Goooood Evening SuperForest!
Yes! Already, again, it is Tuesday – and that means it is time for a contribution from me on bike power! Now, life – being the glorious unpredictable maelstrom it is, I don’t have sufficient progress on my own pedal-powered project to report, so this Tuesday, having listened to BBC Radio 4′s In Business programme on cycling this week, I’d like to focus on bikes and their possibilities with the old bamboo!
aaaaaaaaaaaany excuse for some Dick Van Dyke
Yes, Bamboo, that wondrous, fast-growing grass! We’re familiar here on SuperForest with bamboo’s versatile applications, from Simon Velez’s architecture on a grand scale and Zero One’s in Ain’t It Grander! scale, to toothbrushes, chairs and even SuperForester April’s bamboo train …
BAMBOO! who could resist that bamboo, and that smile?! courtesy of SuperForest on Flickr ;)
…but what about bicycles?
Craig Calfee’s Calfee Design bamboo bike
Bamboo is such a natural material for building bikes: it’s sustainable, workable, light, strong, cheap AND make for a comfortable ride. What’s not to love?
A great bicycle frame must be rigid enough to optimize the power you put into each pedal stroke, yet flexible enough to absorb the bumps, divots and vibrations of the road. Inside every bamboo plant, stronger-than-steel “power fibers” run through a matrix of flexible, foamy tissue. This unique combination, what we call “nature’s composite,” is strong enough to support plants that grow up to a hundred feet tall, but supple enough to survive hurricane winds. Bamboo is naturally hollow, lightweight and sturdy— when it comes to the rigorous and varied demands of cycling, no other material matches the versatility of bamboo.
In bamboo we have a material, “the strength and lightness of the plant made it a great substitute for metal. As a bonus it had excellent vibration-dampening properties, making it comfortable for riding over long distances.” Did you know that bamboo has greater tensile strength than steel?!
Bamboo bikes can also form a key part of assisting everyday transport in the developing world – where terrain is sometimes rough and the most common bikes are ill-suited steel-framed imports. There are some well established social business initiatives on this front, including Zambikes (who’ve produced various vehicles, from cargo bikes to their zambulance) and Craig Calfee’s Bamboosero – both of which are working to develop local bike production industries in Zambia and Ghana – enabling indivivuals and communities not just to use bamboo bikes, but also to build and make a living from selling them.
The Bamboo Bike Project, based at New York’s Columbia University, and working with the Columbia University Earth Institute, has the same aims, but larger – “to harness the possibility and promise of self-propulsion, reaching out from New York City to developing nations around the world, beginning with Ghana and Kenya in Africa” – why not a full bike industry? KPMG have conducted a feasibility study and it is apparently quite doable:
“Thus far, our work has shown that bamboo bikes offer a number of advantages over the imported metal bikes currently used in sub-Saharan Africa. Manufacturing bamboo bike frames requires less electricity and expensive infrastructure, and the final product is lighter, stronger and is better suited for travel on the unpaved roads often found in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. They can also be easily modified for different manufacturer or user needs, such as carrying loads or passengers. Most importantly, the bikes are very affordable. “
And the Bamboo Bike Studio, in Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY, and in partnership with the Bamboo Bike Project, offers weekend workshops to learn to make your own! As they say “each bike-building course extends beyond the walls of the Studio, generating the engineering, teaching, and funding capital needed to establish scalable bamboo bike factories in developing countries worldwide”.
and they look pretty cool too!
Love!
P
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