BikeBiz Bicycle and cycling retail news
The Bamboo Bicycle Club in collaboration with Oxford Brookes University successfully built the world’s first ever bamboo and 3D printed bicycle at London’s Design Museum.
The live event was to coincide with the Cycling Revolution exhibition at the museum where the Bamboo Bicycle Club has been displaying another first in the form of the world’s first aerodynamic bamboo bicycle.
James Marr, founder of the Bamboo Bicycle Club, said:“It’s a wonderful feeling to be pioneering new manufacturing techniques which have enormous potential in the future. The bike needs a few tweaks but we can definitely see a future in this bike building process”
The Hackney Wick based business has been designing and engineering unique bike manufacturing techniques for the past four years and decided it was time to introduce a whole new bike making concept to the world four months ago.
It took professors from Oxford Brookes university two weeks to complete the 3D printing for the nylon reinforced carbon fibre (used on Formula 1 cars) lugs, which are used to join the bamboo frame together with a special urethane adhesive glue. This process is expected to become a lot faster in the future and could have a huge impact on British manufacturing. The frame and completed bike with all the full components was then built live at the Design Museum with the first ride taking place on Sunday afternoon.
Dr James Broughton of Oxford Brookes University said: "It was always going to be a challenge combining highly engineered products with an artesian style build, especially using such an unprocessed natural material such as bamboo. After an intense but ultimately successful weekend, this type of modular construction has really shown the potential to create truly bespoke Bicycle frame design at home, perhaps taking a little more time!"
Supporting the project was the Hackney Wick based business community of Autumn Yard, which included graphic designers, Studio Bark – one of Britain’s most sustainable architects (as seen on Grand Designs), Great Coat Films and A Marr + Associates marketing.
