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."

Comments

strength of bamboo

[mandalayx]

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.

Re:strength of bamboo

[gwernol]

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."

While resistence to longitudinal stress is a good thing, many of the strains on the frame of a bike are not longitudinal - there is a lot of lateral flexing as you pedal. Bamboo is prone to splitting and fracturing when under lateral strain. I would really hate to have one of those collapse under me due to lateral stress fractures. All those sharp slivers of bamboo right under my crotch? No thanks...

Re:strength of bamboo

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but steel/aluminum won't rot, won't get eaten by bugs

Hmmm yes, what we really need is an environmentally friendly biodegradable substance that won't rot or get eaten by bugs. Best of both worlds.

Re:strength of bamboo

[Jahf]

There is very little chance of that based on the way they are using the sticks. No drilling or cutting means the pole remains very stable. Sure, if you use it for extreme biking you're going to have problems, but otherwise it should remain quite solid.

Add to that the possibility of very simple reinforcement by wrapping it at key points with a strong thread and/or laminating it with reinforcements and I doubt it would break under normal usage.

Even if it did, you would see signs of wear before it happened. What causes catastrophic failure of bamboo is usually force being applied on bamboo that has been cut into the grain and/or had holes cut into it.

Of course, that doesn't stop it from being fugly ... I would definitely be getting out some paint!

Re:strength of bamboo

[Ed Avis]

Bamboo canes are hollow, right? So just use aluminium rods with bamboo cladding round the outside. You get a strong and stable bike, and still get all the eco-friendly posing opportunities. It's not as if anyone will try to cut the bamboo open to see if you're cheating.

Re:strength of bamboo

[SerpentMage]

Sure it is funny, but the bamboo society is missing a fundenmental point...

I disagree with this non-environmental friendly stuff regarding Aluminum and Steel. These two metals are some of most recycled materials that there are. What do you think happens to old ships, cars, buildings? They are not buried, but smelted again.

In fact this is the beauty of these metals. They can be essentially recycled 100% unlike plastics and papers that always need additives. The reason we do not know about this is because steel and aluminum have been recycled for decades...

Re:strength of bamboo

[gessel]

I think the bamboo bike is really cool from a cost perspective, but it's not really any more renewable than an aluminum one, nor having a net advantageous resource budget despite the obvious, intuitive expectation that it would.

The matter system on this planet is closed loop.

While this is not entirely true, some 40,000 tons of space borne dust land on our planet and we may someday mine extra-planetary bodies, for arguments sake all the aluminum we're going to use is here now. If we continue to use it all the bauxite will be gone some day, and from then on, all aluminum will be recycled.

However, long before that day all aluminum will be recycled because it costs 20X as much to make aluminum from Bauxite as it does to remelt it from scrap. The aluminum industry uses all the scrap aluminum it can get because the final product is just as valuable as aluminum from ore, but the profit is very different.

So aluminium the matter is a renewable resource, just like the carbon in bamboo, except to reuse aluminum it need merely be remelted via heat (typically electrical power, though a solar furnace could be used), and the carbon in bamboo must be oxidized and reduced (typically by rotting or burning and then photosynthesis).

Most domestic aluminum production happens in the pacific northwest where the power is provided by dams, a renewable resource, but certainly much of it is provided by oxidizing hydrocarbons to produce CO2 and H2O, both end state products that require substantial energy to reduce to reduce back to something chemically useful. This return cycle of oxidized hydrocarbon energy production is managed by the biomass of the world, and is driven by solar power via photosynthesis at 0.2% net efficiency, just as bamboo production is.

The energy system on this planet is constant rate

All energy on this planet comes from the sun. The sun has provided a net energy surplus for a few million years, most of it stored in reduced hydrocarbons (about half in oil and half in methane hydrates, and a comparatively inconsequential amount in leftover fissile heavy atoms). The world's total carbon reserves (1.6E13 bbls oil equivalent) contain enough energy to provide current consumption (globally 1.2E14 Kwh/year) rates for 221 years. If the rest of the world catches up with US consumption rates all the reduced carbon in the world will only last 38 years.

So, sooner or later (within 200 years, longer if there's a big global war or other population reducing event, much shorter if growth continues) all our energy will come from solar power directly as we will have consumed the planets "life savings" of net reduced carbon.

Photosynthesis is 0.2% efficient. Photovoltaics are currently about 10% efficient (20X more) in commercial applications (7.5% efficient over the life of the device) and efficiencies of over 30% are achievable.

To meet next year's global energy demands (1.2E14 Kwh, not including firewood) would take only 6.5E7 M2 of commercially available solar panels for $1.3E10 at current retail. The world will spend $4.4E11 on oil alone next year. If we spent 5% extra on oil (global tax) we could fully fund global solar power within a year. Interestingly, to meet the US's entire current energy demands with solar electric, we would need to cover about half of our roads, at no net change in albumen.

Within 200 years, and probably within 50, all the energy used in the production of aluminum will be direct solar.

Bamboo vs. Aluminum just isn't that obvious

Bamboo is a very impressive material, basically a single orientation composite, which can be easily reinforced against torsion and it's comparatively low modulus can be compensated for with larger diameter tubes in a bicycle, but it is not obvious that it's a more efficient use of land to grow bamboo than to use solar power to recycle aluminum into new bicycles.

But we have a long way to go on energy use and recycling, and so bamboo is an o

it's been done...

[hangingonwords]

i've seen this before on a show called gilligans island...

Re:it's been done...

[whiteranger99x]

i've seen this before on a show called gilligans island...

Go figure, the Professor could make Bamboo Bikes, Timeshares, Coconut powered-radios, a nuclear reactor and yet they couldn't simply patch a fucking hole in the goddamn boat, The Minnow...wtf?!

Seems like a hoax...

[fmita]

They're probably just trying to bamboozle us...

Attacked By Endangered Species

[Eberlin]

This is all good until someone gets attacked by a Panda. Yet another version of "meals on wheels!"

"Sustainable"?

[justinburt]

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

An explaination for non-bike-geeks

[salimfadhley]

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.

Re:More Sustainable than Aluminum ??

[RiffRafff]

He's prolly referring to raw aluminum. Extracting it consumes way too much electricity. Of course, recycling aluminum takes very little.

Bamboo is cool

[aaron.rowe]

I spent some time working in Nigeria and watched the local people erecting 4+ storey buildings using bamboo as scaffolding and for supporting newly laid concrete floors.

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

Bamboo bikes have existed for over 100 years

[kfg]

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

Make it out of...

[mcd7756]

sugar cane!!

Sweet!

flaming hoops

[yintercept]

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."