Ride Studio Cafe and Seven Cycles along the minuteman trail.

On Thursday the weather was perfect so with help from Betsy and ridewithgps I put together a route that would take me to Lexington where the RideStudioCafe is and on to Watertown and the Seven Cycles factory where Lucky was built. The RSC is a bike shop owned by the owner of Seven Cycles and there is a wide selection of Sevens there as well as some Honeys which is a non-custom brand that is also built by Seven.

After a pleasant ride down the Minuteman rails to trails bikeway and a bit of wandering around Watertown I arrived at Seven Cycles where I met with Carl and took a quick tour through the factory. Seven is a great company and as I have noted often to anyone willing to listen, they make an awesome titanium bike that I couldn't be happier with. It has served me well for almost 18,000 miles in the last 21 months and I look forward to perhaps hundreds of thousands more.

 At Seven, a bike starts with a need that can't be met without something special. I had a list of needs that couldn't be met with a fancy carbon bike off the shelf and my aluminum bike was beating the crap out of me on the rough roads back home so after much searching and test rides on dozens of different models, Robbie at Mellow Johnie's lined up a customer's Seven for me to ride and I knew I had found the answer. That started a process of discussions and measurements and forms to fill out where I described what I needed from a bike and who I was as a rider and where I might be headed with my cycling. More discussions followed and then a drawing was created in which Neil Dohski created a little Seven magic.

 A machinist then takes some very special titanium tubing and turns it on a lathe and mills the parts on pre-WWII machines and creates a box of parts that will become a bit of bike heaven.

That box of parts then lands in front of Tim who is one of the best titanium welders in the country. Titanium is unlike any other metal and is exceedingly difficult to work with but Tim creates beautiful welds in an argon flooded environment in order to insure that no oxidation occurs in the process that would lead to cracks later in the life of the frame. This frame is forever.

 The frame is continually checked for trueness throughout the process so that the heat of the welding can help straighten it in order to minimize the need for bending the tubing to achieve the final trueness. More milling processes are then done after welding to insure perfect alignment of the crank arms wheels and front fork. It is unlikely that the level they go to could be experienced by the rider but from my own work I understand and appreciate the desire to take it there. There are different processes used on different models and this is a carbon/Ti hybrid frame. They also make carbon, steel and many different models such as mountain bikes, touring bikes cross bikes and tandems.

 The employees commute to work by bike often and it is interesting to see the wide range of bikes that they have chosen or built  for themselves.

 They have a few special bikes in the front room and you should look closely at them for the special details that make them one of a kind.

Many thanks to Carl and the great people at Seven for the tour and for building me a great frame. It is truly the bike of my life. After the Seven factory tour, lucky and I had a spirited ride back to Westford. Along the way I stopped for a seemingly well deserved heaping portion of ice cream. Later we had a great vegetarian meal to stoke the furnace for the next ride.