Cycling Over Sixty

Beyond the Ordinary Bike Frame with Lennard Zinn

• Tom Butler • Season 2 • Episode 57

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Host Tom Butler is gearing up for his biggest challenge yet: a 400+ mile cycling adventure. With a mix of excitement and nerves, Tom prepares mentally to set off on his journey, determined to conquer the road ahead.

Joining Tom this week is the legendary Lennard Zinn, a renowned figure in the cycling world. Lennard shares insights from his long and illustrious career, focusing on his expertise in designing bikes for riders with unique needs. As a pioneer in the mountain bike scene, Lennard offers a fascinating glimpse into the early days of this beloved sport.

Listen in as Lennard discusses his latest frame design projects and shares his thoughts on the future of innovation in the industry. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in cycling history, bike design, and the inspiring stories of riders who push their limits.

Link to Lennard's Substack:  substack.com/@lennardzinn

Thanks for Joining Me! Follow and comment on Cycling Over Sixty on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cyclingoversixty/

Consider becoming a member of the Cycling Over Sixty Strava Club! www.strava.com/clubs/CyclingOverSixty

Please send comments, questions and especially content suggestions to me at tom.butler@teleiomedia.com

Show music is "Come On Out" by Dan Lebowitz. Find him here : lebomusic.com

Tom Butler:

This is the Cycling Over 60 podcast, season two, episode 57, beyond the Ordinary Bike Frame, with Leonard Zinn, and I'm your host, tom Butler. Welcome to this week's episode. I'm here to share the conversations I'm having about staying fit in my 60s and also discussions about a wide variety of cycling topics. First, here's a brief update on my progress this season. I've got a little over a week before I head out to ride across Washington. The wildfires seem to be mostly out and the skies are clear of smoke. The road is open and the weather looks like it's going to be great, so the only thing keeping me from making it across Washington is my legs.

Tom Butler:

I want to be open about the fact that I am a little nervous about this trip. It's possible that I have taken on more than I can handle. I'm not worried about doing 400 miles in five days. I think I can handle that. It's the 25,000 feet of elevation gain that has me questioning if I can make it all the way across the state. Both the miles and the climbing are far beyond what I've ever done before, and I'm also feeling more apprehensive about being so inexperienced at this kind of riding. Of course, I am being followed by my wife in the car, but there will be long sections when I have no cell phone coverage. If something happens in one of those sections, I'm not sure how to get help. Now none of my questions are going to stop me from doing day one, and I guess maybe that's the best way approaching the whole ride. Just take it one section one day at a time.

Tom Butler:

If you have listened to the podcast for a while, you know that a little less than a year ago I started wearing a continuous glucose monitor, typically called a CGM. The data from the monitor pushed me to understand my health in a different way. The CGM has been extremely helpful from the moment I started wearing it. To get a CGM I had to go through a process to get diagnosed with something that would warrant using it. I was able to do that, but the cost of the sensor was around $200 a month. When it was announced last March that an over-the-counter CGM had been approved by the FDA, I was immediately interested. Last week it finally became available for purchase.

Tom Butler:

The Dexcom Stello is available without a prescription. Now it's called a quote glucose biosensor, not a continuous glucose monitor, but it does continuously monitor glucose. So I'm curious why the focus on biosensor. The savings isn't as much as I would have hoped, but it is a little less than half of what I was paying, so that is a step in the right direction. If you do a monthly subscription with Dexcom, it is $90 a month.

Tom Butler:

I originally got my CGM from the service called NutriSense and they have a very nice app. Since I got the Stello, I'm using the app from Dexcom. It is designed for the Stello, but I don't think it has quite as much functionality as the NutriSense app. One change is that the Stello updates readings every 15 minutes. However, when it updates the data, it looks like it gives glucose levels at every 5 minutes. The app continues to run on my phone and the data is automatically sent from the sensor.

Tom Butler:

The last sensor I had was the Freestyle Libre 2. It took readings every 10 minutes and stored data on the sensor for up to eight hours. In order to get the data, I would have to put my phone up to the sensor. It would then connect to my phone using near field communication or NFC. Nfc is used for things like secure payments from cell phones. The Stello instead connects with Bluetooth and, as the user guide states, you need to keep your phone within 20 feet of the sensor at all times. That instruction is a little bit hard for me. One thing that I will point out is that I think the website is terrible and user support is almost zero. Hopefully, as they get the Stello in the hands of more people, they'll improve their customer service. The sooner the better.

Tom Butler:

As far as I'm concerned, I have one major goal between now and when I start writing across Washington on September 9th Don't get sick. There are a number of people around me who have gotten COVID recently. It would be a massive disappointment to have everything set and not be able to go due to having COVID. Any suggestion that you might have about how to keep my immune system sharp would be appreciated. You can find my email and the show Instagram links in the show notes. But if you haven't joined the Cycling Over 60 Strava Club, consider doing so and sharing your thoughts there. That way, others in the club get to see the info and respond. I love that. The club is steadily growing every week.

Tom Butler:

I am always curious about bike tech and when I saw a Clydesdale bike I was hopeful I could get someone from Zinn Cycles to come on the podcast. I was thrilled to find out that Leonard Zinn offered to come on. Leonard, in my opinion, is a true pioneer. That is true in the mountain biking world, but also in designing bikes for large people and small people alike. Here is my conversation with Leonard Zinn. It is so cool to have someone join me today who I think has had a massive impact on the world of cycling. Thank you, leonard Zinn, for taking the time to be here.

