June 27: Seven Cycles factory tour
When a person goes and does their “dream tour”, they should ride their “dream bike”, right?
For me, that dream bike is made by Seven Cycles. In addition to the comfort, performance, and reliability of a titanium frame, Seven’s customized build process allowed me to get the perfect fit and select frame features perfectly suited to the type of touring I would be doing on The Dream Tour. Oh yes, did I mention that I was able to request a custom, three-color paint job of my own design? The colors are the Bayer HealthCare corporate colors, but the arrangement of the colors on the frame was my own idea and I think it turned out pretty nice. Here’s a picture of the frame when it first showed up at Canyon Bicycles in Salt Lake City:
Anyway, Mike Hanseen, the manager of Canyon Bicycles back in Salt Lake City, tipped off the people at Seven that we were going to be in the Boston area. They got in touch about a week ago and invited us to stop by for a factory tour. We eagerly agreed and arranged to drive in to Watertown, Massachusetts for a tour. We got a tour of how the whole manufacturing process is done. It was quite impressive. All the quality checks along the way and the efficiency of the whole process is amazing. I don’t have any idea how many frames they make a year, but they have dealers all around the world and it’s all done by about 40 employees from a very modest manufacturing facility. You could stand at one end of their manufacturing area and carry on a conversation with a person standing at the other end.
And speaking of amazing. One corner of the facility was storage for the bicycles of employees. Most Seven employees ride their bikes to work. There was the full spectrum of bicycles stored there. Single-speeds with coaster brakes, mountain bikes, racing bikes, everything. There was also this creation:
I’m told it is NOT just a display bike. There’s an employee that actually rides it to and from work everyday.
June 28th, 2006 at 6:00 am
Fascinating. It is very different than a tour of a Huffy factory that we took in China. That one was huge, dark and the manufacturing techniques were truly scary.