our designers to come up with something special. After a few design iterations, we had something he was happy with. There are a LOT of cool details on this one, including some distressing, faux rust and rivet details on the metallic section. Check out the photos below.

The Overlooked Awesome, Part III

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.

The Overlooked Awesome, Part II

Belt drive chainring on a Seven — Belt-Drive Compatibility

The Overlooked Awesome is an attempt to highlight all the things, beyond geometry, that a custom bike can deliver. In Part I, we talked about the rider-specific tubeset. Here, in Part II, we want to highlight options.

Every rider comes to a new bike purchase with a set of features in mind. Maybe they’re looking for a disc-brake road bike with fender mounts for rain/winter commuting. Maybe they want an old school cyclocross race bike in their team colors. Maybe they want a bike they can do some light touring on, but can also use for a weekly group ride with friends. Or, a mountain bike with rack mounts that lets them ride single-track during the week, and go bike-packing on weekends.

Seven low mount disc — Low-Mount Disc Brake Tab

All those different purposes can be addressed with specific features, whether part of the frame design, an add-on, or aesthetic, as with paint or custom decals.

For bikes that straddle categories, it can be hard to find a production offering that meets all your criteria. Seven doesn’t force you to make compromises. We build what you want.

Seven rocker dropouts — 142 x 12 Thru Axle Rocker Drop-Out

We can build a frame with cable routing for multiple brake types. We can paint your bike any color you want or order a screen printed custom decal. We can add rack and fender mounts to any frame, build a rack for the specific panniers you want to use, adapt the rear triangle to take wider tires. We offer multiple headtube sizes, bottom bracket shells and seat post diameters. When it comes to options, the choices are infinite, and most of them are no additional charge.

Your bike should fit perfectly. That should go without saying. But more than that, your bike should deliver the set of features you want, without compromise because your best ideas produce your best riding, the most fun, your peak performance, and the comfort you want when you’re out on the road or trail.

That’s what we want to give you.

Read more about our 5 Elements of Customization, check out our paint gallery, or see some common frame options.

What Comes Around

The circle is a powerful symbol and a strong shape. Our friends at Circles Japan commissioned this paint scheme, dubbed, aptly enough, “the circle,” for a run of road and cyclocross bikes we did with them. Shinya Tanaka, Circles’ owner and big-thinker, loves the idea of iterative learning and improvement, of putting back into his cycling community all the good things he takes out. We iterated this scheme in five different colourways for him.

There are a lot of great pictures of these bikes here. It is good to work with people you can call friends, people who can teach you about their cycling culture and reinforce what we all, as bike lovers, have in common. Watch this space for more collaborations with Circles and others in our extended circle of friends.

Images: Ryota Kemmochi

Tag: paint