Lennard Zinn:

You're welcome. Thanks, Tom.

Tom Butler:

Now, before we get into anything else, tell me about your earliest memory of the bicycle.

Lennard Zinn:

Well, probably my earliest memory is getting Bright Red One under the Christmas tree.

Tom Butler:

How old were you at that time?

Lennard Zinn:

Oh, I was young, I don't know, five or six, or something like that.

Tom Butler:

Had you already been riding or did you need to learn?

Lennard Zinn:

Yeah, I've been figuring it out on my brother's bike.

Tom Butler:

At one point, you decided to focus your career on bikes. How did that happen?

Lennard Zinn:

That's probably a multi-step process. First of all, for some reason I'm not sure why I was intrigued by building bike frames and now when I look back I'm like, wow, I really that far back. I did that when I was a sophomore, maybe junior, in college. I applied for a Watson fellowship to go to Europe to go study frame building and I didn't get the fellowship and I guess I completely pretty much forgot about it. But I was intrigued by it to that point.

Lennard Zinn:

I also had worked with metal a lot as a jeweler. I taught jewelry making even in my spare time at Colorado College through their leisure program, college through their leisure program and so I knew how to you know work a torch and silver solder things and you know cut and hammer and all that. And then in 1980, I won a lot of races and got all sorts of bike parts and my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife of 44 years or something she had a really crappy bike and I thought, oh God, I got all these parts. Be fun to make her a frame. So I got the Proteus frame building manual, which was a thing at the time. I'm sure it's long out of print and I at the time I was in the resident training program with the Olympic Training Center and in Colorado Springs. But my alma mater was Colorado College and I was a physics major there and so I kind of had access to the physics lab. I was also working there as the paraprofessional in the physics department and so I set up my dad's torch there and everything and I made her a frame and I don't know, I guess I figured, you know, got to build a bike frame once in my life. I didn't really still hadn't gotten to the point of the question that you asked of how did I decide to make it a career? But then um 1981 I was racing the, the iron horse classic, the it.

Lennard Zinn:

So there's a stage from durango to silverton that goes over these two 12 000 foot, almost 11 000 foot passes. Back then it was really big race. The prior year I'd won it and I'd set the course record by five minutes. And then now here I was, you know, national team member and on a big, big trade team just gotten a brand new bike. That was the first time I would have ridden it in the mountains. I literally just got it from the team and so I get over the first pass and start going down the other side and the bike just starts shaking uncontrollably Like oh my God, and so I had to put the brakes on, let the group go. Same thing happened on the big descent, all the way down into Silverton. It's just shaking like mad. And it was at that moment that I said, god, I could do better than this myself. I, you know, I'm gonna. I'm gonna make my own frame. And you know, for for my senior seminar, for my physics degree, I'd done a project on um, the stability of the bicycle. I'd I'd made computer models of in fortran, of it, and I'd I'd kind of rigged together an unrideable bike from which you could then learn what it was that made a bike handle properly and ride well. So I wanted to try out those ideas as well, and I'd already tried them out on my what's now my wife's bike. But I wanted to do it for myself, in a big size, and anyway, that that was sort of the next phase.

Lennard Zinn:

I ended up in northern California I don't know five months, three, three or four months later, because I'd torn. I'd torn my gastrocnemius in the tour of Ireland stage race and it just wasn't healing and wasn't healing and I couldn't stand to be around Boulder anymore because it just I was a bummer to be around. My girlfriend and I wasn't riding, and all my friends there were bike riders and you know, and my the trade team I was on was based there and they were always checking on me and national team coach was. I just needed to get out of there and I drifted out to california, northern california, was working for a geophysics company, got laid off. Then I I uh just was flipping through the phone book and I saw tom ritchie's name and you know I'd seen ritchie bicycles in the palo Alto bike shops catalog. I don't know if you ever saw that catalog, but it was. You know what we all poured over in the seventies, you know, looking at all these cool bikes in their mail order catalog and um, and I just called him up and he answered and I said he said hello and I said, is this Tom Ritchie? He said yeah, the Ritchie that builds bicycles. Yeah, oh, wow, I had no idea why I'd done it and I was like, well, do you need any help? And he said, well, actually a guy just quit today. Yeah, and so he had two employees at the time and one of them had just quit. So I was then his third employee ever and so yeah, was then working for him.

Lennard Zinn:

This was very early in the mountain bike scene when he was partners with Gary Fisher doing Ritchie Mountain Bikes. Mountain Bikes was Gary Fisher's name, the name of his bike shop in San Anselmo, and anyway, so we were making I don't know if you've seen recently, tom richie recently came out redoing the bull moose handlebar, this steel. Do you remember the way those bikes, early mountain bikes, had? Instead of a stamina bar they had a one-piece triangulated thing that came out like this with all all from tom was all phillip braced together but like the stump jumper, which was the, the bike that was the copy of the Ritchie bikes that you know Mike Sr had taken to Japan and had it, had it copied to make the stump jumper. That had also and that's what I was doing actually was making millions of those handlebars.

