Can a self-confessed perfectionist who’s terrible at woodwork make a bamboo bike from scratch at home? Well, the answer is ‘sort of…’

WORDS WIL PHOTOGRAPHY CHIPPS

Sand a little bit. Stop. Step back, blow away the sawdust, eyeball the mitre. Nah not quite, needs a bit more. Start sanding again.

I can feel the coarse sandpaper starting to make its way through the third layer of skin on my fingers… try to ignore that. Stop sanding to check the mitre again. Do that thing that artists do where they cock their head to a few diTherent angles while looking at something. Squint a bit, then nod. Yeah, reckon that looks alright now. Take the long piece of bamboo over to the jig and check how it’s fitting up against the shiny alloy headtube. Still nice and snug. A beautiful fit. Pretty impressed with that really, given it was the very first mitre I’ve done in my life. Now, check the other end of the downtube where it meets the metal bottom bracket shell. This is the one I’ve been sanding into the tube for the past three quarters of an hour. It kinda fits, but then I look around at the other side. As in, the underside of the bottom bracket where there’s a rather large gap. Hold on, that… that doesn’t look right. No, it is most definitely not right. I start to panic. The whole mitre is off-centre. Like, by a good 30 degrees.

And there’s an enormous gap between bamboo and metal that I can fit my finger into. That is not what the instructions specify.

‘Shit’ I think. Shit-shit-shit. Then I realise – if that mitre isn’t good, I can’t fix it. My neck starts to get hot. This whole tube is… oh shit. Oh f***! F***ITY-F***-F***!

Yep, that tube is toast.

That’s me coming to the realisation that I had just royally cocked up the second mitre on the first tube of the first bamboo frame I’d ever endeavoured to build. The tube was ruined. Unusable. A throwaway. Given all the cutting, mitreing and gluing I had ahead of me, this didn’t bode well.

‘There’s no faster way to build a frame with so few tools and so little expertise required. Anyone can do it.’

Why bamboo?

That my friends, is a most excellent question. And one that I’ve been repeatedly asking myself during the past month of turning a Bamboo Home Build Kit into some sort of semblance of a rideable mountain bike.

Notwithstanding the torture I’ve put this collection of tubes through, bamboo itself is an incredible material.

Aside from the fact that it just magically sprouts up from the ground, bamboo can be, and is, used for a huge variety of purposes – from food for cuddly pandas and as an ingredient for making beer, through to being used for scaffolding and as a building material for furniture, roads and bridges – it’s versatile, and a whole lot more sustainable than most humanmade alternatives.