RAGBRAI Adventures on a Clydesdale E-Bike
By: Kip Williams I’m a 64-year-old, 6’ 5” 250LB sized cyclist from St. Louis, Missouri. I have put quite a few miles on various bicycles over the years and am now enjoying a Clydesdale . My ride is a very cool titanium flat-bar e-bike. I just completed RAGRAI! For those that don’t know, RAGBRAI is an annual week-long group ride across Iowa. This year the route was 501 miles and 16,000+ feet of climbing. RAGBRAI also claims 30,000+ riders. I have a couple of long-time riding friends and we occasionally try these epic adventures, which by and large turn [...]
Master Builders Bike Show – Bentonville AR – Sept 16-17, 2023
We invite you to come visit us at the Master Bike Builders Show in Bentonville Arkansas this September. We will have bikes, components, and clothing on display as well as a fleet of demo bikes to ride. This is a great opportunity for folks in the midwest and southeast to come and see Clydesdale and Zinn bikes. The Master Bike Builders Show (MBBS) is a public exhibition of custom handmade bicycle builders showing their creations to the passionate cycling community in Bentonville as well as visiting cyclists. Bentonville has become a cycling Mecca with an immense network of amazing [...]
Chris Lloyd Gets the Lead Out for Over 20 Years on Custom Zinn Bikes
By Lennard Zinn Lennard with Chris and his custom Zinn hardtail mountain bike Chris Lloyd fits the profile of the median Zinn Cycles customer in stature but definitely not in his usage of his Zinn bikes. Where he takes his 6’6”, 220-pounds under his own power is so far out of the ordinary, it boggles the mind. He bought his 5th Zinn bike for his 60th birthday, to be pedaled, like all its predecessors, an incredible number of miles at very high altitude. You see, Lloyd’s way of celebrating being on this earth for 60 years in [...]
Colorado Western Slope Gravel Ride with Lennard Zinn on October 7, 2023
Come join Lennard Zinn and friends for a fun, 50-mile gravel bike ride on Colorado's Western Slope! E-bike riders are welcome to join. Fall is one of the best times of year to ride gravel on the western slope of Colorado, a gravel riding mecca. Beautiful high desert gravel roads with incredible scenery are abundant. You are invited to join us for a fun group gravel cycling adventure on some famous routes in DeBeque Colorado. Roan Creek Bikeworks is a brand new bike shop in this unique western town and we will be organizing this ride with them. Please register [...]
Partnership with Roan Creek Bikeworks on Western Slope of Colorado
Zinn Cycles and Clydesdale Bikes are proud to partner with Roan Creek Bikeworks, a bicycle shop located on Colorado's Western Slope in De Beque. Roan Creek Bikeworks Roan Creek Bikeworks provides demos, featuring two Clydesdale bikes, the Draft and the Steer, and will be gradually building the fleet to include more gravel bikes and gravel e-bikes. They also provide bike service, parts, accessories, and coffee to riders exploring De Beque and the surrounding area. Roan Creek in De Beque The Colorado Western Slope is rich with gravel riding opportunities, and De Beque offers a home [...]
Ridelogic Mountain Bike Fitting
Mountain biking is a great way to get outside, enjoy nature, and get a great workout in. However, if you don't have a mountain bike with the proper fit, the ride may be uncomfortable and even painful. The other, most important aspect of a great fitting mountain bike is performance. A great mountain bike fit allows you to have the range of motion needed to negotiate technical trail features and flow with the trail. A great fitting bike will make you faster and your rides more fun. In this guide, we'll go over the different aspects of mountain bike [...]
Upright Riding Positions
By Lennard Zinn If there is one thing that we at Zinn Cycles are experts at, it is building bikes with the handlebar high above the ground. That is a function of the fact that so many of our customers are very tall. But it also can be because the customer has a back or neck condition that mandates a very upright riding position. Riders with conditions like spinal or cervical stenosis, fused vertebrae, degenerative or congenital spinal diseases, undiagnosed neck pain, or hip-impingement issues often rig up their existing bike, like very tall riders might, with tall stacks [...]
Lightweight Custom Ebike for 5’4″ rider
A few months ago a really nice woman stopped by our shop to chat about e-bikes. She was 5'4" and petite and had been struggling to find an ebike that fit her that was not super heavy. Most of the ebikes out there that are fully powered are very heavy, and she did not like the way they handle or how difficult it is to load the bike onto a bike rack. We set out to build her an ebike that was around 35lbs instead of 50-65lbs like the other ebikes she had tried. We started by doing a [...]
What Is Metal Fatigue and How Does It Affect Big Riders?
Fatigue failure is failure that occurs after repeated cycles of stress, but at a stress that is less than that which would be required for the failure to occur with a single application. Cyclic loading is the key idea here, and we get plenty of that as we ride. The number of cycles to failure by fatigue decreases as the load is increased. This is where the big rider comes in – the rider we at Zinn Cycles specialize in building bicycles for. However, metals can also fail at rather low stresses given many repeated cycles of stress. All metals, [...]
