CARBONDALE — Koichi Yamaguchi studies his adversary from a crouch, searching for weakness and pinpointing flaws with the deft precision of a samurai.
Moving with a nimble dexterity that belies his 50 years, he easily demonstrates his mastery over the task at hand, hovering across the room to confront the next challenge with a stoic sense of purpose.
Yamaguchi, though, is not a samurai, and he wields no killer’s katana. Rather, his tools of preference are the infinitely more pedestrian file, hacksaw and acetylene torch. His purpose is to build, not destroy.
“He’s just a natural teacher,” said Elliott Norquist, whose son, Fred, studied under Yamaguchi last year. “It’s so rare for a master at his craft to be such a good teacher.”
Those who can’t do, as the denigration goes, teach. The master, apparently, does both.
Yamaguchi, a native of Japan now living in Rifle, is a master bicycle framebuilder, a title bestowed upon him after a lengthy apprenticeship and four-year stint crafting race bikes for Japan’s 3 Rensho company before moving to America in 1986 and starting a company of his own (Yamaguchibike.com). Specializing in road and track racing bikes, his credentials were bolstered upon landing in the States, where he began working as national team mechanic for the U.S. Cycling Federation in 1988, and became the lone official framebuilder of the U.S. Olympic Cycling Team heading into the 1992 Games.
During that period he designed custom frames for such notable riders as Lance Armstrong, Bobby Julich, Jeanne Golay and a young George Hincapie. According to Yamaguchi, his independently produced designs also had a big influence at the world championships in 1992, when Mike McCarthy, riding a radical custom Yamaguchi Pursuit frame, easily defeated Shaun Wallace and his futuristic “funny” bicycle built in secret by Britain’s Lotus Engineering.
“Lance was my guinea pig,” said Yamaguchi, adding that he continued to field requests for frame geometry from Armstrong’s team for years. “We grew up together.”
Now that he has grown, Yamaguchi is sharing the secrets of his success. Twice a year he conducts custom framebuilding courses for those interested in learning the melding of art and science that goes into building a bike by hand. And once a year for the past two years he has loaned his expertise to a handful of students at the Carbondale-based Colorado Rocky Mountain School (CRMS) during their eight-day interim project.
“Someone donated a bicycle jig to the school a few years ago,” said Darryl Fuller, a biology teacher and director of the school’s outdoor program. “I was very interested in learning how to build bicycles, but very quickly realized that I knew absolutely nothing about it. . . . Koichi has been building bikes for over 30 years.”
Tradition in new way
In that sense, student and master share a common bond. Although the CRMS bike-building program is only in its second year, the interim project at the 50-year-old school has been around for decades, teaching practical applications of academic theory such as geometry outside of a traditional classroom environment.
“We have a bike shop here on campus used for tuning bikes and refurbishing and repairing CRMS community bicycles. Kids are required to do two days a week on work crew, and they can sign up for bike shop work crew if they like,” Fuller said. “When this jig got donated to the bike program, it was the next logical step to think about what else we could do. CRMS has a long history of kind of doing things for itself, so why not figure out how to build bicycles? Some of the first fiberglass skis were built in an interim here 30 years ago. The school used to build its own kayaks when fiberglass was the material of choice to build kayaks. This seemed like a good fit for the school.”
Unusual mix works
The yin-yang fit of CRMS’s somewhat atypical academic approach and Yamaguchi’s traditional building philosophy appears to be a suitable melding indeed. To say that Yamaguchi wrote the book on custom framebuilding is a bit of a stretch. But he did write one he supplies to students that captures his intense passion for the sensible artistry of a hand-crafted machine.
“Still, I am kind of old school,” Yamaguchi confesses in a thick Japanese accent. “I like to see people learn what it takes to build something by your own hand. A bicycle is good because you can build it by hand, but outside of that, you can ride it also. I still remember the first time I built a bike and the first time riding it. It was very mixed feelings. I was very excited, but mixed also with a kind of scary feeling. They can keep that memory in their life forever.”
For their part, the students look forward to that moment.
“I just thought it would be really cool to build my own bike and be able to ride it around,” CRMS sophomore Jonas Jonetzki said. “I wanted to buy a new bike anyway, because my bike broke. When I heard that I had the opportunity to build one, I thought that would be pretty cool.”
The seven students participating in the program also are appreciative of the craftsmanship Yamaguchi brings to the process, enabling them to complete the traditional 10-day process of building cross country mountain bikes or BMX-style dirt jumpers in just over a week.
“Building it is something I’m into. This is the stuff I like to do,” said John Adams, 17, adding that he intends to race on his new mountain bike after it’s completed this spring. “Koichi is pretty impressive. He’s helped me out and done stuff in 10 minutes that would take me an hour-and-a-half.”
Ever the humble master, Yamaguchi says the students deserve all the credit.
“It’s a good class. They are motivated, excited. They learn fast,” he said. “One student told me, ‘I woke up at 6 in the morning, excited to build the frame.’ I was like, ‘Wow!’ I was actually surprised. I expected the young people to be more into the computer games, like my son. But they are working hard, actually.”
Scott Willoughby: 303-954-1993 or swilloughby@denverpost.com
