Hello, I am Augustine in Capine, master frame builder and this is the…
Hello, I am Augustine in Capine, master frame builder and this is the Goldman cycling podcast. That was legendary frame builder Augustine Hincapi. Today we're going to talk about one of the world's greatest frame builders. Let's cue that intro! The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, for happiness and our long chances. That's the question on this podcast, and give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh, and welcome to the Row Man Podcast. Roman welcome back if your Spanish isn't too hot that was Augustine Hincapi one of the best frame builders in the world and he was basically saying that he's been building frames since the 1970s that each frame is built by hand and it's unique to the specifications of the individual and all frames are built in his workshop in Medellin, Colombia. Visiting the workshop of Augustaine Hincapie, it was actually it mirrored my experience true a lot of Colombia. When you get into a plane and you head to Girona, you head to Italy, it's like getting into a plane. When you get into a plane and you're heading to Colombia, it's like you're getting into a time machine. You're going to a different planet. Everything is different socially, culturally, economically, politically, the landscape is just undescribable beauty. And that's what I felt about going into Mr Hinkapi's workshop. You've never been to anywhere like this in Ireland. It was truly like stepping back through time and getting to meet, you know, like Enzo Ferrari or Ernesto Conago, like getting to meet one of the true engineers, pioneers, something that we love. And it was just breathtaking. Before I jump into all of it, I want to remind you of how I'm able to get content like this and all the other contents in the Roadman podcast out. It's true user donations. You have your Jeff Bezos over at Amazon, you have your Netflix founders and they've thousands and millions of monthly recording customers paying them 12, 15 euro a month. We don't have that luxury here. The price of a point of beer once a month keeps this podcast on the road. But unlike Mr Bezos and all those founders who don't care when they get your extra 12 year old month, when you buy me that price for a point to bear, honestly, like my face lights up. Anytime I get that ding and the phone going ding, it just means that we're building something so special here. We're building our own little tribe, our own little community, our own little corner, the internet. And I thank you from the butt moment my heart for supporting that. So if you'd like to support it, head on over to patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore waltz and just five euro the price of a beer once a month that's going to get you access to the secret podcast and it's going to keep supporting this podcast doing what we're doing so if you're sitting on the fence i'd highly encourage you to head on over there okay so augustine hinkapi it was such a truly humbling experience getting to see this man's workshop it's you know if you look at my instagram the instagram handle is roadman.soicling if you you go over there, you'll see some pictures from inside the workshop and the pictures are just crazy. And the closest thing I could identify with it is back when I was in primary skill. My dad was in the army working Collins Barracks and McKee Barracks for his entire life, but as a nixer on the side to pay the bills and buy me football boots, he always built bikes. So from the earliest age, I can remember from four or five years old, I was always helping my dad in the workshop and it was a big share at the end of our garden and we had hundreds of bike frames hanging around and I'd be there lays into the noise and someday it's missing school if we were putting the finishing touches to a bike it might be helping spray it, put parts together. And it was a real old school workshop and we stopped doing this probably when I left primary school and my dad went on to other little business ventures on the side. But I had such fond memories of that and stepping back into Augustine Hinckapies, that's what I felt.
It's an old school bike shop and it has an old school flavour
It's an old school bike shop and it has an old school flavour. And he's been building bike frames since I think 1976. So to talk about experiencing, it just makes me, he's a man who's in prime health and he's already beat cancer. But he's also a man in his 60s and it just breaks my heart that in 20, 30, 40 years, whatever, we're going to lose a talent like this at some point because He's truly irreplaceable and his story is actually brilliant because There are greatest innovations I find something sometimes come from necessity and that's how he started building frames It was to earn extra cash to feed his family. He was completely self-taught He had to get textbooks in English and translate them with the dictionary word for word And I can tell you as a man who lived in France trying to learn the language without the luxury of the internet and I buy Lequis Beach Day and try and translate word for word, this is a time consuming process. So to translate technical engineering books and frame building books from English into Spanish, when you don't speak any English, it's a super, super difficult and time consuming task. But he wanted to do this to feed his family, but initially he was, I suppose, he wouldn't mind me describing him as a back-at-a-bunch professional and he wanted to build this force bike to give himself a performance edge and the bike turned out brilliant. I don't know if I gave him the performance edge he was hoping because he had quite a short lived pro career but the bike caught attention straight away and immediately friends started asking would he be able to make a bike for them? Would he make a bike for the next friend? Would he make a bike for a friend for a friend? And I kind of started there but he knew nothing about basic bike geometry so he learned about bike geometry by measuring cool bikes that he seen coming into the country So if someone was racing and