Build Your Own Bamboo Bicycle? You Better Believe It

Sunday’s Weekend Edition included a story about Bamboo Bike Studio , three lads in Brooklyn who create…you guessed it, bamboo bicycles. How? Well…”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.

Thankfully, those three fellows are not the only folks doing this sort of thing. Bamboo, the eternally evident superstar material of the aughts, maintains special properties that allow it to be heat treated with fiberglass or natural hemp fiber, which carmelizes the sugars in the bamboo and bonds the fibers… at home! Who knew?

All kinds of folks at Instructables know, apparently, and they’ve been building bicycles from treated bamboo left and right. Most recently XMan created this design, but he references inspiration “by Brano Meres’ excellent Instructable, ayasbek’s Instructable, and, of course, Craig Calfee’s bikes.”

Listen more at NPR.