Bamboo Evolved

I got the following comment just the other day -

Hey Brett, I was wondering where you got the plan for the bike rack ... or are you coming up with it on the fly?

I found a stand of bamboo by my grandparents house in FLA and thought I would go 'green' with the rack idea. plus, a bunch of bikes leaning on each other doesn't look as cool. bikes lined up in a kick ass bamboo rack would look sweet!

Ben (Tri-Bagger)

I'm away from home right now, so I can't post a picture of how it turned out. Will do when I get back. This is what I learned about bamboo so far:

• Fire treating it takes forever. Yet, it is beyond awesome and looks super cool.


• I didn't have plans, but it was assembled by a Texas Aggie and modified by an engineer that builds skyscrapers. Said Aggie and engineer have a combined 80 years of knot-tying in the Boy Scouts.


• Aggies are renowned for being stupid and don't ever ask a skyscraper engineer to build anything less than 500,000 square feet or 40 stories tall.


• Give a Boy Scout a rope and you will get back either "I lost it." or "It somehow caught on fire."

But seriously, we did a pretty slick job of it. It's not as stable as I hoped, but it definitely works. Here is an actual useful list of what could be considered useful information:

• Fire treating the bamboo... it cures it instantly, but I ponder how "green" all the propane use is.  That being said, I didn't use very much propane.


• Bamboo as construction materials = green.  Bamboo as fabric (t-shirts, sheets, etc...) = very, VERY, not green.  They use some extremely toxic chemical to turn bamboo into a pulp for thread.  Stay away from bamboo fabric for now.


• Gorilla Glue is perfect for bonding pieces together.


• A fine-tooth saw can cut bamboo OK.  Use a larger-tooth saw and you're asking for fractured and blown apart pieces.

I'm at the stage of where I've worked with it enough to know how to fire-treat it, saw it, and seen how strong Gorilla Glue can hold it.  I think that's a good place to sit back and try to figure out more uses.  There is a real geometric problem in that the pieces are round, not flat.  It makes joining pieces together difficult because there is not contact surface area big enough to glue.

I've also seen several examples of people building bikes out of it using hemp or carbon fiber to hold the joints.  Joints are often lugged with steel or titanium.  Soooooo...  Basically I'm just sitting back and re-sizing the skill set and the situation before I plunge into it again.  I don't want to spend too much time on something and then realize I built it all wrong. Just writing this, I'm now wondering if a lugged bike rack would be more effective than the wired-and-tied-together model I built.

Anyway, picture and description of all the parts coming soon!

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