The Bamboo Bicycle

Photo by Joe Zorilla

It may not be the season in most places in the country, but cycling is another great way to act environmentally friendly.  Riding a bike instead of using a car whenever possible is a great way to curb emissions, lessen pollution, and save money.  Some folks, however, have gone a step further and created a bike that is itself eco-friendly.

Jon Kalish has written a very interesting story for NPR online.  Here is his article about the bamboo bicycle:

The Bamboo Bike Studio is
run by three men in their late 20s who know a lot about bamboo and a
lot about bicycles. On a cool autumn morning, two of them are out on a
bamboo harvest — in a dense grove near New Brunswick, N.J.

Justin
Aguinaldo and Sean Murray carry a small Japanese pull saw and a caliper
to find bamboo stems that are 1 1/2 inches thick. When they find stems
that are just right, they tap the bamboo to make sure it’s not too
soft: “If the bamboo’s too watery, it’s not as dense and it’s not as
strong,” Aguinaldo explains.

Aguinaldo makes his living as a
bicycle messenger. Sean Murray is a former schoolteacher whose voice
mail greeting makes note of the fact that he is now living the dream of
making bikes with his friends.

Murray says he finds bamboo
patches by reading online gardening forums. He says a lot of people
start growing bamboo as a decorative plant — but then it gets out of
hand.

“There’s a kind of urgency brought on by the protests of their neighbors,” Murray says.

The
two bamboo bike makers cut the green bamboo stems in 3-foot and 5-foot
lengths and fill the trunk of their small sedan before heading back to
their bike studio in Brooklyn.

‘My Bike Is My Favorite Object Now’

Back
at the bike studio, the bamboo’s outer skin is treated with a torch,
and the stems are baked in a homemade oven. The brown stems are then
fastened into frames by connecting them with a sawdust and resin
mixture. The joints are wrapped with a thin, ribbon-like carbon fabric
that soaks up epoxy. After the epoxy dries, the bike’s joints look like
they’ve been wrapped with black electrical tape.

On a recent
weekend, Sari Harris — a self-described “tinkerer” — spent close to
$1,000 to make her own bamboo bike. For that fee, she got the bamboo
frame and all of the components she needed to make a multi-gear or
single-speed bike — and a bamboo bike expert to guide her through the
assembly process.

Harris is an information architect who was
overdue for a bike upgrade — she’d had her old bike for more than 20
years. Harris designs interfaces for mobile phone apps — but she admits
she’s a little less savvy with bike maintenance (“I can change a tire
and that’s it,” she says.) Learning the mechanics and components of her
bike really appealed to Harris, and she says she now plans to do her
own tuneups.

Engineer Marty Odlin was supervising Harris’ work.
Odlin estimates that there are now close to 80 bamboo bikes on the road
that were built in his Brooklyn studio.

“Everyone who leaves the
studio says, ‘Wow, my bike is my favorite object now.’ ” Odlin says.
“They have such a connection to this thing that came together under
their own hands. They may not come here to have that connection to
their bicycle, but that’s what they leave with.”

‘Something With More Enduring Value’

The
Bamboo Bike Studio has drawn amateur bike builders from as far away as
California and England. Alexis Mills, a bicycle messenger in Ottawa,
and his 61-year-old mother, a doctor, came and made bikes.

Back in Canada, Mills quickly found that people who ride around on bamboo bikes get a lot of questions about their wheels.

“The
ride itself is really smooth,” Mills says. “It eats up a lot of the
vibrations of the road. I wondered if it might be too flexible or too
mushy, but it’s not. It’s really nice to ride.”

Interest in
bamboo bikes is growing. A company in Colorado says it will start
shipping bamboo bikes in the spring that cost as much as $1,300. But
Marty Odlin says the bamboo bike makers here in Brooklyn believe in
doing things a different way.

“There is a concern that bamboo
bikes become this fad,” he explains. “And we could sell a whole bunch
of them for a whole lot of money to a whole bunch of people very
quickly and then nothing after that, right? It becomes a fad and dies
out. We feel like we’re building something with more enduring value
than that.”

The bikes themselves really last; Odlin and his two
partners have all ridden thousands of miles on New York City streets on
their bamboo frames. And whether it’s a fad or not, the bamboo
bike-making classes are filled until April.

Amarcusa | My Bio & Articles