Sunday, February 10, 2008

Brano Meres bamboo composite frame

Road frame made with bamboo fiber composite material

Brano Meres is an engineer in Slovakia who first built a carbon / bamboo composite bike four years ago. He continues to dabble in new materials. His latest innovation is this frame made from a bamboo composite material.

Bamboo composite road bicycle

This frame looks and kind of feels like a carbon composite frame, but the material is made up of bamboo fibers instead of carbon fiber. Like carbon fiber and fiberglass, the bamboo fiber is embedded in a plastic polymer to create a strong and lightweight composite material.

Brano tells me this bamboo fiber composite bicycle is currently too flexible for it to ride well, but he continues to investigate its properties. The other builders at the show who work with carbon fiber tell me that carbon fiber is getting to be almost impossible to obtain, so perhaps we'll see some more work in new alternative materials like this.

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