Lennard Zinn:

And then still, you know, I was not thinking of this as a career, I still thought of myself as a bike racer. And then my knee just wasn't getting better, out there, my torn, gastrocnemius, calcified, and I was, you know, I was on a swim team in Palo Alto master swim team, trying to work it that way and I really hate swimming actually, but I just couldn't ride. And at the same time that Andy Pruitt was the head athletic trainer for the women at CU he's like the guru of bike fit these days, but back then he was an athletic trainer at CU and was a riding buddy and he told Sonny my wife, his girlfriend at the time that if I came back to Boulder he'd just treat me for free in the field house along with all the co-ed athletes. And so that seemed like a good deal to me. And so I came back to Boulder and at the same time my grandmother died and left me $10,000.

Lennard Zinn:

And I was like, well, what am I going to do with this? Well, I could start a bike company. So that was probably. I still didn't think it was a career. You know, it wasn't until I was like 40. So this time, 1982, I was 24 years old and when I was about 40, my dad said oh my God, you've really made a career out of this bicycle thing. So at that point I knew really made a career out of this bicycle thing. So at that point I knew it was a career kind of crept up.

Tom Butler:

That's awesome. Do you think that your study of physics kind of brought something unique to uh, to your craft, to to building frames? Do you think that was something that allowed you to see things in a specific way?

Lennard Zinn:

Yeah, absolutely yeah, yeah, like especially with front end geometry and handling and the whole relationship between the fork offset and the wheel diameter, the head tube angle. Just you know, that was a huge thing. That I looked at from a physics perspective and and then you know, I see physics as as really being like figuring out how to make how the world works. You know, and so that was always the case with building bikes, and designing bikes is bringing that perspective to it.

Tom Butler:

A while ago I had somebody on and they talked about the bicycle as an elegant machine and I think that's kind of an interesting way to say it. What do you think about that?

Lennard Zinn:

Oh, absolutely. I mean, there's nothing like it. There's no conveyance that exists that can carry more than 10 times its own weight. It's probably actually more like 20 times its own weight. Now, when you think of these 16 pound bikes that could carry a 320 pound person, you know it's, it's there's. You know semi trucks there's nothing, there's nothing that comes close to it.

Tom Butler:

And yeah, elegance and grace, not both of the bike but also of the riders, it's cool you talked about mountain biking and you had an interesting view of mountain biking that many people don't have these days, kind of being at the very genesis of it and the place where it was being formulated. What was that like at that time to see that take off?

Lennard Zinn:

Well, it's a lot cooler in retrospect than it was at the time. At the time it just sort of seemed like the way it was, but like we'd have a Thanksgiving Day group mountain bike ride on Mount Tam. And so there was Tom Ritchie, gary Fisher, joe Breeze, steve Potts, charlie Cunningham, mark Slate, scott Nickel Ross Schaefer, scott Nickel Ross Schaefer, everybody was there. You know that would ultimately be really significant names in the mountain bike business, but at the time you know, they're like Joe Breeze is coming over to Tom, he just made his first frame. Maybe it was Steve Potts.

Lennard Zinn:

One of those two guys made his first frame and wanted some tips from Tom about how do you, you know, how do you scale this up, and Tom was very generous with his time about stuff like that. But yeah, it was just pretty amazing that whole concentration I mean you know it's really kind of like right by the Silicon Valley and and and similar, in the sense that there's all this somehow magnetic grouping together of all these people with a similar interest, kind of bringing something new out of nothing, well, out of the existing bicycle. But I guess, you know, the Silicon Valley people were bringing something out of an existing giant computer.

Tom Butler:

Yeah, I think that innovation, that interest in innovation, I think there's definitely some real parallels there. In the beginning it seems like there was, you know, this adaptation of the road bike, you know, to going off road. How soon did it happen that you know there's a divergent? You know we see road bikes and mountain bikes very differently. Now, how soon did it happen that there was this real divergence? Was it almost immediately or did it take some time?

Lennard Zinn:

Well, from my perspective as a roadie, it was immediate. Tom Ritchie originally made five bikes. The first run was five, but one was for him, one was for Gary Fisher. I don't know where two of them went, but the other one went to Chris Kant at Criterion Bike Shop in Colorado Springs and he was sponsor of the cycling team. I was on at the time one day.

Lennard Zinn:

It was like right next to colorado college, and when I was over at the shop he said you know, what do you think of this? Shows me this bike with knobby tires and stuff, and you know you can ride it on dirt trails, like hiking trails and stuff. And I'm like who would want to do that? It's awesome. So then when I got to tom richie, you know when he said, yeah, you know, a guy quit today. You could come on up and I go up there. And then I look around, he takes me a little tour and I'm like you mean, all you're doing is just mountain bikes. You know, I'd envision making these cool road bikes. And he's like, yeah, there's no business in road bikes anymore, this is where it's at. Oh geez, you know.

Lennard Zinn:

So I was reluctant to take the job because I thought, oh boy. Of course, in retrospect I'm super glad I did, but it was, it was a different time. You know, we just ride anywhere, literally anywhere. And then you know, one time we were there was a dinner party up there.

Lennard Zinn:

He lived on the top of the coastal range above Palo Alto looking down on kind of half moon bays on one side and Palo Alto, redwood City and stuff is on the other side, and we were at a dinner party at some. You know, people up there tended to have a lot of money, nice house up there, and we were at one of these places and you know, I was just kind of a little bit of an outsider, didn't know anybody, and striking up a conversation with one of the homeowners up there oh, what do you do? I build these bikes with this guy over there, tom Ritchie, and you know we just ride them all over the place. Somehow we got on the subject of how we rode them all over up there and he said you're the guys that have been riding across my property. Oh, I had no concept of trail etiquette, you know, trail access issues or anything. We just literally rode everywhere, that's hilarious.

