Karl B., breaking it down for the Assabet kids

Neil, or rather Mr. Mansfield, used to work alongside Seven Cycles’ founders as a welder at Merlin Metalworks before moving on to become a top tier welding and metal fabrication teacher at the Assabet Valley Vocational Technical High School in Marlborough, MA.  To help generate learning moments, Mr. Mansfield sets up field trips to show his class real world applications for the skills they learn throughout the school year.  Today’s example was tube welding, and what better way to bring welding to life than showing his class what he did more than twenty years ago?

One way to create buzz at Seven is to drop a bus load of students into our showroom.  The entire factory was crackling with energy.

Before splitting into groups, we opened the floor to questions, and were inundated:
How much is that bike?
How much does it weigh?
Do you make BMX bikes?
How long does it take to make one?
What are they made out of?
Do you weld?
Why not?
How long do they last?
Are they strong?
What happens if you crash?
Is titanium better than steel?
What if I wanted a BMX bike, then could you make one?

Matt O., going over the finer points

Once their questions were answered we headed out to the production floor for the real fun.  Starting in machining we covered the basics of tube preparation, cutting, coping, bending, curving, and squishing.  As is the case year after year, Neil’s classes are always more mature than their age would suggest and this class was no different.  Their questions honed in on the craft and harkened back to things they had studied and practiced in their classrooms.

Tim D. dropping some knowledge

The highlight of every tour, for both the me and the students, is when we get to Tim Delaney’s welding bench.  Not only is Tim an encyclopedia of welding knowledge, he is also a natural educator.  When he speaks, people listen with interest and enthusiasm, and the rapport is instantaneous.  I’m certain that the students’ interest in Seven’s welding process had a lot to do with it as well.  They pummeled Tim with questions, donned welding masks, and watched as he showed them examples of what we do here at Seven.  When the questions came to a close, we moved to final machining, then finishing, and finally to painting where Staci was working on a Diamas SL, which garnered some serious attention.

Wrapping up in the show room, Matt O’Keefe took some final questions on job inquiries, and positions for beginning welders.  Needless to say, those of us over age 15 were exhausted by the end of the tour, in a good way, but the kids seemed to be ready for another go ’round.  And lunch!  We were really happy to have spent the morning with Mr. Mansfield and his smart, interesting, and very well-behaved students.  We hope that someday, we can call one, or even a few of them colleagues.

-Karl B.

In designing and building bikes all day, every day, day after day, year after year, for decades, it’s possible to lose sight of what you’re doing.  Even when you’re achieving your stated purpose, inspiration can ebb.

Like a bike race, where you have your head down, and your entire focus is on the work of staying in the group.  All you know is your legs are burning, and your chest is heaving.  And if you keep your head down like that, you’ll miss the winning move.

So we build bikes all day, every day, but we also pick our heads up and look around us.  There is so much there to inspire.  Some of the things you see stick with you, either consciously or unconsciously, and then find their way into your design work.

Or maybe, you are so taken with an object that you look it up. You learn how it’s made, and in discovering that process you find a better way to make something you’ve been working on forever.  In the best cases, this whole process leads to solutions for seemingly intractable problems.  You didn’t expect this, but there it was, in a sculpture park or parked out behind a shopping center, just waiting for you to see, if you can remember to look.

Photos by Seven’s own Matt O’Keefe.

On cold, wet mornings like today, there is a calm deliberation to our work.  The factory is quiet as folks roll in for the day.  Coffee gets contemplative as we size up the work to be done.  And it’s nice to have that little bit of serenity that comes in the afterglow of a hard ride.  It helps you make the right decisions.  In these quiet times, you hatch your best ideas.

As the afternoon slides toward us, the pace picks up. Finished frames find boxes.  Delivery trucks pull in and pull out.

Whether you’re working or riding together, pushing and testing each other every day, the pace rises and falls with energy and inspiration.  And over time the best always comes out of each of us as we fall into the rhythm of the work, and in large part that’s why we’re so lucky to be able to do what we do.

Hammering up the last hill – to take the KOM points that no one awards and no one remembers, except the one who won -  and then down into town to contend with cars and bright headlights.  Matt S. says, “I don’t even like to ride bikes.  I only came for the pizza and beer.”

Photo by Matt O.

Frame Refinish-after

You can get your custom Seven painted just about any way you want.  Still, for our bare Titanium bikes, we prefer one finish and only one finish, and people wonder why.

Just to describe what we do, so you have some context: First we take the best US-milled 3-2.5 Titanium tubing available, and we cut, butt, miter and cope it to look like a bike frame.  Then we load it into a frame jig and weld it together, checking alignment 17 times throughout the process.  Finally we face and thread the bottom bracket, before passing the complete frame to our finishers.

That’s when the fun starts.

The finishers take the frame and wheel it out with a buffer.  The first pass eliminates discoloration around the welds.  Then they go at it by hand with some Scotchbrite, before adding decals, head badge and any other accessories on the build sheet. Each bike takes roughly two hours to finish.  It takes a certain amount of patience and strong forearms.

The result is a clean, lustrous look. We like that it exposes every last piece of craft we’ve put into the frame.  You can see the quality of the tubing, the quality of the welds. It lays bare our process.

The reason it’s the only finish we offer is that it’s the only one that will hold up over the lifetime of the bike. If you scratch it, you can Scotchbrite it out and return it to new. Beat it up over time, we can fix it.  There is no point in the future of one of our frames that we can’t restore its original shine.  This is not true of any other Titanium finish we’ve seen or experimented with.

As with everything we do at Seven, “by hand” just seems to yield the best result.