Calfee designs Bamboo Bike

A bamboo bike, and who would have thought of such a thing, but it’s on the market and has a wonderful story behind it.
Craig Calfee needed a bike frame after a spectacular head-on collision in Boston. Determined to make this frame as tough as possible, he built a bike using materials he had used at a job making composite rowing shells. He braided the tubes and laminated them together with tooling made on a drill press.With a $10,000 loan, Craig hired a machinist to make the first production tooling.

Professional bike couriers and amateur racers took to the streets of San Francisco to test the first frames. Adjustments were made and the frames were ready to sell to the public. Carbonframes became a corporation and debuted at the industry’s biggest bike show, Interbike, in 1989.

From its headquarters in Santa Cruz, Carbonframes built a state-of-the-art production facility and continued production and sales of its superior frames. Professional triathlete Dave Scott rode his Carbonframe bike to second place at age 40 in the Hawaii Ironman World Championship triathlon.

• 2005: Bamboo Bikes Beginning as a publicity stunt in 1995, Craig’s bamboo errand bike evolves into a well-tested new model for the general public. 12 Bamboo bikes had been built for employees, relatives and friends. The feedback on the smooth ride quality was too good to ignore, so they decided to go into production

Since then, Calfee has gone from building clunker bamboo bikes to fashioning sleek, pricey racing machines that turn heads in even the snobbiest pace lines. He’s built enough bamboo bicycles, for their reputation to spread across the country. And, perhaps as important, enough for Calfee to have faith in his unusual contraptions.

Craig Calfee is no ordinary bicycle shop owner. He’s considered one of the country’s elite bike builders, someone who creates machines for the likes of Greg LeMond,

the first American to win the Tour de France. He fashions the lightest of bike frames from carbon fiber.

Among the believers was Ken Runyan of Emmett, Idaho, who owns a hardware and bike shop and saw Calfee’s bamboo creation at a Las Vegas trade show. He ordered one to sell (the frames go for $2,700), but ended up keeping it for himself. He found he liked it better than his other bikes.

“It’s a great bike,” said Runyan, 63, who rode it in Hawaii’s Ironman triathlon last year. “The bike continually gets double takes and questions. People look at it and ask if it’s really made of bamboo.”

And, of course, there are the obligatory jokes: Keep it out of the rain so it doesn’t sprout; use it for firewood if you get lost; you’ll never lack for a toothpick.

But Runyan said he also noticed his times were faster on long rides. And when he cracked the top tube of his frame, all he needed was Super Glue to patch it up.

“It’s still kind of a gimmick bike,” he said. “But I wouldn’t have any qualms about selling it to anybody.”

What I thought great about part of the story was that Craig is working with other entrepreneurs to create production in Ghana.
The idea of bringing his bamboo bike project to Ghana came to Calfee after a trip in the early 1980s.

“The bamboo bikes make perfect sense in Ghana,” he said. “They can be made from an abundant local resource, and you don’t need power tools or electricity to make these frames.”

Not only would local bike production create jobs, but the bikes themselves would enable Ghanaians to carry goods from fields and to markets more easily.

Calfee traveled to Ghana in June 2007, along with members of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, to conduct a feasibility study and gauge local interest. He said he was impressed with the enthusiasm of entrepreneurs who were waiting to meet him when he arrived.

Calfee returned to Ghana in February, ready to start training the first three groups in bamboo-bike-frame basics. One of the biggest obstacles was the supply chain: Epoxy is needed to join the frame, but none is made in Ghana.

“It took us six months to even get a quote for the epoxy,” Calfee said. Even so, the group built two complete frames and learned how to cure the bamboo for future production.

Calfee plans to return to Ghana this summer to train two more groups in small villages who have shown the skills and motivation to build the bamboo bikes, which will start at $40 to $50 and cost up to $120 for a cargo bike suitable for carrying heavier loads.

How can a bike cost $3,500 in the United States and $50 in Africa? Aside from the bamboo, they’re different beasts. The U.S. bicycle uses high-end components and state-of-the-art machinery. In Ghana, Calfee has again used what’s available and built a prototype, basically using glue heated over flame and components sourced from Ghanaian flea markets.
“I like to say this bike has the lowest carbon footprint on the planet,” Calfee said. “It also has a super-smooth ride quality,” thanks to bamboo’s natural vibration-damping qualities.

Another advantage of bamboo is the ability to choose any part of the tapered, hollow stalk to suit a rider’s preference and size: heavier rider, wider part of the bamboo; lighter rider, narrower part.

Calfee uses bamboo imported from Taiwan, but he hopes to find California-grown bamboo soon. “It would allow us to manipulate the bamboo as it grows,” said Calfee, noting that it takes three years before bamboo is mature enough to be used in frame building.

Once the bamboo has reached maturity, it is smoked and treated with heat to prevent splitting; the process takes about four months. The bamboo bike frames are then tacked with adhesive and wrapped using epoxy-impregnated fiber, either hemp or carbon. “I’ve found that hemp works best with bamboo,” said Calfee, who also tried sisal and fiberglass along the way. A frame costs about $2,700, and a complete bike starts at $3,500.

I was first introduced to the concept of the bamboo bike by a high energy raw vegan bike rider who goes by the moniker of durianriders at youtube a guy who walks his talk and is one of the growing many who challenge the high impact way, We humans interact with the fellow occupants of this planet and the planet itself