Tom Butler:

Oh, I think there's always been this sense that cycling is really a european thing, but mountain biking seemed like, you know, a real american thing. What was that sense there? That there's a vision there between kind of road racing and mountain biking as far as Europe versus the U S?

Lennard Zinn:

Oh yeah, I mean, it didn't. It didn't exist in Europe. At the time that we were. I was working for Tom and you know, I my mother's German. I grew up, grew up speaking German. I loved going to Europe racing. I just had a pretty Euro kind of view of the cycling world. So that's another reason that there's like mountain bikes, you know, because I really thought of them, as you know, just the clunkers. You know the pictures of the clunkers that these guys were riding down, repack and stuff on and you know, in jeans and no helmet and stuff. Well, we didn't really wear helmets then either for racing at that time on the road either, but it was just the clothes, the everything. It just was like. This is not the elegant sport that I love Shaved legs and all that.

Tom Butler:

So did that shift for you?

Lennard Zinn:

Yeah, I didn't. You know now, even I hadn't really thought about it until literally having this conversation, but that shift happened relatively quickly while I was up there working with Tom. I was just like these are cool and we can do all these cool things on them.

Tom Butler:

Yeah, One thing about you, and you talked about the shimmy that was going on as you were descending on a bike. You're a tall person. Yes shimmy that was going on as you were descending on a bike. You're a tall person. Yes, was that always like something about you as you were on the cycling team, that you were one of the taller people?

Lennard Zinn:

Yeah, I think I was always the tallest. When I won Durango Silverton I was six foot six and I weighed 156 pounds. It spurred some of my thinking about the bike Cause, like when I was on national team Eddie Borisavich was the national team coach at the time Eddie B, and he did the, you know, initial positioning of me on on my bike for when I, when I joined the team and and I was using 180 cranks Most people had never even heard of cranks that long and I had gone to great lengths to get them. It just that was the longest that was available. But that just made sense to me, especially with my physics background.

Lennard Zinn:

It made no sense that that I would go through smaller range of angles and relative extension, contraction of muscles and stuff than other people. Like if it worked for them and these guys that went in the tour de france that their crank length and their crank circle, the way their feet moved around, why did I have to now work like a sewing machine, you know, on these little short cranks? And? And so eddie b positioned me on it. I thought he was going to go, oh geez, what are these long cranks? And said, oh, you got 180 millimeter cranks. That's fantastic, but they're not long enough for you.

Lennard Zinn:

I'm like, well, I'm sort of been thinking that, but there's nobody makes any longer than this. He's like, oh yeah, they make, they make. Which of course was not the case. But told me you know that you should, you should ride 182 and a half for everything and 185 for time, trial, hill climb, okay.

Lennard Zinn:

But that would always stuck in the back of my mind, you know, until decades later, when I was writing for velonews and I wanted to do a whole article on crank lengths and test these things, and I built an ergometer that would allow you this whole range of adjustment to to be able to fit all kinds of sizes of people with all kinds of sizes of cranks, because most mergometers, you know, didn't accept standard cranks. They don't have a standard threaded bottom bracket and everything. So I had to build the whole thing and then and then got jeff boone to make all these cranks from 100 millimeter to 220 millimeters. That then I'd do these tests with. And you know, if Eddie B hadn't said those things, I probably would have just maybe stuck with well, my 180s or improvement over what would have been, but stuck with that, with that so you talked about the ten thousand dollars, deciding to put that into a company making bikes.

Tom Butler:

Was that the beginning of of Zen Cycles, or when? Did that start.

Lennard Zinn:

That was it. That was it. Then I incorporated, became an S-Corp, I don't know. A month or two later, by the time, I'd gotten a little bit of advice about what to do, and so yeah, now it's 42 years later. Zen Cycles is still going strong.

Tom Butler:

How do you describe Zin Cycles today? If someone was going to ask you kind of what your focus is at Zin Cycle, Well, still, the majority of our customers are very tall people, but it is changing.

Lennard Zinn:

One thing that changed it was e-bikes. And I started making e-bikes because I developed a heart arrhythmia. And you know, connie Carpenter and Davis Finney are good friends of mine, you, you know, and they're the winningest bike racers in American history. They're sort of the first, first couple of cycling and and I used to put on bike camps with them in Italy and stuff, and they, and Davis has Parkinson's and as was riding an e-bike, which I didn't know, but he was, and and he and uh, I was telling him about how, yeah, boring it's gotten me can only being able to ride this very small radius near my house and can't ride with anybody else, because as soon as I start talking, I forget about paying attention, my heart rate and skyrockets, or, and that I needed to be close enough that I could get back home if, if, I went into arrhythmia. And so he's like, well, you need an e-bike and you know it's just in my nature. You know, when I started kayaking, I made my own kayak. You know, when I got into bikes, I made my own bikes. You know, I there's no way I was going to go buy an e-bike, particularly in my size, I always figured same with kayaks and everything you know. I always figured it wouldn't be one my size anyway. Then after doing that, it started. You know, e-bikes have.

