Bamboo Bike - The new Project, May 2009

After my bikes and trikes were successfully running on the roads of Bangalore, a friend approached me with the idea of building a “Bamboo bicycle”. I thought I should give it a try and a few weeks later I felt happy as I finished assembling the bamboo bike in my terrace garden.

The bamboo bike is an environmentally friendly bike as it uses bamboo in place of steel for the main frame of the cycle. Therefore with each such bamboo bike one is cutting down the consumption of steel by 3.5 kgs.

The first prototype was made with raw bamboo with metal sleeves on junctions, as I had not thought of a jig while making the frame (a jig is a metal frame used as a reference for mass production while joining different parts to make an object so that all the pieces are identical.) After testing it further, I realized it had a fish tale effect at higher speeds which had to be overcome.

The second prototype was made using thicker bamboo sections and this time with a jig to hold all members and important junctions like bottom brackets, rear drop out, head tube and seat tube. This time around the parts were glued together without metal sleeves and using hemp fiber.

After I had finished making my first prototype of the Bamboo bike I met Arun Katiyar. Arun is involved with the Ride-A-Cycle Foundation that promotes biking, going green – a small way to give back to the environment. He not only appreciated my work but was very instrumental in encouraging me to develop it further. While I made more prototypes later, he tested them out and gave me the relevant feedback to improvise on the designs.

Later Arun suggested that I build one bike for Tour of Nilgiris (TFN) http://www.tourofnilgiris.com/blog09/. I loved the idea because TFN is one of the challenging mountain biking events, I thought it is a very good idea to put my bamboo bike through the endurance and get further endorsement.