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Bamboo Bike A Reality
markjugg writes "The American Bamboo Society has a page describing a working bamboo bike. This is a strong step towards making bicycling more sustainable, expecially in contrast to aluminum, one of the most resource demanding materials that exist."
Before you say that bamboo is weak and easily dismembered, here's a quote from the article:
But Flavio makes me see things differently: Bamboo is a resource of immense potential. And it is strong too. What makes it possible to build bicycles from it is that it is stronger than steel when strained in the longitudinal direction, 17% to be exact.
The main point of the article, of course, is that bamboo is much more environmentally friendly than metals while being extraordinarily plentiful.
i've seen this before on a show called gilligans island...
fact: microsoft > linux
Does any one see a set of brakes on this thing?
Yes, I know that some bikes have the brake mechanism in the hub of the rear wheel, but that doesn't appear in the photo either.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
This would work fine, except that pandas eat bamboo. Better not get into a forest with that bike.
They're probably just trying to bamboozle us...
Is the poster serious ?
r ustmaterials.html
Aluminum makes up 8 percent of the crust of this damn planet. http://www.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/geog140/lectures/c
expecially in contrast to aluminum, one of the most resource demanding materials that exist.
That's funny. Aluminum is indeed expensive to extract and process and that's why it's also the most recycled mineral(?) in existence.
This is all good until someone gets attacked by a Panda. Yet another version of "meals on wheels!"
Next week we can all read about the follow up stories from the America Plastic Association, the American Balsa Wood Collective, and the Society for the Reuse of Aluminum Foil...
Davak
Bicycling more "sustainable"? Haven't the environmentalists been trying to get us all to change to bicycles from cars supposedly because of the pollution that cars generate? And now not even bicycles are "sustainable" because they are "resource intensive"?
When does it end? Should I just stop using resources altogether (i.e. die?)
I won't post this anonymously precisely because I mean this quite seriously and not as a troll. Mod me down if you must.
Justin
I am a bike-geek as well as a Lunix-Geek:
The bike is a single-speed. That means it does not need gears, breaks or even a ratcheted freewheel (on the back wheel)... the pedals are connected directly to the rear wheel by the chain. If you want to slow down you use your legs.
Single-speeds are favourites of city-couriers, where there is a great advantage to have a light-simple bike. There is less to break (XTR gear systems are known to wear out after a few weeks of couriering).
As for Aluminum - dont get me started on that nasty harsh material. There has been a disturbing trend for wannabee bikers to adopt the freakiest lightest materials at the expense of all other properties.
For me, steel still has the edge over all these fancy materials. A steel frame will last for years of hard riding, and still feel as plush as the day it was first ridden.
I do a lot of mountain biking. I know there's some engineers who read /.
There are suspension forks which can be purchased for mountain bikes and some offer read suspension.
Assuming, the metal suspension fork is kept and a decent diameter bamboo tubing is used - would the bamboo have sufficient strength, durability and shock absorbing qualities to make a good mountain bike?
One way or another it would be interesting to try, that's for sure.
so I can escape any rogue pandas.
I wonder if this would me more or less expensive than a traditional bicycle? I usually try not to pay more than $200 (CDN) for a bike, because they always get stolen (even if they're locked up... those bastards).
:)
Since bamboo is so plentiful, I hope this would be uber-cheap. It would be great if I could ride around on a $15 bicycle... I wouldn't really care if it got stolen, but then again, nobody would really want to steal it if they knew how cheap it was...
My Structural engineer friend told me that Bamboo is better than steel if used properly and since it just grows like grass it's basically free.
A bamboo bycicle would be neat but, as a natural product you aren't going to get uniform material to work with so every bike would probably be completeley different to an other. You wouldn't be able to mass produce these things.
Doing a little googling I found this report about using bamboo instead of steel in reinforced concrete.
any way that's my bit out of the way.
A
This is a strong step towards making bicycling more sustainable, expecially in contrast to aluminum, one of the most resource demanding materials that exist.
It's a cool looking bike, but there's a few things worth mentioning. First of all, compared to driving cars, any form of bicycle is the most sustainable mechanized transport imaginable. I think if we have to worry about the fifteen pounds of metal used for each bicycle, then we might as well give up all hope that humans can survive on the planet. Because if things are that bad, the millions of people buying SUV's are going to put us over the edge in no time, no matter what material we fashion bicycles out of.
Secondly, the summary says that aluminum is "one of the most resource demanding materials that exist."
That statement strikes me as terribly disingenuous, if it's not also mentioned that recycled aluminum does away with about 95% of the energies needed to extract aluminum from ore. And besides, how many bicycles are actually made from aluminum or fancy alloys/composites? No bicycle I've ever ridden, I know that much. And certainly not the bikes that are going to be produced for developing countries.
The real question here is how much extra work goes into fabricating a bamboo bike, vs. mass producing a steel-framed bike that's totally useful to anyone who's not a racing enthusiast. Because I would bet that making bamboo bikes in quantity would take fivefold or even tenfold the labor of stamping out cheap steel-framed bikes. And if that's the case, bamboo bikes could never be within reach of the poor.
