| Bamboo Bikes - Santa Cruz Cycle Maker Goes Global |
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| Written by Maria Gaura |
LA SELVA BEACH (December 2009) - Custom bike builder Craig Calfee has spent two decades crafting featherweight bicycle frames out of high-tech carbon fiber, and selling them to elite cyclists. But his travels in Africa got him thinking about a different type of building material - and a different type of bicycle rider.The result of Calfee’s brainstorm is Bamboosero, a line of moderately-priced bikes with frames made of bamboo. The frames are engineered to Calfee’s high standards, but handmade by craftsmen in Africa, Asia and Latin America out of locally-sourced bamboo. While Bamboosero aims to do good, it isn’t a charity – it’s a business partnership with an altruistic edge. Bamboosero aims to bring desperately-needed skilled jobs to developing nations by training workers, helping them set up workshops, and marketing their products in wealthier countries.“We’re trying to develop a market, and an industry,” Calfee said. “And the way to start is by selling bikes in the U.S. and Europe. By just being good customers we can have a huge impact on people’s lives.”While he understands the importance of emergency aid, Calfee said the people he meets on his travels would rather have a job. “When people come around (to your village) to give things away, you’re transformed from a farmer or a worker into a beggar,” Calfee said. “That doesn’t feel good to anyone. The self-esteem issue is huge.”Starting up Bamboosero required identifying locations, recruiting and training workers, and designing workshop equipment suitable for the developing world, where spare parts and reliable electricity can be hard to find.Calfee designed a simplified template for assembling bike frames that consists of a half-sheet of plywood and about seven small support fixtures made out of cut-and-glued plastic pipe. The template is marked with measurements for different size frames, requires no electricity to operate, and is portable enough to set up in a variety of working environments.Partner workshops source their own bamboo and sisal fiber, and do the labor-intensive handwork of frame building. But local suppliers of epoxy are still hard to find, and the cost of shipping is high – two challenges that Calfee hopes will be eased by competition once the industry gets rolling.Bamboosero hopes its partner workshops will eventually produce fully-assembled bicycles for consumers in their home countries, where bicycles are a critical means of transport. Calfee’s designers have already come up with a cargo bike capable of carrying hundreds of pounds of extra weight, and a ‘bus-bike’ big enough to carry six or seven children to school.A dozen Bamboosero workshops – known as Bambooseros - in Ghana, Zambia, Uganda and the Philippines, are either in production or on the verge of shipping product. More are getting underway in Latin America and Asia. One of the project’s main organizers is Suzanne Hartley, a veteran Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana, who plans to work for Bamboosero when her stint with the corps is over.
The Bamboosero project has been a major expansion for Calfee Design, whose high-end bikes have until now been exclusively aimed at athletes able to pay thousands of dollars for limited-edition or custom-made machines. In addition to carbon fiber frames, Calfee Design offers a custom-made bamboo-frame bike, with the frame alone starting at $3,195.The Bamboosero bikes, after being assembled at Calfee’s La Selva Beach factory with components chosen by the buyer, begin at less than $1,000. However, a Bamboosero frame tricked out with the fanciest components can end up costing nearly as much as a high-end Calfee Design bike, Calfee said.Bamboosero designs range from a road-racing model to a nine-speed cargo bike with a heavy-duty rack. The bamboo frames are dried and treated with epoxy to keep them strong and crack-free, then fitted and joined with epoxy-saturated hemp or sisal fiber. Riders say the bamboo frames are as strong as carbon fiber, though not as light. In addition, bamboo dampens road vibrations and may be even more crash-resistant than the high-tech frames.“They’re really similar to what we already do here,” said Aaron Kaufman, Bamboosero’s first full-time employee. “But (the Bamboosero frames) are less expensive, and the labor costs less.”On a recent morning, Kaufman worked to install brightly-colored tires, a seat and a fork on a bamboo show bike for Calfee to display at a Santa Cruz fundraiser for the Tour of California bike race.“This is kind of a coming-out for Bamboosero,” Calfee said. “We’re starting to take orders, it’s a transitional period.”The bikes can currently be ordered on the company website, but they may eventually be sold through bike shops as production ramps up.“Bamboo bikes are now rare and unusual,” Calfee said. “But I’d give (Bamboosero) ten years before it gets close to capacity. I’d like to see bamboo bikes eventually sold right next to the lower-cost steel-frame bikes, that would be a good thing.”Trackback(0)
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April 24th Peter Sharma III will be sharing ideas about wind turbines that can be build from bamboo and recycled sails...thought you would be interested.