Lennard Zinn:

More of a problem like the way my business is still here after 42 years and so many other frame builders have come and gone is that I never tried to compete with big brands in the middle of the market. You know, I looked on the fringes for what they weren't doing and originally my business was completely making bikes for small people. I sponsored a women's racing team. We created the team. It was the first women's only cycling team in Colorado and most of my customers were small women at the time and that was because the big brands were not doing anything for them. The only thing they could get that really fit decently was a Georgina Terry bike, but it had a 24-inch front wheel and you couldn't race that and get neutral support, wheel changes and all that sort of thing. So all these manufacturers made small bikes but they were kids' bikes. A kid's 10 speed, you know, was not the same quality and so I was making a, you know, a really good bike that would fit these really small people. And then at some point, you know, these big manufacturers figured out that women spend a lot of money on bikes and they started catering to that market.

Lennard Zinn:

And then that part of my business kind of dwindled and and but it would always been, from the beginning, figuring out this, how to fix this shimmy problem. You know, which did come from my physics background was figuring out how to how to solve that. And there are just so many tall people tall bikes just tend to do that. That would come to me because they were scared to death going downhill on their bike and and also just from getting one that fit them properly. So then it became 100 big and tall bikes for decades.

Lennard Zinn:

But then, with the once I started making e-bikes, e-bikes have that same problem with too limited range of sizes. Most manufacturers are just not making things in the big or small sizes and and so the fact that I made every size and made a light one, really high performing one that performs like a, like a nice, whatever it was it's a e-mountain bike, or if it's a road bike but performs like a nice road bike, nice mountain bike or gravel bike or whatever and so that then brought in a lot of small people again and then other small people because of them started buying normal bikes too. So so now we're we find a pretty interesting mix, you know we have. So zin cycles has three brands the zin brand we make custom, custom titanium, almost all titanium bikes, also some aluminum full suspension bikes. And then we have c Clydesdale brand, which is a titanium stock-sized range road bikes, gravel bikes, e-bikes, mountain bikes, fat bikes, all in titanium and originally all only size 2XL, 3xl and 4XL. Now some of those things we go down to smaller sizes but the idea still is big. So sometimes we get 6 foot tall or five, ten, ten people who weigh 400 pounds and that kind of thing, so that that whole Clydesdale line is designed to be an unbreakable bike, you know, for big people, big and tall people. And and then we have this third brand which is a pretty new thing for us, also titanium stock size, but it's called 2ETUI, which is a bird in New Zealand. That's for small people, small gravel bikes and e-bikes for everybody, but focused on those that are not fine, that find a hard time getting things from big big companies.

Lennard Zinn:

You know we also make our own carbon fork. We don't manufacture it, but that was a project during the pandemic. You know, business tripled during the pandemic and I think you know we were fortunate in that here where we were, you, I, we were all socially distanced. You know I had one guy out in the shop doing the assemblies. I was in here doing design and all that sort of stuff alone. He was out there alone. Nick was working alone at his house. The titanium welder is one man shop, that guy making the full suspension aluminum bikes out of fort lupton here. He's all one-man shops.

Lennard Zinn:

And then titanium was the only material bikes are made out of. That became more abundant and cheaper during the pandemic and that was because you really the only commercial use of titanium tubing is in is for hydraulic tubing inside of commercial aircraft for running the lifters and the landing gear and all that sort of stuff. And and they were just mothballing planes, nobody was building anything. So people were eager to sell titanium tubing but since our business was primarily big, tall people, we needed a fork with a long steer and and there was only one on the market that was long enough and I designed pretty much all the really tall bikes oversized 2XL to use, which was the Envy Allroad fork, allroad disc fork.

Lennard Zinn:

But then we couldn't get it during the pandemic. That was just one of the many things, but that would completely stop us in our tracks, because you know other stuff that we couldn't. When we couldn't get chains, you know, we'd figure out something. When we couldn't get rim strips, we'd figure out something because they didn't know what was going to happen next and all of a sudden nobody was ordering anything. Nobody knew what was happening. So I negotiated a great price on getting these forks made and I worked out the design.

Lennard Zinn:

Had the EFBE test lab in Germany, which is like the premier bike testing lab Germany, which is like the premier bike testing lab keep doing the testing to make a fork that was really designed for super big, heavy people. We didn't stop at the test level that all the other guys did. We went 50% higher and then made the steer tube much thicker. So if people stack a whole bunch of spacers up above the headset to get their handlebars way up there, if they're buying it as an aftermarket fork in order to do that, that we didn't need to worry about the steer breaking and and also that the steer was then like all of the forks are 300 to 350 millimeter long steers, which wasn't enough for most of our bikes. And then that one envy fork was 400.

Lennard Zinn:

Well, this zenduro fork, we make 450, and we make it instead of the 140, 160 millimeter rotors, make it take 160, 180, because for really big people they need bigger, bigger disc brakes as well. And so I guess I guess I see zend cycles as a company that tries to produce solutions for people that have, you know, can't otherwise find a bike that's right for them. And you know I do a lot of customer fittings. Now I'm doing got this computerized fit bike. You know that moves in response to type it on the keyboard. I do lots of fits for people on non-Zen bikes. Now I've really completely turned over the business end of things to Nick and so I'm just doing bike designs, bike fittings, writing, writing for the blog and things like that, but I don't have to spend so much time paying bills and ordering parts and that sort of thing, and so I'm freed up to do things like bike fittings, which you know I've been doing forever, but just on our own bikes, and now it's kind of fun to do it.