Impressions of a Zinn.
Howdy - I'm Adrian McKenzie - a new member of Team Zinn, from New Zealand. . I took delivery of my new Zinn Dolomite Ti a few weeks back and after a wee while on it, I posted the following review on the www.roadcycling.co.nz website (I've edited it a bit to explain a couple of things that might not make sense to non kiwis - and added a couple of extra photos)... . And now - for something a little different... . This bike is a little different from most road bikes out there. But its design differences have been [...]
E-Bikes Benefit Health, Fitness, and Rehabilitation
When I built myself an e-bike and started riding it, I was coming off of 35 years of racing bikes and cross-country skis. At age 55, I was still winning lots of bike races until I suddenly developed a heart arrhythmia. I struggled for a few years with finding satisfying outdoor activities that didn’t set off my heart arrhythmia, and my cycling range had become shortened to a very small radius around my house, ridden solo at a slow pace. It was repetitive and uninteresting for someone used to using the bike to have fun and get to far-flung beautiful [...]
Adventure Gravel/Trail Bike Packing Bike
When a long time customer and professional photographer residing in Aspen, Jim Paussa, came to us with a unique request to build a 29+ custom bike with drop handlebars for bike packing, we jumped at the opportunity. This was not a commonly built style of bike, in fact, I don't think I've ever seen one before. We at Zinn Cycles always love this type of project. With our extensive experience with riding and building 29+ mountain bikes, we knew Jim's idea was a good one. 29+ tires are so good for bumpy and chunky terrain, which is often [...]
Custom Anodized Titanium E-Bike
We just finished up this really cool E-bike for a musician in San Fransisco. It's a titanium custom ebike build for a 6'6" rider. This was one of the few occasions where the rider's wife convinced him to upgrade from what he was originally looking for. He came to visit us at our shop in Louisville, Colorado and test road several bikes. He was originally looking for a non electric commuter/city bike to ride around San Fransisco. He got a chance to ride an e-bike we had built up and really enjoyed it. He came back from his test [...]
Custom electric mountain bike with Sram AXS Eagle
This was a really cool project. We recently built this custom titanium electric mountain bike for a local Boulder cyclist who is 6'4", but with extremely long legs. His legs were as long as the average 6'9" customer but his torso was similar to someone who is 6'2". This posed a very interesting design challenge, and on top of that, he needed a very upright riding position to keep his neck and back comfortable. Instead of building the bike with a super long head tube and a custom suspension fork with extra long steering tube, we used the new [...]
Tall Gigabike riders taming Vancouver’s hairy North Shore trails
I just had dinner last night in Vancouver with two tall (6’7” and 6’9”) Zinn customers, Layne Nadeau and Byron Tokarchuk, and heard inspiring tales of the riding that is now possible for them since they got their XXXL Zinn Gigabikes. The Vancouver North Shore trails are notorious for their steepness, slipperiness, dropoffs, stunts, and general technical challenge. Trails that are labeled blue (i.e., intermediate) on the North Shore would be labeled as double black diamond anywhere else. There are maybe two loops in the area that could be called “cross country” trails; everything else is an incredible network [...]
Custom Titanium Electric Mountain Bike
We recently built this custom titanium electric mountain bike for a long-time customer of ours in Hawaii. The rider is 6'8" and 275lbs and we built this mountain e-bike with 29 plus tires. The Tires are 29x3.0" which are a real game changer for a big and tall person. You get better traction and stability, and even more tire cushion, which is nice when you don't have rear suspension. The eZinn Mountain Bike is a performance oriented titanium mountain e-bike that is built for serious riding. We are using the Bosch Generation 4 motor, which has 85nm of [...]
29er Wheel strength for Big and Tall Riders
This is from the last issue of our Quarterly Newsletter As essentially all of our mountain bikes for years have been 29ers, and as the vast majority of our customers are taller than 6'4" and well over 200 pounds, we at Zinn Cycles have a lot of experience with 29er wheels for big riders. The quality of the build is critical, and the rim, spokes and spoke count must be chosen appropriately for the rider. Due to availability, prior to 2006 or so we only used 24mm-wide road trekking rims of around 550 grams, namely Mavic A719 and DT [...]
Grand Opening and 40th Anniversary Celebration
You are invited to our 40th Anniversary and new shop Grand Opening! We would love to have you come and celebrate our 40 years of building wonderful bikes and our beautiful new shop in Louisville, a block south of South Boulder Rd. on 95th St.! In addition to being around to chat, answer questions, and show old photos and newspaper clippings, we'll offer test rides and do some talks listed below. See below for the schedule of events. When: Saturday August 13th - 9am to 1pm Where: Our new shop! 1655 Cannon Cir. Louisville CO 80027 40th [...]
