Bamboo Bike Update

Ok so things have been going slower than I had hoped mostly due to my involvement in a play on campus and my bamboo contact falling through but there is still plenty of time.

On April 10th I went to Triple Brooke Farms to cut down my own bamboo to use for the chain and seat stays. There I met with the owner Steve who walked me around the farm and told me about the different species of bamboo he has.

As for the bamboo for my main frame I've had to order out of state for it because finding large diameter bamboo in Massachusetts is hard this year due to the awful winter we had. That being said I've also had to change the design for my frame to use smaller diameter tubes, so my design has gone from being a mountain bike to a road bike because I'm concerned about the smaller diameter tubes handling the stress of mountain biking. Also to increase rigidity I'm going to use high density insulating foam to lug the tubes together before wrapping them.



Last week I heat treated my chain and seat stay tubes. To prep the tubes for heat treating I first rough cut them down to size and then drilled a very small hole in each clum to allow steam to escape. I used a propane torch to get the majority of the water out of the tubes, which turned them from their natural green to a really pretty golden marshmallow color, then I baked them at 350ºF for an hour to get the last bits of water out.



One question that I am still left with is how am I going to attach my dropouts to my seat and chain stays. Right now I think I'm going to weld tubing onto them to act as lugs and then wrap around the bamboo and steel lugs.