Tom Butler:

That's awesome. It's a really cool business story really. I mean, what a unique transition and a time when, like you get this opportunity where titanium is more available, you know, and everything it's. It's just a really interesting business story. What is it about titanium? What? What are the properties that that make it a good material?

Lennard Zinn:

Well, one is that it can never rust or corrode and it doesn't actually need any paint, which is really nice, because that was always a hassle. You know, painting bikes myself or getting them painted or powder coated or whatever, it's really the the liveliness of it. So there's, the liveliness of it is a ride characteristic that you can hear. Really, if you, if you had tuning forks made out of aluminum, steel and titanium. You know the aluminum one, I think you can kind of imagine it sort of goes thwap, you know, and carbon one would do the same thing, even more better sound. And then steel is a nice bright, ringing sound. And then titanium, it rings so brightly it's like it's almost deafening, like if we knock a bunch of titanium tubes on the floor it just rings like ding and everybody's covering their ears and it's quite amazing and that sort of liveliness and energy transfer you can really feel on the bike. And then its strength to weight ratio is super impressive. So it's two thirds the density of steel, whereas aluminum is one third the density of steel. But where steel that's used in bike frames, high end steel, is up close to 200,000 PSI tensile strength, the best aluminums that are used in bike frames, strongest aluminums used in bike frames are maybe 40 000 psi, so five times less so, even though here it's, it's a third the density, you got to use a whole bunch of it in order to not have it break. But titanium has a tensile strength like 150 000 psi, so up close to steel, but at only two-thirds the weight and two-thirds the density.

Lennard Zinn:

And then another thing that's great about it is elongation. So you can kind of understand elongation, because you know better than to use a really fine kitchen knife as a screwdriver, because you know you'll break the tip off and the tip is brittle, because they push the tensile strength up so high with that in order that it'll really hold an edge. And they did it at the expense of the elongation, which is how much something can stretch, and when you let go of the force that it'll return to its original shape or bend and then let go and return to its original shape. And so when you get to this really, really high brittleness, then you're talking. You know, two or three percent elongation is all. If you stretch or bend it two or three percent beyond its original shape, it's not going to go back, it's going to either break off or deform permanently and you know the steel that's used in bike. They bring that compromise back some. So that's like seven percent elongation and you get 200,000 psi tensile instead of, you know, 350,000 on the knife blade.

Lennard Zinn:

But but aluminum, those high-strength aluminums that they need in order to have that bike be strong enough and not have it be heavier than a steel bike, has an elongation like 2% or 3%. And then, of course, carbon. You can design, flex into it and all that. But if it takes a big impact, that's it, it's not, it doesn't have spring back to it. You know you, you delaminate, crush fibers, whatever. And titanium has, rather than 2% or 7% or what elongation, it's 25% elongation, which means that it can just be bent all over the place and you let go and it'll go back to its original shape. So so, like when, if you're building a bike and you build it crooked or somebody brings in a bent bike, you know you building a bike and you build it crooked or somebody brings in a bent bike, you know you can steal bike, you can cold set it, you can bend it out and it'll come back, come out to and hold this set and and the an aluminum bike. Yeah, you can do that to a certain point. But if you the the tensile strength is so low, the the yield strength, that all of a sudden it'll go and it'll bend. You know a kink in it, stay there. And titanium, you can yank on it and bend and do all sorts of stuff and it just keeps going back to the way it was.

Lennard Zinn:

And um, you know, we used to see lots of bikes in the 90s where people would drive into their garages with them on the roof. You know, because all the roof, all the bike racks were on the roof. Then they weren't on the hitch and if it happened with a carbon bike or an aluminum bike the bike just broke. And if it happened with a steel bike they would get a little bit crinkled. You know you get a stretch point at top, the head tube, top tube joint and a little bubble on the bottom, same on the down tube, and you know the bike would be permanently screwed up. The head angle would be too steep then and it would. You know the tire would hit your toe and stuff like that.

Lennard Zinn:

But titanium bikes, you know we had people that would come in here where that all kinds of stuff. One guy had even totaled his car because at the time the roof rack, the cars had the gutters, you know, and the roof, the, the roof racks, clamped into the gutters and it just tore the gutters right off of this car and, you know, broke the rack, broke handlebars, all sorts of stuff and the frame, you know. Apparently it would have been cool to see it in slow motion because it probably just went like this and then when, then when all the straps and started breaking on the, on the, the roof rack, and the roof rack broke away from the roof of the bike, of the car, then all of a sudden bing, it would have just going back out to its original shape and and so I love that. You, it's just a, it's a lifetime material. It rides wonderfully, you basically can't ever dend it or break it or bend it. And it gives me confidence, given that we're making bikes for really, really big people, that even if we, you know we do sometimes make steel bikes for we still do some steel bikes and some people insist on it, but still there's plenty of them that people weren't careful about how they dealt with water.

Lennard Zinn:

Water would get inside the seat tube and then they'd be hanging it from their ceiling by the front wheel, and so the back of the seat tube is like horizontal and the water that is collected in there from riding in the rain and having water get thrown into the slot behind the seat post that would be collecting there. And how we would know about it is they'd call us up and they'd say, hey, the paint's bubbling on the back of my seat tube. No, really, I don't know. Scratch in our head trying to figure out how that happened. Then they send the bike in. You just push your finger in one of those bubbles and it just goes right through the tube Because the whole back of it's all rusted out and you just can't. Things like that just don't happen with titanium bikes and um, and of course you have less margin for that when you're really big, you know, depending on having the full strength of the material that you're riding on I had somebody talk about how excited they were to get their Clydesdale bike.

