Clydesdale Bicycles was started in 2017 by Lennard Zinn and Nick Wigston with the mission of making great affordable bikes for big and tall guys everywhere. Lennard and Nick have worked together at Zinn Cycles since 2006, and have made it their mission to make cycling more available to everyone, including those who have a hard time finding a bike that fits and won’t break. Zinn Cycles specializes in extremely high-quality and fully custom bikes for all sizes of people, from the very short to the extremely tall. They started Clydesdale Bicycles to offer a great quality, great fitting, and durable titanium bicycle for the big and tall market at a more affordable price than a custom bike. The goal of this great new brand is to continue to add more types of bikes to the lineup each year until we have every type of bike big and tall guys want to ride. So keep an eye on our website, join our newsletter, follow us on social media, and email us anytime you want to keep up to date on what we have to offer. We have some great bikes in store for the future!

Lennard Zinn has been designing and building great bikes of all types for big and tall cyclists since 1982 at Zinn Cycles. He is one of the few bike designers in the world that has dedicated his career to improving the performance and durability of big and tall bikes. There are many more factors to building a big and tall bike than most people understand. It is not as simple as just scaling up a “normal” sized frame and calling it good. When you do that, several things happen to the bike. First, the stretched out tubes become less stiff, which results in high speed frame shimmy. This is a scary by-product of a poorly designed bike. Second, the added material makes the bike heavier, especially if the builder tries to solve problem number one with just using bigger heavier tubes. Third, without a fork with a long enough steering tube, the handlebars will be far too low for the tall cyclist causing discomfort in the back, neck, wrists, and arms. Fourth, building a bike for a tall rider with average length cranks will make the rider feel like he’s pedaling a kids bike while sitting up very high. Lennard has developed great frame design concepts to address and solve all of these issues and more. A bike designed by Lennard Zinn will be stiff and strong, while remaining lightweight. It will never shimmy at high speeds, and all of the components will be proportional to the rider. Fit, performance, comfort, and durability will all be superior on a Lennard Zinn designed bike than a big and tall bike from any other designer out there. We guarantee it.

Titanium is half the weight of steel, so we can build bikes for big and tall guys with larger diameter tubing with a frame still lighter than steel. Larger diameter tubing provides greater strength and stiffness for greater power transfer, yet still with amazing compliance for a comfortable ride that doesn’t beat up your body over a long trek.

Titanium has enough strength and fatigue resistance to avoid the need for extremely oversized tubes, providing a compliant ride on rough surfaces that smooths out and absorbs road buzz and small bumps. Steel frames, with their smaller tubes, can be almost as compliant, but aren’t quite as comfortable.

Titanium can never corrode, unlike other metals. It can be painted or – unlike steel or aluminum – can be left without paint, powdercoat or plating, so you never need to worry about scratches. Internal cable routing is simple because the insides of the tubes are naturally impervious to rust and corrosion. Unlike aluminum, titanium has a fatigue limit, so as long as the tubing is not stressed beyond this limit or damaged, it will never fatigue. Titanium can also flex three times further than aluminum and twice as far as steel without permanent damage. Carbon fiber is very vulnerable to crash and notch damage, after which it may fail catastrophically. The epoxy matrix also degrades over the years with exposure to the UV in sunlight. A titanium frame can literally last the rest of your life, and longer.