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Make your own bamboo bike
Learn to build your own eco-friendly bicycle while helping to support sustainable industry and eco-travel in Ghana.
Tue, May 12 2009 at 2:02 PM
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Photo: Courtesy Bamboo Bike Studio
If learning to fix your own bike at a local bike co-op’s not enough of a challenge, maybe you’re ready to make your own eco-bike from scratch! The Bamboo Bike Studio will let you do just that via a Two-Day Bamboo Bike Building Course in its Brooklyn studio (via Treehugger).
For $1000, you get all the raw materials and instructions to build your own bike, custom-fit for your body and riding style and made with a local, renewable resource — all while supporting a good cause! That cause is Bamboo Bike Project, which seeks to build sustainable, eco-friendly bike industry in Ghana — to create a sustainable form of transportation for poor Africans in rural areas.
If you’ve got a grand and a plane ticket to New York, you can sign up for the class. On Saturday, you’d pick out some New Jersey-grown bamboo to suit your biking needs, then learn to work a drill press and some hand tools to cut out pieces for your bike frame before joining the pieces together with fabric. Sunday, you’d add on the pedals, chain, wheels, and handlebars, do a safety check, learn some maintenance tips, then pedal off with your eco bike!
Email bikes@bamboobikestudio.com to get in on the next course. I think I’ll need to learn how to fix a flat on my bike before trying my hand at building a whole bike from scratch….
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I've always loved the concept of eco friendly traveling where people find so many new ideas to reduce their carbon footprint. Bamboo bike is one such idea where the cost of making is less and impacts very less to the environment.
Green Auto
we also manufacture bamboo bike in China. please contact us: bellengao @gamil.com
Which species of bamboo is used for bike?
Hi, Zahid, this is what Sean Murray from the Bamboo Bike Studio said:
"We've had great results using Phyllostachys nuda, aka rock bamboo, aka nude sheath bamboo. It's very common in the Northeast, hardy down to about -10F. It's a running bamboo (as opposed to clumping; there are no clumping species in the US Northeast) which means that there's one culm/rhizome. Best of all, it reaches maturity in about three years and can be harvested sustainably."
Hope that helps!
Well, I'm pretty sure that the bikes made in the African factories -- once that gets up and running -- will be a lot cheaper than $1000 :) The classes are in part a fundraiser --
www.flaviodeslandes.com
The idea of bamboo bikes is so far the best idea i have heard of ! But regarding the money this may be a problem with people who do not have money to purchase a bamboo bikes. But so far there great !