The road to Rifle: Attending the Yamaguchi frame building school

In 2011 during the height of my fixed gear/single speed bike interest I stumbled upon some images on the internet of what appeared to be a one on one style frame building program.  The school was in Rifle, Colorado and taught by the legendary frame builder Koichi Yamaguchi.  In time I rolled around the the idea of saving money to attend the not so cheap class at some point.  My interest in hand built (particularly lugged bikes) was super high and I seriously contemplated the thought.  At the time I was riding a Japanese track bike that was just as fun to ride as it was beautiful to look at as I knew that one day I would want to build at least one for myself.  Though I considered the merits and was probably better off then taking the class than I am now, I did not go through with it and moved forward with my many other bike related interests. 

I now fast forward 7 years to the last night of Summer of 18 as I pack my finished frame and fork into the trunk of my friends car before leaving little Rifle Colorado.  It finally, actually, oddly enough happened as I am back in town now reflecting on what passed.  I was unbelievably fortunate enough to have help with this trip from my friend Jim, without which I would not have been able to do.  I learned some amazingly useful skills and techniques, made new friends (Ken/Koichi/Barbra), learned interesting history, went on beautiful rides, had a great roommate/traveling partner and built a bicycle frame.

 The following is a short recollection of my thoughts that pertain more to the actually experience and composition of the school than a log of the steps, days and progress regarding curriculum.  This write up is more about Koichi Yamaguchi as a person, his philosophy and attitudes towards frame building, the bicycle industry, automation, and the experience of learning about these things from a person with such a concise understanding and steeped background of bicycles.

Yamaguchi

 

Koichi, as I would call him him throughout the duration of my trip, is a fairly reserved man.  Generally quiet and  massively down to earth are attributes that anyone would immediately pick up on.  His demeanor is calm, his appearance modest and his tone confident yet humble.  When it comes to bikes the guy has done it all.  A list of his accolades would necessitate a separate tangential blog post that I am not interested in writing, but in short his direct experience spans continents and composes decades.  From spearheading the trajectory of the legendary 3rensho company to designing and building USA Olympic and world champion yielding bikes; Koichi may be the winning-most, still practicing frame builder in the world (someone step in here).  Not that numbers are everything by any means, his track record (pun intended) at 3rensho alone eclipsed 4 thousand frames.  He single highhandedly taught the true temper tubing company how to specially form radical tapered, s-bent tube sets, lays claim to developing the highly used and still revered Serotta fit-bike and has been the secret builder behind custom one-off race bikes displaying decals that misleadingly advertise Huffy, Serotta, Raleigh etc.  After all the racing dust settled Koichi and his partner Barbra relocated to Rifle, Co from Colorado Springs and began teaching the Yamaguchi frame building school in 2008.

Koichi is a very friendly, yet ultra direct and to the point kind of person.  As I would discover during day one, his style of teaching allows students to ask questions that reveal their own varying levels of interest.  Though he of course shares any and all information necessary to moving forward with class and progressing along with the steps involved with frame building, he particularly comes into his own when you start asking questions and dropping hints at things.  The more you show curiosity the more he opens up and begins revealing bits about his past, ideas regarding his approaches to things and the history behind his practice.  He was more than happy to talk about his disenchantment with the UCI (one of cycling's biggest race organizing body's), failures and successes with frame building techniques, love and hate relationship with the industry and overall fondness for the simplicity that is the bicycle.  He never hesitated whatsoever to discuss his reasons for doing things in certain ways, be it traditional or exploratory in nature.  His willingness to elaborate upon request was almost to the determent of the class's forward motion at times; something I am happy to take some credit for perpetuating.

Class

The Yamaguchi frame building school as well as cicycle frame building technique has been heavily documented via forums and tutorial videos to the degree that I don't find it necessary to do any sort of full breakdown of the practices employed in Koichi's curriculum.  Suffice it to say that we thoroughly traversed the full gamut of frame building technique.  What I am interested in talking about with regard to class is the nature of it all.  Hand-everything was the reoccurring theme in our steps along the way.  Often Koichi would go into great depth about how frames fail, what makes the fail and how to avoid such shortcomings by build a strong, lightweight and long lasting bike.  Nearly every aspect of the frame building course was hand done.  Miters were hand filed, blue prints were hand drawn, bronze was hand sanded and all brazing was done by us after practice and instruction.  Koichi's aim was to sufficiently demonstrate before allowing us to practice and make our own mistakes, but of course never at the expense of destroying our bicycle frames or forks.  His emphasis on doing things primarily by hand was not just an iconoclastic approach to building, but a necessary measure in maintaining quality control and keeping things to a one step/one hand at a time basis.  It is mostly for the sake of joy that he still hand cuts and files tubing himself for custom builds.