Tom Butler:

You know this was someone that was big and just thrilled that. You know he was getting a bike that he felt really confident in, it felt really fit him. You must hear that a lot.

Lennard Zinn:

Yeah, a lot of people found God thank you for being here Like if it weren't for you I wouldn't be able to get a bike. So I love that. Yeah, I mean, there was a time at one time that I tried to quit this business 1994, you know like we were had a shop up in North Boulder then and it just was a struggle financially. I'd gone through a clinical depression. It was just like it was just rough.

Lennard Zinn:

I closed the business, sold most of the equipment, a few things like the welder and stuff I couldn't let go of, but most stuff I sold to the people who worked for me and helped them set up their own frame building businesses and I was just going to go by that point. I was writing for Velenor's a lot and I was just going to be doing that. But really what happened was so many of my prior customers already but at that point I'd been in business for 12 years there was already so many tall guys out there who would call me up and say, oh my God, you can't stop. You can't stop doing this because you're the only guy that would make a bike that worked for them. Then I figured out a way to do it and to make it profitable and all that make it sustainable and kept going well, that's awesome, I'm glad you did for sure.

Tom Butler:

Do you see some technological advancements coming up that are going to contribute to frame building?

Lennard Zinn:

I'm sure we're going to go further with 3D printing. As it is, that's made a huge difference in our business recently. Like I told you, when I decided to make myself an e-bike well, I was going to make it out of titanium because that's what it makes bikes out of I called up Bosch and asked them to send me a motor. And first of all, that was the first roadblock, because they said no, we can't do that. We're not set up to sell the small frame builders, we're only set up to sell the big manufacturers. And I talked him into like dude, you got to do this because pretty soon other frame builders besides me are going to want these things. And so he said, well, give me six months. And then in six months months he set up saris as the distributor with the hazmat certification to be able to ship the batteries and set up set up qbp to do small parts and set up magura usa to do like dealer training and warranty service and stuff.

Lennard Zinn:

But during that time I was figuring out what am I going to do if I get this motor? How am I going to attach to the bike? To machine that out of titanium be ridiculously expensive first for the programming and all that to figure out exactly how to do it. But then you'd be starting with a big block of titanium, which is expensive stuff, and you'd be throwing out 95 percent of it, not to mention all the machining time involved and the special cutters that you need to cut titanium because it tends to smear rather than cut. So you got a super, super sharp cutter and then the upfront cost to mold it or to forge it or anything but 3d printing.

Lennard Zinn:

Wow, you know, you just had to have a good the exact design of it and find somebody that could do it. And actually the company that makes the titanium 3D printer in Germany was who's been making those 3D printing those for us. And then they said it would be $5,000 for one of these things. So my bike was going to be pretty expensive, my e-bike, or $7,000 for 10. So that's how I got in the e-bike business, because I had these nine motor mounting nodes that I needed to sell, and so I kept going with it. And then by the time I sold that ninth one, then Bosch had changed the motor. It was a smaller, lighter motor, and I had to change the design anyway of the 3D printing.

Tom Butler:

That's fantastic. That's a anyway of the 3d printing. That's fantastic.

Lennard Zinn:

That's a big one, 3d printing and I do think that that's going to continue to have a. I don't. It's hard for me to predict how, but it's just inevitable that that kind of thing is going to show up more on bike building and we already use 3d printed dropouts to a 3d printed head, two bins and 3D printed dropouts too, and 3D printed head tube ends and 3D printed mounts for things on the bike. And you know, I think it's really in the area of carbon manufacturing, because really that's where, if you look at the business as a whole not my business, the business as a whole that's kind of the direction it goes, because the labor required is less skilled, you can have much lower costs, but you end up with a lighter product that you can sell for more. And the other thing that costs you more to make and those upfront costs to produce the molds or whatever to make one-off bikes and carbon that that's going to somehow come down. I see that that is sort of another thing that would happen.

Tom Butler:

One of the huge contributions that I think you've made to cycling is helping people understand how bikes work and how to fix them. How did you start writing guidebooks?

Lennard Zinn:

My wife was a teacher and this was before Barnes and Noble and Amazon and all that sort of stuff. So she and all the teachers would go to this one bookstore in Boulder called Discount Books and it was owned by a guy that I went to high school with in Los Alamos, New Mexico, who happened to be a bike nut and he read all my articles and veloners, and so my wife would go in there to buy a bunch of books for her classroom and he would say Leonard needs to write a book and he needs to call it Zen and the Art of Mountain Bike Maintenance. She'd come home and tell me that and I'd chuckle and that would be the end of it, and six months later she'd go back in to get more books for her class. Same thing would happen and one of the times she went in and he'd made up a dummy cover of the book Zen and in the Art of Mountain Bike man, he brought that home and somehow, having that sitting there on the table like I could do that, that's how it started.

Tom Butler:

What a good idea he had to do that. Why do you think it's important for people to understand bikes more, how they work more understand how to do their own maintenance? What's your thought on that?

