The wife's bike

So any healthy relationship has to have balance. The past few years my wife has been in the enviable position of getting to ride a different demo bike every year, and sometimes having a choice of multiple bikes.

The downside is that in this situation, you don't get a perfectly fit bike most of the time (unless you're lucky, like me, and most size 54/55s are usually pretty darn close. She does have some shoulder problems, however, and that usually causes her to sacrifice her low back in order to maintain a comfortable reach to the bars. Suffice it to say that she tends to leverage a bit more through one side of her lumbar spine, especially when she climbs.

So, finally this year, I decided to surprise her for her birthday with designs for a custom bike "all for her." I decided on Seven's Axiom SL (double butted titanium), which is their workhorse model, a SRAM Force group, FSA K-Wing carbon compact bars, Selle Italia Lady Gel Flow saddle, and I had a pair of Zipp 404 rims lying around that I had Mike at Bigwheels (www.lacemine29.com) lace to some DT Swiss 240s hubs.

I don't have a great creative streak in me so I gave the Seven designers some themes to work with: Ethiopia (our kids are adopted from there), gourmet cooking (my wife, who is a Nurse Practitioner, loves to cook enormous meals on the weekends to the delight of our friends. The painters at Seven cam up with the scheme you see below:

there is an outline of the country of Ethiopia on the top tube, and there are two "Electric Blueberry" panels on the seat and down tubes that have a fleur de lis pattern on them. the fleur de lis has many meanings and references, but it is also the cover for Julia Childs' Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

I think they did well:

Seven Sola S single-speed

I love how this bike turned out. You may have seen it in older posts when I was building it with my new dee-luxe headset press.

Briefly on the build:

It is a full Ti frame with slider dropouts, the brakes are Avid mechanicals (likely upgrade to their Mag CRs in a bit), Seven Kit, Truvativ Noir single-speed crankset, Chris King/DT 470 wheels, matching King headset, Kenda Karma tires, and last but not least a DT Swiss XMC 100 fork. The fork has a huge pricetag ($1400 retail!!) but I was blown away by the suppleness and features on the fork right out of the box. DT says it will "break in" after 20 hours of riding or so, but it felt pretty good on the shakedown ride to me.

Enjoy.