The Bike

 

When reading about the frame building school you often see that students get right to the chase when it comes to talking about and photographing their freshly built bikes.  Often the bike ends up getting the spotlight from what I have seen other students report on and I very much wanted to break away from that trend.  What I will say about the bike that I wanted to build is that I went for something that would be as versatile and clean looking in those versatile incarnations.  I have a knack for owning few bikes at a time (2/3 usually) and I knew that I would be doing myself a favor by building up a bike that I could run either fully geared, internally geared or single speed.  The trick was trying to do it in a way where the bike looked fairly purpose built in any of the three hypothetical builds.  As part of a throwback to my original desire to go to the school years ago with the intent of building a fixed gear bike, I will be doing a somewhat upright single speed build initially.  Clearance for 38/40c tires, cantilever brake bosses, fully horizontal dropouts (with a derailleur hanger), eyelets for front and rear racks/fenders and 123mm spacing to run either a 120mm Single speed hub or a 126mm road hub with a 6 speed freewheel has this bike setup to be about as versatile as possible.  I tend to change up my bikes a bit and knew going into this that I would inevitably be doing so.

Photo Dump

 

One day before the trip I was given a free phone with an amazing camera on it.  I was super trigger happy and snapped shots wherever I got the opportunity.  Though I did bring my film camera I seldom had time during class to go grab it and set up a composition.  These pictures are a semi-cohesively ordered hand full of photos taken from the beginning of the trip to the end.

Colorado bound in Santa Fe, NM

The Yamaguchi island, VW and all..

Barbra and Jim smiling and talking business in their museum of a house

The 3rd student Ken and Koichi in what would become a familiar sight for the next 2 weeks

A few very rad one-off Guchi bikes: Would love to have a Yamaguchi built ATB!

Many bicycle tubes, but no where near what lives in the basement...

Part of Barbra's cruiser collection

What would inevitably become the mess hall during class lunch

Tools and broken frames

Our morning commute to the house over the Colorado River

The work area that Ken and I would share

Beautiful hand built lugs we would not be making...

Koichi's Vertical jig

A few to be finished bikes:  The far left bike is a traveling bike for Barbra with a personal bike for Koichi to tour on

a beautiful gravel pass that became one of my favorite after school rides. 

The drafting board and lugs

Koichi's computer/music/food/stem zone

Practice brazing "towers"

Frames littered the top space of the work shop

Koichi Showing ken good filing technique

Barbra getting her post card hustle on.  We all bought handfulls

Deltas on a Guchi near the community bathroom

Post miter dry fitting

The boys regular lunch..

Some cool bits on display

This frame came in the mail from paint on the first day of class...

My rear dropouts getting brazed up

Jim getting down to business with stay cuts

Ken climbing a nice hill we found north of town

Kens fastback

My headtube all fluxd

Lugs.. and that clock...

Super zoom on the bits display

Koichi worked briefly as a sports journalist in between bike work

Ken tacking dropouts to seat stays

The fork bender

another beautiful little bit of found dirt

the boss jig

super cool super scale

Koichi's only 3rensho

campagnolo

Head tube reaming and facing

Koichi's personal Cinelli that he used to ride/race in japan

Barbra is a typewriter nerd.. and nerd of all things well made

my frame in final alignment

fork jig inverted for brazing

Jim cruzing in town.  We found out he was the only student to show up on a Yamaguchi built bike

Their beautiful upstairs hangout

Some more windy gravel sections

BB detail

Barbra made us brownies..