Given how eco-friendly a steel-framed bike is, it's probably counterproductive to devote attention to an alternative that would probably be fundamentally unsuited to mass production.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
This may seem like a pain, but fixies are actually extremely popular among a certain bike subculture, particularly urban bike messengers. The famous and wonderful Sheldon Brown has an extensive collection of articles on building and riding fixies.
...Nothing interesting here. Just move along...
The thing is, unlike trees bamboo reaches usable size in three years, and no need to replant after harvesting. Rather than deforest you can simply plant your own. And if they deforest correctly there is a new forest within three years. In the process of producing carbon fibre don't doubt there is a crazy amount of pollution and environmental destruction. Just think of the chemicals in the resin, and the use of sulphuric acid and petrochemicals in the fibre production process. All in all, the point is that I couldn't grow carbon fibre in my back yard no matter where I lived on this earth. Did it ever occur to you that in underprivilidged societies a bamboo bike may be a whole lot cheaper than carbon fibre?
I question whether this is an environmental good thing. Using bamboo in stuff means *importing* bamboo - because if you try growing it anywhere other than where it's supposed to be, you can destroy your own local ecology. So it has to be imported, and you're economically tied to the few countries that can grow it in quantity and to the right quality. Steel and aluminum, on the other hand, are easy to get locally, and can be shaped in ways bamboo cannot. Plastics and carbon fiber can also be made locally, and carbon nanostuff will eventually also be available locally. And all of these other materials can be recycled, whereas bamboo can only be burned or mulched.
You also can't mass produce bamboo products - as it says towards the bottom of the article, the guy that makes these needs to hand-select everything for quality. Remember, you can cut the length of these, but not the diameter - you're stuck with whatever diameter it grew to - so precision is extremely difficult.
Particularly in the orient, but in other places as well when times were either hard or when metals were subject to civilian restriction, such as during WWII. Wooden bikes have also been used at times.
They don't work very well. Bamboo is strong, but it's also very flexible. This is also the reason that molded plastic bikes ( as opposed to fiber reineforced plastic bikes) have never worked. If a plastic is ridid enough to make a good bike frame it's also to brittle.
Aluminum is energy intensive to originally produce, but the cheapest and easiest metal to recycle. It also doesn't rust away to unusable oxide, making aluminum the most green of the metals in the long run.
In any case you'll still find most bikes made of steel, because iron is common, easy to smelt, easy to turn into high quality steel, easy to recycle, cheap, and, while not necessarily the highest performing material for a bike frame in any particular measurment, it is, nonetheless, in the top 90 percentile in every attribute needed to make a good bike frame.
What's more, you need very little steel to make a bike whose usable lifespan may be measured in decades. I have two ridable children's trikes over 100 years old.
There's simply nothing about bamboo bikes that make them more sustainable than a steel bike, and they're nowhere near as good.
KFG
This sounds great to me, but man I hope that bamboo doesn't work its way into my garden. Has anybody here ever tried to weed bamboo out of a garden?
My mom planted bamboo once, and then, a few years later in the course of reorganizing her garden, asked me to dig it out. Ugh! That stuff is worse than an Outlook virus! It sends out needle sharpd shooters in all directions. If you see a single stalk poking out of the ground, it might have sent out shooters ten feet all around it. The only way I was able to finally dig it all out was to wait until after a heavy rain and basically just turn the "garden" into a mud soup pulling it out.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
It turns heads in Christiania because it is the only bike that doubles as a hash pipe.
Sweet!
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them? --Abraham Lincoln
They had a bamboo bicycle that powered the washing machine.
Did anyone see the episode where the professor made a bamboo car? Why he didn't just make a bamboo boat is beyond me.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
They're believed to be related to racoons. Take a look at the lesser panda.
Technically speaking it does look like a single speed, but also a fixed gear. A fixed gear bike has less moving parts and therefore less chance of breaking down. The downside is that you will want to choose a gear that deals best with the terrain you are in.
My fixed gear bike is running a ratio of 46t/16t chainrings (over a 2:1 ratio). The one in the photo looks more like a 24t/18t (close to a 1:1 ratio). Bottom line is you won't be picking up too much speed on this thing, but it should make the hills easy to climb and momentum easy to stop.
Are the brakes necessary? For this bike, no. You can quickly bring this thing to a halt and in a worse case scenario put your feet down for a Flintstones stop.
yeah, smoking hemp twine will get you high, just like masturbating will make you go blind.
One of the primary reasons (even beyond weight and durability) why the SCA uses rattan instead of bamboo for weapon shafts in its mock "heavy" combat is that it does not splinter but instead kind of "pulps" when it breaks. The concern on the battle field is that splinters could easily be driven through helm eyeslots. There's enough risk in taking a blow or falling in armor during normal fighting that extreme hazzards like that are hardly welcome.
After all, we can't have anyone getting hurt during a war, can we?
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Bamboo is also flamable...which leaves out common activities like jumping through flaming hoops, or over a burning tar pit. Being made of wood, I really wouldn't want to ride a bamboo bike while juggling chainsaws. There are lots of arguments against bamboo bikes.
