Bamboo Framebuilding

Thanks to a friend I recently had the opportunity to take a bamboo bicycle frame-building workshop at the Bamboo Bike Studio in San Francisco.

Bamboo on Wheels is a video
from Jan Sturmann on Vimeo
that describes why bamboo
makes good bicycles.

Here are some of the tubes used to build the frames. Tubes are selected according to rider weight and the ride characteristics desired.

The jig is setup with balsa wood blocks to anchor the main tubes and steel dropouts to anchor the stays. The ends of the tubes are roughed up to increase the grip of the epoxy and carbon used to join the tubes later.

File and saw remove everything this isn't a bicycle.It sure is a lot easier to file than a traditional steel frame.

Filing the non-structural balsa wood to make a smooth shape around the steel head-tube. Glad I had clean fingernails here.

Here is the frame ready to wrap with carbon thread.

The carbon is a thread made of many thousand strands of super-fine fiber that must each be coated with epoxy for maximum strength and stiffness.

The finished joint is wrapped in tape to compress the epoxy deep into the fibers. In 12 hours the epoxy has cured and is hard enough to sand smooth.