Ten years ago, Luna the dog -- part pit bull and part Labrador retriever -- was gnawing on a piece of bamboo growing behind Craig Calfee’s bicycle shop outside Santa Cruz.
Luna was adept at crushing wooden sticks with her powerful jaws. Give her a piece of wood, and she’d chew it to splinters in no time. But the best she could manage with the hard, round stalks of bamboo was a tooth mark or two.
And that got Calfee to wondering: If bamboo was strong enough to withstand Luna, why couldn’t it be a bicycle frame?
Since then, Calfee has gone from building clunker bamboo bikes to fashioning sleek, pricey racing machines that turn heads in even the snobbiest pace lines. He’s built 91 bamboo bicycles, enough for their reputation to spread across the country. And, perhaps as important, enough for Calfee to have faith in his unusual contraptions.
In a sense, Calfee is part of a bamboo craze sweeping the United States. Bamboo is suddenly chic, now that it’s being made into everything from baby-soft T-shirts to baseball bats. Gone are the days when it was the stuff of cheap, ugly curtains and tacky lawn furniture. Bamboo has arrived.
“The uses are almost endless,” said Dan Keesey, president of Gardena-based EcoDesignz, which sells everything from bamboo clothing to furniture. “You can eat off it, wear it and sit on it.”
And sleep on it, eat with it, walk on it and fish with it, to name but a few other uses.
In Calfee’s case, you can also ride it.
And, of course, there are the obligatory jokes: Keep it out of the rain so it doesn’t sprout; use it for firewood if you get lost; you’ll never lack for a toothpick.
More information on bamboo bikes can be found here.
Link & Image: Bicycle.NET
Tags: Bamboo | Bike
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