Nick Wigston of Zinn and Clydesdale Bicycles

Zap (Zapata Espinoza) interviews Nick Wigston of Zinn and Clydesdale Bicycles at the 2023 Master Bike Builders Show in Bentonville, Arkansas.
@zinncycles @bikeclydesdale @masterbicyclebuilders
Check out more at the www.masterbikebuildersshow.com
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Partial Transcript:
Zap:
Here we are back down in Bentonville, the master bike show, Master bike builders show. And lo and behold, just for Tony sake, we got an E bike.
And it's not just anybody ebike it's an E bike built by Zen company. Next year from Zen and just the sake of it, it's not just that it's a Z thing. But just for for you kids out there who may not know be familiar with Leonard's in. He's like the grandfather of bicycle, everything. In America, one of my personal heroes, as a journalist, as a bike technician, everything.
Bicycles are near and dear to his heart, no pun intended.
But Leonard is in just a fabulous name. Everyone should go and like Google him and just find out about Leonard's and he's just a great human being. And just like I said, a little Encyclopedia of bicycle technology, history, passion and design. He started in bikes years and years and years ago. And now Nick's the man in charge, and he's gonna tell us all about the Zen brand and more importantly, this Zen ebike. Vic, take it away. Yeah, well, I started working for Leonard, just fresh out of college, and he's been a mentor of mine. Since then. He's I think he's gotten bolder and bolder. That's right. Yeah. Boulder, Colorado. So I went to see you and met Leonard whitewater kayaking, actually, and, and then I, when I graduated, I, he gave me a job. So I started, I started helping him manage the business. And when was that? 2006? Okay, yeah. So I've been there 17 years now. Wow. And,
and Leonard has, I've learned so much about bikes from him. And, and we've just, we've kind of grown the business together. Because, you know, he's, he's really passionate about bikes, and designing and bike fitting, and just, you know, really, he just really has a knowledge of bikes that I've never seen. Exactly. But, you know, he hired me to kind of help him grow the business. So that's what we've done, you know, and he really, he really opened up to me and to my ideas on how to grow the business. And we've been working on it for that, that amount of time. And we've grown quite a bit so yeah. So of course, he's like, you know, famous for his, you know, a Leonard's about eight foot 10 Nine, I mean, he's, you know, he's tall Leonard. So originally, like, like, Xin bikes are really famous for tall people, because nobody was building bikes, like over, you know, especially rode bikes, like over 62, right? I mean, it's all custom, custom custom. And winner was a guy who can only build a bike but understand a bike that was built for a tall rider, you know, so it was like a specialty. But since then zinzino gone beyond just building bikes for tall people. And now especially with E bikes, what how did that kind of change come with in terms of Leonard I mean, we know about you know, what, how he got into it, but it's like for him personally, bike builder, what does it mean to be doing e bikes now? Well, you know, the,
you know, he needed to start riding an E bike because of his heart, which a lot of people know about. And that, of course, prompted a lot of our past customers who had bought bikes years ago, as they were getting older, they decided they wanted to you bikes, too. So we started making a lot of custom e bikes. But we what we what we want is an E bike
that feels like your regular bike. Yeah, like feels like a really nice road bike, or a gravel bike or a mountain bike, but has the motor so it almost just makes you feel like you're more powerful. Not not Yeah, it doesn't, it almost doesn't feel like you're riding and ebike. And we try to keep keep the aesthetics to where it still looks light and fast and nimble. And not have like huge, huge big down tubes to hide the battery. Like we actually we actually like the way it looks better with the battery on the down to because overall the frame looks like a normal bike frame. So the idea of having an E bike

[@bikernaut1]

Too expensive

[@w.patterson4413]

Certainly not cheap. I bought my first Zinn, a Custom, in 2003. Over the 20 years, it's amortized to about $250/year.
And I just sent off a check for a new Clydesdale eBike. I'd be happy to pay $250/year for it but I doubt Nick would go for that.

[@bikernaut1]

@@w.patterson4413 here in Croatia one company makes custom titanium gravel or road frames for 900€