Class notes

The night after the final day of class.  From left to right; Tired, beer hungry, contemplative

Gear count fanaticism and the endless quest for 1 more cog

There is no question that our hunt for quick, easy solutions for long term problems has led us down the path we are now traveling today.  Our world is bombarded with an array of "instant fixes" while the word "free" is thrown around left and right in desperate attempts to sell us the idea that one can get something for nothing.  We are told that the stuff in our lives is not good, fast, compatible and chic enough to rationalize continuous usage, repair and love.  So quick we have been in disposing of our new stuffs predecessors in the name of supposed progress that we often forget that there is typically plenty life left in said objects.

 One of the Taylor brothers (a highly revered trio of traditional frame builders from Britain) once said "I don't like progress.  I think as you get older you find that it isn't progress, its only change and it isn't always change for the better.  When your young you accept all the new idea and new designs and you go along with it. As you get older you find they don't stand up and you become very skeptical of progress".  When it comes to drivetrain component this quote would not resonate more with me. 

this is Rotor's 13 gear cassette.  It is going to change the way you ride bikes.. bonus
 points to Rotor for throwing in the hydraulic actuated derailleur

  Always a trade off

 

  With the advent of Sram's 12 speed cassettes hitting the market early in 2016 I watched as people went nuts over the idea of 12 speed, %500 gearing in the package of an 10-50t cluster.  Yes; that's right; a 10 tooth high gear.  "For the love of God; when is enough enough?" I couldn't help but think to myself as bike geeks rushed forward with open arms for this newest tech that would promise amazing shred-inducing riding and newfound climbing abilities.

  For a quick reminder, a 650b x 2.4" tire with a 2x9 speed setup using 22x32t chainrings on a 11-36t cassette gives you an even lower gear than the 32t ring/10-50t cassette 12 speed equivalent.  Was the 9 speed stuff of the early-mid 00's really so unbelievably inadequate that the mountain bike think tanks needed to spent the next 13+ years in r&d concluding that saving a few hundred grams was worth all this trouble.  Of course they did, as do any company predicated on exponential growth/sales models.  And truly a few grams was really the only "gain" here whatsoever as everything else lost points in the big equation.  Narrower sprockets with narrower chain rings wore quicker.  Even more extreme chain lines cause even narrower chains to wear more quickly.  Wheels with far more dish and less bracing angles will have an inherently shorter life expectancy.  None of the the preexisting 11 speed stuff was compatible in terms of indexing, free hub spacing, and derailleur usage.

 The point here being that as we have hunted so much for more and more cheap and easy gearing, we have simultaneously given away more and more of the quality, longevity, interchangeability and overall value that came with the seemingly less proprietary (though still often so) gearing arrangements of yesteryear.  I am not saying that I fundamentally believe that we all needed 11-36t cassettes coupled with 22/32t chain rings using 9 speed chains in the first place as much as I am trying to suggest that maybe we have gone even more full circle with this stuff than ever before.  We are being sold the same technology of the early 00's back to us in an ever so slightly varying package.  Ramped cogs on cassettes still spin on freehubs that still use index shifting while still offering an incredibly wide gearing spectrum.  And yet here we are drooling over the idea of buying/building brand new wheels to support the new freehub that supports the new cassette/chain/chainring/derailleur that gets shifted with the new shifter; all in the name of maybe a few hundred grams saved and an incrementally quicker shift if at all.

here we have srams patented "pivoting chainring".  This is basically Sram coming out with a public acknowledgement that running a cigarette-paper thin chain at a ludicrous angles is inherently exacerbating the detrimental effects that already existed in your previous 1x11 generation drivetrain.  Yet again throwing more unnecessary technology at a solution to a problem that maybe shouldn't have existed in the first place?

Why we buy it

 As I write this post I have a Sram GX eagle group sitting in the JBI shopping cart for the small bike repair I work at (by request of customer of course).  This is the absolute bottom end version that sells at an msrp of $550 for a crankset/bottom bracket/chainring, cassette, chain and shifter.  For perspective the top end Sram Eagle xx1 equivelent sells for $1,500.  As I will quite likely be the one installing this bit of kit on said person's bike I will inevitably be going through the motions in my head as to weather or not the "upgrade" will bring new bliss inducing gearing to this rider's experience.  For that kind of money spent on replacing already well working parts I would absolutely hope for a truly game changing product.  

