Zinn Cycles, Inc.
Builder Profile
President, Lennard Zinn
Author of the best-selling books:
-"Zinn and the Art of Mountain Bike Maintenance"
-"Zinn and the Art of Road Bike Maintenance"
Also senior technical writer for VeloNews and velonews.com
The biggest frame builder in existence builds big frames. Makes big sense! At 6'6" Lennard Zinn knows what it takes. Light, strong, stable and comfortable custom road and mountain bikes for people from 6'3" and up.
If you are over 6'3", our Big and Tall Custom Bike may be the bicycle you have dreamed of but thought could not be found. You are well aware of the difficulties in finding a bicycle to fit you and perform well. I am 6'6" myself and have been building and designing frames for tall riders for over 21 years. Unlike shorter designers, I am able to ride big bikes and evaluate whether they perform to my standards, and I intimately appreciate the compromises in fit and performance that tall riders are traditionally asked to make.
Custom Zinn frames for tall riders are built out of steel or titanium and are designed specifically to address the fit, rigidity, handling and shimmy problem that normally plague the bikes of tall riders.
I am familiar with the shimmy and shake that many tall bicycles get at high speeds or riding with no hands, and I design my bikes to eliminate it. I know how whippy a tall frame can be standing or sprinting, and my designs address that as well. While being stiff, stable, and shimmy free, these frames are also built with the strongest available double-butted tubing-- True Temper OX Gold or with Ancotech titanium tubing. You get a long-lasting frame with a weight that belies its stiffness, strength and durability.As with all our frames, we won't let your bicycle out the door until it meets not only our high quality standards, but yours as well.
We are pleased to offer custom Zinn frames in steel or titanium with S&S couplers for ease of traveling. And, of course, since we cater to tall riders, this means that very tall customers, too, can have the convenience of traveling with their bike in an airline-legal-size case. The 26” X 26” X 10” hard case flies on any airline for no extra charge and rolls easily on a pair of wheels with a handle in front.
These couplers are superbly designed and precision machined, whether in steel or titanium, to hold each tube together as strongly as if it were one piece. Naturally, we install them with impeccable workmanship into the tubes; we do this before mitering the tubes and building the frame. The couplers add some weight, but otherwise the ride quality of the bicycle is exactly the same.
Below, you can see the step-by-step packing of a super-large bike into the case. The titanium bike pictured being packed into the case is 65cm with a 63cm top tube and 195mm crank arms. As you can see, the fork with its extra-long steering tube will not fit along one edge and must go in diagonally. As a result, it must be removed, since the down tube would stick out of the case if the fork were left installed in the frame. But with a front-opening stem and a threadless headset with sealed cartridge bearings like the Chris King pictured, this is no problem. And by removing the fork, the crank need not be removed, although it could be for further ease of packing. From this sequence, you can see how to pack your own extra-large custom coupled Zinn travel bike!
Step 1 -- Place the front end and rear wheel into the case.
Step 2 -- Place rear half of frame inside along with fork and cranks.
Step 3 -- Place handlebars into case.
Step 4 -- Place front wheel, saddle, pedals and other parts as well as case supports (the three white discs pictured are the tops of the case supports) in the case and you're ready to close it up and go.
Zinn Cycles, Inc.
7437 S. Boulder Rd.
Boulder, CO 80303 USA
Phone: 303-499-4349
Fax: 303-499-9050
e-mail: l.zinn@comcast.net