Lennard Zinn:

Well, I think it gives them power. Like I drive an electric car and I don't like the fact that there's so many things on it that I don't understand that if it broke I'd have no idea what to do about it and some things out of my control, like where, if charger stations are screwed up or whatever, you're stranded, and a bicycle it inherently. One of the reasons it gives you so much freedom is the sense that you can go a long way but you can always depend on yourself to get yourself back on it. And then it's an extension of that that if something goes wrong with it, that you can fix it and still get yourself back.

Tom Butler:

That, I think, is the biggest reason For me. That drives me for sure. I love it. You had mentioned using an e-bike because of some health issues. I'm wondering if you could talk a bit about cycling as an activity for older people, kind of including the fact that you know there is pedal assist out there. If you do, you have something going on and maybe you know there's a lot of different things that could warrant pedal assist. Do you see cycling as a particularly good activity for older adults?

Lennard Zinn:

Yeah, I definitely do. I mean it's easier on your joints than just about anything, except maybe swimming. Swimming actually is hard on your shoulder joints but leg joints and stuff. But you don't have to have a pool, you don't have to be in chlorinated water, you don't have to all that stuff that goes along with that. You get to be outside, where running and even walking, you know, are more wear and tear on your joints.

Lennard Zinn:

Provided on the bike you get everything lined up properly, that you're not grinding away at something because your knee swings out or your foot's twisted weird or something like that, but that you get everything lined up, you properly fit on the bike and you know you can go places. You can go interesting go places. You can go interesting cool places with it. And then with the e-bike, you know I never envisioned myself riding an e-bike until I was, and then, once I was, I was like god, why didn't I do this years ago? I mean you know it's fantastic, I can do any ride I want to. I mean it's just a matter of how many batteries I'm willing to carry. It's better batteries if I want to go really a long way.

Lennard Zinn:

But you know, trail Ridge Road is the highest mountain pass in the US. You know I can ride up there and I can. You know, if Peter Sagan comes to town I can keep up with him. You know I can do any riding I want. There's nothing that limits you to how hard you pedal. You still get to choose that.

Lennard Zinn:

As long as you don't have one with a throttle I'm not into the e-bikes and throttles, but pedal assist e-bike you can still pedal as hard as you want, but you are going faster than you would have with only your pedaling, which I find freeing and also a way to look around and smell the flowers and enjoy the scenery more than just being constantly, you know, redlined going up a big mountain. You know I'm 66 years old. I have a heart arrhythmia. Yeah, I go on rides that most people would never consider going on. I think that I could keep doing this till at least 75 or something, maybe till I'm 80,. You know riding high in the mountains and everything and and otherwise. You know you I don't know how old you are, but you're probably familiar with you know how constantly there's some aching something. You know something doesn't work like the way it used to, and to still be able to do some things that you did when you were really young is great.

Tom Butler:

Yeah, I love it. I see people all the time. We just did a ride three days on a tour, so I'm 61. And you know there are a lot of people on that ride that were quite a bit older than me, and it was just you know. And you know there are a lot of people on that ride that were quite a bit older than me, and it was just you know. Several of them had pedal assist and it's just really good to see people out there that would not be on a bike ride otherwise and maybe not being active otherwise. So I'm just it's really good to see it. Thank you so much, leonard, for coming on. Can you talk about you do some writing and how do people follow Zin Cycles and kind of follow what you're writing about?

Lennard Zinn:

So I'm no longer writing for VeloNews. I'm now writing my own thing on Substack, so leonardzinsubstackcom. I have a weekly tech Q&A withonard zinn on that. I do on on that every monday and we'll post some other things as well as that. But mostly that's what I'm doing is people ask me questions and I about bike stuff and I answer them. And then, yeah, zinn cycles dot com is our website and there's lots of content there about the things that that I do and there's a blog that I have there. You know stuff that I'm thinking about about bikes and why we do certain things. And then my books. You know zen and the art of road bike maintenance. I just did the sixth edition of that. Is is now out, and zen and the art of mountain bike maintenance is also sixth edition. Is is out in the market. And then I wrote the haywire heart, which is about how masters endurance athletes are much more prone to heart arrhythmias, why and what you can do about it.

Tom Butler:

So those are other ways again, I just think that you have contributed massively to cycling and just even you know the fact. Like I said, the people discover a Clydesdale bike and they're bigger and get to experience that. I mean, that alone is such a huge thing, but you're riding and everything. So I want to thank you for that. And again, I want to thank you for taking the time to be on here.

Lennard Zinn:

You're welcome. Thank you for inviting me. All right, take care now Bye.

Tom Butler:

I love what Leonard shared about being involved in designing and building bikes for years and then only really realizing it was his career when his father pointed it out decades after Leonard started.

Tom Butler:

That feels to me like Leonard was just by nature a bike guy. I feel bad for Leonard that his aspirations of professional racing were interrupted by injury. However, I wonder if the world wouldn't have Zinn Cycles, if Leonard hadn't needed to find another profession. Like he said, without his bikes, there would be a lot of people who would have to put up with bikes that just don't fit. It is such a valuable combination for Leonard to be very tall himself and also have the knowledge to understand the forces that impact larger bike frames and to be able to see the interaction between taller people and the bike through his own experience. And, of course, it is awesome that his experience also led to smaller people getting bikes that fit them as well, no matter your size or cycling ability. I hope the week ahead is filled with some incredible rides on a bike that fits you well, and remember age is just a gear change.

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