Then, a hypothetical: If I can find a way to get pictures online, I will do it.
Finally, the good news: Today was the first day of the Yamaguchi Bicycle Framebuilding School!
After a long bus ride last night and a warm welcome at what will be my humble abode for the next two weeks, I had somewhat restless of a night between my nerves and the comings and goings of my new roommates. Perhaps indicative of my anxieties, waking early enough for the 45 minute bus ride to the Yamaguchis' house was no problem, and the caffeine and the morning chill didn't hurt my accelerated wake-up. Several small towns break up the mountainous scenery as one descends (or ascends?) into Rifle. There seemingly isn't a whole lot going on out here: tourism, railroads and shipping, maybe some mining, and, of course, custom bicycle frame fabrication.
The class consists of at most three students per two week session. My fellow classmates had bicycled from their hotel to the workshop, and immediately I considered that perhaps I'd chosen the wrong place to stay: out of bicycling range. We were all introduced to one another by our contact person from Yamaguchi, Barb, at the front steps of the Yamaguchi house, and welcomed inside. From what I saw, the incredible house is part museum, part storage unit, and part domicile. Its walls and patios, stairwells and ceilings are lined with bits of Yamaguchi bicycles history. Track, Olympic time trail, national team road, urban fixies, single-speed cyclocross, classic Italian, eccentric Japanese, vintage American, and more than one's fair share of Dutch-style heavy cruisers and Schwinn Stingray frames and complete bikes filled the spaces not cleared for passage between rooms. And I had been thinking that I owned too many bicycles...
Koichi toured us around the house, then led us into the workplace that we will come to know very well. The room smelled of grease and steel and rubber and compressed air; there were bikes on the walls and in the rafters, with fragments chaotically organized to demonstrate the how-not-tos of frame building; tools and materials were carefully tucked away in their appropriate places; a coffee machine and microwave stood at the ready. Clearly, this space was meant for bicycle people.
We meandered through Koichi's story of bicycles, bicycling, metal, national teams, other builders, and the nature of perhaps a small part of the bicycle industry. His knowledge and experience are incredibly comprehensive, and I feel that I will be digesting what I can of it slowly over the next few days. Clearly, he and his contemporaries have been influenced by and/or become bicycle icons: Yamaguchi, Nagasawa, Konno, Makino, de Rosa, Colnago, and Armstrong to name a few. It is a lot to process, though, while also trying to understand how our work as students fits in. (One of Yamaguchi's relatively recent students has won multiple awards from the North American Handmade Bicycle Show. Will his name be on that list someday, too? Will one of ours?)
After lunch, we began putting our ideas on paper. The type of bicycle we would build, its intended use, and the aesthetic we had in mind had to be reconciled with the way our bodies are shaped. As soon as we committed to a design, we were measured head to toe, similar to being fit by a professional bicycle fitter. The process is similar, but rather than optimizing an existing bicycle fit scheme we made the bicycle - any bicycle - fit under us. And while there are practical limitations to how our bicycle can and must be designed (lugs have to fit tubes with certain angles, fork rake has to put the front wheel out of your toes' range, we're not building recumbents, etc.), the bicycle came together on Koichi's drafting table based on the rider's body and input. It is incredibly cool to be so intimate to the construction of your bicycle, to see how every little detail plays its role in the proverbial finished product.
Tomorrow we practice cutting, mitering, and building towers of brass. We practice until we're deemed worthy of making a bicycle that doesn't explode. I'm crossing my fingers!
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