The end of the beginning

I am approaching the home stretch on my second bicycle. This one is going out to my brother Ian's boss at Williamson Bicycles in Madison. Dave has been a willing guinea pig and has ferreted out a lot of great information for me in addition to being a patient and accomodating customer. I did get the better of him when I suggested that we just skip the standard seat clamp and use a hose clamp instead! Ridiculous!

I had a fabulous visit to a sake brewery several years ago. When I tried to refuse the brewmaster’s generosity as he stuffed another bottle in my jacket, he responded, “Ichi-go Ichi-e.”
The phrase translates as, “unique meeting, unique opportunity”. With six months grace on my student loans, I had a unique chance this past year to fulfill my dream of building a bicycle frame from start to finish.

Probably everyone in the room can identify somewhat with my farcical term “make-lust” which I define as a desire to create, plus the desire for self sufficiency, plus a little pinch of hubris that says, “I can do it better.”

After school I shifted gears, from thinking about rebuilding cities, to thinking about re-inventing a simple bicycle.

I know a number of people who had built frames of steel, aluminum or even Titanium, but the idea of making a bicycle out of something different appealed to me. I had seen immense structures built from bamboo while teaching English in Japan, and with a brief internet search, I learned that a number of people had created bamboo bicycles already.

This is where the pinch of hubris spurred me into action. I had seen some samples of the work of other framebuilders and thought, “If they can do it, so can I.”
I had the unshakable optimism of the ignorant. Bamboo was like wood, and I had made plenty of things with wood, right? In retrospect, I probably should have taken a lesson from my previous experiences in fixing our house,
But, when make-lust takes over and the ideas keep spinning, it’s hard to let them go
Bamboo seemed like an ideal choice for my project. I could build the bike that I wanted in my own basement, and without the capital investment in things like torches and steel. Bamboo is strong and light weight, readily available, and importantly, grows to the perfect size and shape all on its own. Oh, and it’s totally hot as a building material right now.

Thank god for invasive species. Bamboo grows wild in groves and plantings up and down the Schuylkill river, and I set about getting a healthy selection of culms. Though it would have undoubtedly been faster to drive out, there was something a bit more satisfying about carrying the bamboo back to Philly by bicycle trailer.
One note: Beware Main Street Manayunk with an 8 foot trailer full of bamboo behind your bike.


Preparation is key. At first it was exceedingly frustrating, but I eventually came to love layered nature of the problem.
My project was initially to build a bicycle, but each step in that process devolves into a project unto itself. To build a frame, you must build a jig to hold it. To build the jig, you must figure out how to cut a perfectly square corner in the wood. I feel great satisfaction with the end result, but each step in the process yields its own satisfaction.


Harvesting and working with natural materials provides just that type satisfaction with process.
The culms had to be dried and picked over before they would yield appropriate sections for bicycle making.
With no experience in this matter, I did a fair bit of guessing and testing to find the ideal pieces. Carving and mitering the tubes by hand, I started to get a sense for how the material should be shaped, and I re-learned the age old maxim, “Measure twice, cut once.”


Working with any material has it’s own sort of rhythm and requirements. I soon realized that I had a whole different set of skills to learn regarding the man-made components of the bike. Bamboo seemed familiar in it’s woodenness, but metal and composite structures have characteristics all their own.

Lessons Learned: Cheap epoxy is cheap for a reason, aluminum can dull drills faster than steel, and a drill press can throw chunks of metal with surprising ferocity.

As I epoxied bamboo tubes to the aluminum hard points, things started to look a lot more bike-like and I started to get a bit hasty. I have always had a hard time slowing myself down when the excitement of a project starts to take over.
I simply didn’t have the patience to wait for the glue to cure or the paint to dry throughout this project, and ended up re-doing things as a result. Patience is indeed a virtue.


If you have made paper mache you already have the basic skill-set required for making advanced carbon fiber structures. Just substitute fibers stronger than steel for newspaper for and space age polymer for starch paste and you’re mostly there.

The most odious part of the whole process was the sanding to smooth the lumps between layers of carbon. I would probably give the nod to poison ivy for discomfort, but the carbon dust was a pretty close second.



And after hundreds of hours of muddling through, and thousands of hours of thinking about the process, a bike emerged.


I sanded the bamboo and carbon bits down to a smooth finish and screwed on the final cable guides and assembled the frame, fork and parts at the bike shop one evening. I had hoped that the bike would be light weight, and was pleasantly surprised when it weighed in at a little more than 16.5 pounds


Among the last of my grab bag of new skills was trying to pick up shodo, or Japanese calligraphy in an evening. Decided to call this bike ichi-go ichi-e, as you may have already guessed. I started practicing the basic stroke order, practiced for a couple of hours on some paper and scrap bamboo and then faked my way through.


The frame was together and by all appearances a success. The bike looked good, and rode well, but it was still a first step.


At this point, perhaps in an effort to validate all the hours I spent scheming over the bicycle, I put up pictures and a description of my project online.
Within a week of its posting, the bike had been viewed hundreds of times and I had received emails from around the world asking for advice and instructions on how I had done it.
I had suddenly become what passes for an expert on the internet: I had blogged.



Expertise is developed over time, through trial and error. My initial goal was simply to make a bike, to see if I could. As with any project, I learned a tremendous amount as I went on, and I began to understand the limits of my skills. Though it is so tempting these days to answer, “Google” to every question. I realized that I needed to tap into the real, living network of people with real experience to help me in whatever comes next.



The internet is great for scratching the surface of a topic, but the internet does not generate skill or craft. People create information and people make things. I learned from a framebuilder in California that smoking the bamboo reduces the risk of cracking, and I am indebted to a machinist friend of mine who made me parts for the next jig, and perhaps most importantly, my friends and relatives have all volunteered themselves as guinea pigs in my bamboo bicycle experiment.



Process and practice. There is something primally good about creating something with your own hands, about making something that can be used. I know that chimpanzees and sea otters use tools just as humans do, but maybe the thing that separates us from the rest of them is how much joy we get out of doing so.


I don’t know exactly how far I will take the whole frame building enterprise, or how far it will take me. Chances are it will never pay the bills, but chances are, I will probably be plotting and planning about it anyway.