The bike industry and its tech-infatuated love of progress will constantly have the susceptible ready to pounce on the latest upgrade as it tightens it's jaws of influence.  We are told we will "climb more efficiently", "descent quicker", "shift faster" and "shed grams" all in the process.  We are spoon fed this stuff as we gobble down the baby food mush of the bike industries blended up and recycled/rebranded ideas/tech.  We want easy and free solutions to inherent issues of both biking and life.  We want to float up hills without exerting energy.  We want effortless sprints.  We want bikes that weigh nothing as every effort we make is measured by our peers on Strava.  No longer are we riding just to ride for fun.  We have been so effectively sold the idea that cycling is a quantitative above qualitative experience that we cringe at the thought of wasted effort.   

The fact remains that at some point if we want to pedal up a hill we have to do just that; pedal.  No matter how much money and technology you throw at the act of turning crank arms with your legs, it takes a frighteningly similar amount of energy to get up that hill with or without the newest buzz-improvement in between your legs.

Getting burnt on the bike world

There comes a point with anything where you reach a plateau of sorts in your work.  You learn, experiment, help others, and in more ways than not give much of what you have to your craft.  You get real world experience, discover truths and disinformation through trial and error as well as having a plethora of humbling experiences along the way.  Sometimes there comes a point where you hit a wall of sorts with it all.  You find that you are lacking motivation to move forward with things for various reasons and begin questioning your place in it all.  I believe that for my own reasons I have as they say in the cycling world, met the man with the hammer.

Fitting in

Iv always struggled to find any sort of identity in the bicycle industry/culture.  Subscribing to ideals that undermine the shop/industry status quo, never fitting the bill of either a road or mountain cyclist, lacking the finances and desire for high end bikes and all the kit to go along with it has put me in a somewhat queer box of sorts.  In March of 2016 I wrote a blog post called  "Not a roadie, not a mountain biker, just a cyclist" in which I spelled out the various conflicting states of trying to fit into a particular genre or sub-genre of cyclist.  As it was for me two and a half years ago it still stands; the less I make attempts to conform to the varying, heavily marketed, often alienating and divisive cycling images that dominate the pages of magazines, the advert side bars of blogs and and the subtle product placement in various forms of media, the less I worry about who wants to ride with me, how I am perceived by them and and weather or not I will fit into the aforementioned boxes.

Now, far more than ever I am less and less interested in paying attention to market trends, being immersed in the growth-at-all-costs cycling industry, painting myself as a "serious" cyclists and being victim to the "more upgrades" mentality that dictates the discussions, lifestyles and attitudes of all too many cyclists.  It is for these same reasons that I tend to ride with other like minded people who are capable of breaking away from these confining molds while enjoying the lovely freedom that a bicycle ride, stripped away of all the racy/tech forward jargon and thinking patterns, can truly offer.

Myself explaining how sketchy but fun our ride was as I underbiked on my old mtb:  Photo - Cass Gilbert

The past and the present

 My work with bicycles has come and gone in a variety of ways.  I started getting into bike stuff by building myself single speed and fixed gear bikes, then for friends and neighbors, creating and maintained a bike related blog (still but less often), working a small side repair gig of my own, eventually becoming a mechanic by trade (now with a different shop) and being hired by the city as a bike mechanic/teacher/builder/dissembler/many-things-er (still).  I had and still have many friends and acquaintances in the bike world here in New Mexico with the long story short being that the connections still permeate much of what my day to day life looks like.

With all this having been said, its not the activity of cycling as much as bicycle culture, industry and waste that I am burnt on.  Maintaining a place in these worlds has become increasingly uncomfortable and difficult for me.  Investing energy and time in it all has substantially worn thin as I am less and less interested with many things bike related.  Though I still love to ride, build/repair,  write/read and teach/learn about all-things-bike related; I struggle to find the drive to become more embedded in these often niche and affluent-forward cycling cliques/communities and businesses/institutions.  Though my place in it all may be on the fringes of hip/cool/in, I know I am having fun, helping others, upcycling bikes and making meaningful connections all the while.  The blog has been a huge outlet for me to express and contemplate ideas while forging a deeper sense of identityless identity in this ever changing bike world.

 This is another good opportunity to thank those who have been friendly and supportive of me in my goofy and often off kilter ways of thinking and doing things.  I appreciate so much the friends I have made who embrace me as I come and are comfortable with my lack of fitting the mold.  Thank you all!