Having been away from my home and native land for four months, in my other home and native land, I have been surprisingly disoriented since being back. After looking at a small house project Saturday in the far south west, I came back with the contractor I generally work with when I do such things so he could collect his old Sawsall which I borrowed four years ago to hack out some joists set too high for a floor I was replacing. It was a long story and brute violence was needed to solve it. Anyway, my front room was a mess: half unpacked, stacks of papers everywhere. I bleated 'magazine', 'moving', 'ill', 'too much', etc. and then spent the rest of the afternoon simply clearing my work table. I now have a tidy stack of little notes of ideas. I have similar stacks in each room – neat things I read, or hear on the radio, or think of, fascinating bits of news. What to do with these little notes, each worthy of a dissertation at least. If I work through them here for a bit, I can throw them away. It won't be a series of dissertations, but I can air them and let them go.
This is the danger of misc files: they are brilliant, and unwieldly, and provocative, and oppressive, inducing much guilt that one is not pursuing them, working them out, making connections.
So. Bamboo bikes
First patented in 1894, bamboo frames are lightweight, responsive and quiet. Bamboo is evidently 17% stronger than steel in certain directions. Craig Calfee in Santa Cruz has been producing high-tech bamboo bikes for several years and is the acknowledged expert, although bamboo bikes have long been built in China.
Calfee Bamboo Cargo bike, built in Ghana. The back wheel is bamboo-reinforced and capable of carrying 640 lbs.The straight pieces are heat treated bamboo. Instructables has step-by-step instructions on how to build such a bike: it mortices the bamboo together at the joints and then makes hemp and fibreglas reinforced wrappings around the joints. Better pictures are here.
The other way to join the pieces is to use carbon fibre, steel or other metal pre-formed lugs into which the bamboo poles fit. Otherwise, one needs all the rest of the parts: chain, wheels and brakes recycled from ordinary bikes. The front fork is often metal it seems, rather than bamboo: something to do with stability.
The Bamboo Bike Project in Ghana, Kenya and other African countries was started by several people in different research units at the Earth Institute, Columbia University. BBP is setting up bamboo bike production in local workshops, with local bamboo, that are sturdier than metal bikes and more suited to carrying loads over rough roads.
There are, of course, obsessives who are working to make everything out of bamboo as a kind of pure design exercise. Flavio Deslandes is a Brasilian industrial designer living in Denmark. His bike uses a back brake which is much more elegant than all those cables. Evidently there is much research into bamboo spokes, but couldn't find any pics except for the bamboo reinforcing on the cargo bike above.
Flavio Deslandes. Bambucicleta. Rio de JaneiroIt's all quite exciting, and there are pages of websites, so it must be quite a common project. I just hadn't heard of it.