they had a cool bike, they'd literally pull out the measuring tape and this is how he started to figure out stuff about geometry, rake. It's breathtaking. Right now he's building bikes from Steel. The steel of choice is Reynolds and Columbus tubing for us or a steel bike aficionados. He's churned out thousands of frames out of this boy shop, but each one of those frames, it's not like getting your canyon or your trick. It's custom, it's totally unique to your demands. You measure all parts of your body from your reach to your torso, your inseam, your entire body is measured. And it's built exactly around you. It's perfect for you. There's no like, oh, the boy doesn't fit me too well, it's perfect for you. And also because he's such a student of geometry now, the bike is perfect for your riding style. So there's a more aggressive style for a racer than there is for a torrid and there is for a sporty guy. So the bike is totally yours and this is why I'm just blown away by it. The whole process, it's just, I love the romantic side of cycling and you know, I'm gonna get in and we might do another podcast about Columbia's coffee region. And some of the coffee there because I brought home a few bags and it's beautiful and there's a real romanticism around that which I feel parallels the cycling but cycling is such a beautiful romantic sport and we all grew up here in tales of you know, Gino Bartole, Fausto copy, Marco Pantani, these great, you know, flamboyant exotic foreign stars and that aura of romance and mysticism is just one of the beautiful parts of our sport And there's nobody I can think embodies that romance more than Augustine, Hin Capy. His workshop, his tools are a mixture of new tools that he's acquired in the last few years, all tools that he's gathered through his career, and then custom tools. We've all been doing a job and we talk to ourselves, oh, this tool isn't quite right. That tool isn't quite right. But we may do. this genius visionary, he makes tools for himself to fit the job. So for example, a bike rack, it's pretty much up down left right, but he's made a bike rack that moves in a thousand different directions.
He's made tools for bending tools for foiling tools for sanding
He's made tools for bending tools for foiling tools for sanding. It's just absolutely incredible. I can't hammer home this romance and mysticism around it. The The bikes are totally handmade, hand-paint jobs, custom welded, and just the measuring table that he has alone, like how many measuring data points to make sure the frame is straight and tracks perfect. It just takes measurement after measurement after measurement and if something's not perfect, he bends it, he twists it, he foils it. There's about 50, 50, hand-hours of his attention goes into each and every bike. I don't know what else to say about it, but it was just such a crazy humbling experience and to think that I don't even know if we can call them a bike maker or a mechanic. The man is an artist and to think that we still have an artist among us like this of of this class and this quality is amazing. And I'm just, I was really privileged to be in the company, as an artist for a couple of errors. And he gave me time and he gave me the tour of the workshop and such a beautiful, humble man. And he was sort of joking with me saying, like there's about 50 hours of bike, of labor goes into one of these bikes. So I was saying roughly a week and a bit. And he was joking saying, you know, it's actually more like 200-bit weeks because people like me keep dropping in and are intrigued by his workshop and he has to stop and have coffee and show them around and show them the welding torches and absolutely amazing. If you get a chance to go to Medellin, which I highly recommend because it's, I think in the next decade, Medellin is going to become the home recycling. If you could design scale electric style at perfect location for cycling, Medellin is very, very close to it and as the infrastructure around there develops more bike shops, more awareness on the road. The small little problems that I have at the moment are going to be paper over and it will become the ultimate cycling destination in my opinion. But if you get a chance to go there before this man Augustine Hinckapi retires, I highly, highly encourage you to do it. I'm going to leave a link to his Instagram in the comments down below. Go check it out and if you're looking for the dream bike, the perfect bike for the romantic among us, I'd highly encourage you to go and check that out. This is not in any way a paid endorsement or I'm just a massive fan of the sport and fan of the romance of the sport and nobody embodies that better than this man. Row man, thank you for listening to my romantic musings. I'm gonna chat to you again tomorrow. Before you go anywhere, our first ever Row Man Summit had aired back in December. I brought together 30 experts and they shared with me their secrets on how to biohack your physiology, how to melt away body fat and smash your cycling goals, whatever that was. Since airing that back in December, I've just been in on days of my Instagram DMs, Twitter direct messages with requests to get access to this material. I hadn't locked up in the vault, but I've decided to open access to this material for you, the podcast listeners at the Roadman podcast. So to get access to this, it's a one-point payment of €47 and you're going to have all the interviews, all those secrets forever. You're going to have the videos and the MP-Trees. In there, I've got interviews, world-tore mechanics, nutritionists, sports psychologists, bike-fit experts, and some of the legends at a sport like Tyler Hamilton and Pete Sten. Over 30 hours of content in this members area that I've created for you guys. So if you want to get access to that way to do it, it's to head on over to this URL www.roadmansomit.com forward slash 2021. I'll give you that again. It's www.roadmansomit.com forward slash 2021. That's numerical. The link to that is in the bio. Get it, check it out, learn it, take it in, because this is sure to set you on the right past for 2021.