Personally, I would love to see more natural fibers in bikes. Rather than making the whole bike from bamboo, making just a few pieces helps reduce the consumption from the titanium mines.
Sig: Flamable materials are dangerous, which is why I always make sure the products I buy are clearly marked as "inflamable."
Kids, to those of you who just don't have enough reasons to be picked on and beaten up in middle school, we give you... THIS BAMBOO BICYCLE!
Complete with a detachable frame for easier caning.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
Please use emticons in your future postings so we know whether to laugh with you or at you.
Thanks,
The Slashdot-reading public.
Fine, get excited about the technology involved here, but spare me the statements like that. Everytime I ride to work, I keep a car or about 1/30th of a bus off the road. (I realize I'm not actually 'keeping the bus off the road', but work with me here.) I don't even need to go on about what a retarded statement that is, to call bicycles anything but a vehicle of sustainability.
What's next? Smack-talking a water powered car because it's a drought season?
You know what?
Wonderful. Right up until you pull a wheelie, and the frame shatters and spits you from anus to esophagus. Yegads, but that's a big splinter you've got there, son!
*knits, waits patiently for bamboo Intel chips*
Here is the homepage of the company. They haven't added the bamboo bike yet, but, I have mailed them and urged them to add it http://www.christianiabikes.com/english/uk_main.ht m
I'm going to keep it in my garage with my Segway(tm) and my electric car.
I'll order one as soon as I finish this bag O-lean chips!
ôó
I wonder if there is a way to use hemp in the manufacture of bicycles as well? Ford was experimenting building cars out of it, and using the oil from the seeds as raw material fuel to run those cars, but nothing ever came of that, unfortunately.
They make houses out of hemp. There is a hemp pulp that gets mixed with the right minerals and you can build walls. So far, however, the shipping from France, which is where you can get what is sometimes called "hemp concrete" or "hemp cement", has been more expensive than the product itself, which is rather inexpensive, and a relatively inexpensive way to build a house, or a shed, or a barn, etc....
Some hemp pulp and the right minerals to make a cement - molded into tubes or other shapes - maybe with a little bamboo helping out here and there... I bet you could make a fairly nice bicycle out of hemp products.
I have seen bamboo and other wooden bikes done before.
As some folks have pointed out, the problem with wooden bikes is that they flex. Badly.
That means your chainline won't stay straight. It will rub, and the gears will try to shift by themselves. Note that the bamboo bike in the picture doesn't have derailleurs. There's a reason.
To reduce flex, you have to increase the diameter of the bamboo tubing. At some point, it becomes impractical-- rather like riding a tree trunk down the street.
The designer of this bamboo ride seems to have tried to compensate for the flexy tubing by adding a brace across the main diamond of the frame. It really won't help much if the rider is strong or heavy. The bottom bracket is gonna feel like it's made of rubber.
There's also the matter of frame alignment. I don't care what you coat bamboo with--it's going to change shape with temperature and humidity. Even casual riders on low-end bambo bikes will be frustrated by a ride that doesn't track in a straight line.
My dad used to race track bikes with wooden rims. They were notoriously dangerous. Riding a bicycle is risky enough without having to worry about being impaled by its wreckage.
If you're really concerned about the resources consumed by aluminim or titanium framesets, there's always steel. Modern steel bike tubing approaches the low weight of aluminum and provides more forgiving ride characteristics. There are also cabon fiber and composite alternatives.
The bamboo bike is a head-turner. But bamboo sucks as a bicycle frame material.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
No, because a bamboo bike would be more expensive and less durable than a steel one.
The ability to have a cheap bicycle, made from sustainable materials is an incredible thing for these people
Except that it's impossible. Can they make a bamboo hub or chain? What about the lugs? Wheels? Gear wheel? Ball bearings?
I'm sure in Laos you can buy cheap Chinese-made bikes. (Flying Pigeon, eg). They ARE ALREADY "sustainable". All they need are new tires every ear or so, and put some oil on the chain when it rains, regrease the bearings once a year or two, repaint every 10 years. You find little roadside shops where guys fix bikes (patch flats, fix most other problems with a hammer and a wrench) for pennies in the third world. (I've biked in Indonesia, Thailand and China.) With minimum maintenance they last for decades. Bamboo bikes are a novelty item for rich Westerners, completely useless to the third world.
Say I live in a fairly high-density city, in an apartment or condominium. I have a stove that is broken and old and not worth servicing to make functional again. It's dirty as hell, and just plain gross. Let's also so say that I don't own a truck. How am I supposed to recycle it? No one is going to come pick it up and still give me money for it, and even if someone is willing to pick it up for free to me, I still have to schedule and wait. However, there is the big trash can in the complex that is emptied three times a week, and I can get a couple of friends to help me heave it into the trashcan, and it'll be hauled off with all of the other garbage. Or, I can leave it sitting next to the trash can for it to be someone elses' problem.
A large amount of consumer waste isn't metal, it's plastic, ceramic, glass, or silicon. Metal things generally last longer. The big things that are metal are the problems. Recycling needs to be made more practical for them to be handled right.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.