A bamboo bike in the Design Museum — and a world first built live in front of the crowd

When the Design Museum put on Cycle Revolution, a Bamboo Bicycle Club frame was chosen to sit alongside the bikes that shaped British cycling. Then, in front of the crowd, we built a world first.

The challenge

Cycle Revolution ran at the Design Museum's Kensington High Street home from 18 November 2015 to 5 June 2016, curated by Donna Loveday, and drew more than 70,000 visitors. It set out to capture the whole sweep of contemporary cycling — commuters, cargo riders, thrill-seekers and Olympic-level racers — across 77 bikes. For a small club that started in a corner of a Hackney workshop teaching people to build their own frames, being asked into that company was a serious moment.

What we did

Two things. First, an aerodynamic bamboo racing frame of ours went on display in the exhibition — bamboo shaped and reformed into aero tube profiles, with internal cable routing, shown next to bikes from professional makers and Olympic programme designers.

Second, in April 2016 we ran a live build inside the museum: in collaboration with Oxford Brookes University, we built the world's first bamboo bicycle with 3D-printed lugs, start to finish, in eight hours. The lugs are the joints that hold the bamboo tubes together — normally hand-wrapped over hours in natural fibre and resin. For this experiment, engineering staff and students at Oxford Brookes printed them instead, in nylon-reinforced carbon fibre, over two weeks of testing. We assembled and rode the finished bike live, with the first ride on the Sunday afternoon. Printing the joints pointed at a future where anyone with a 3D printer and a source of bamboo could build a custom frame, anywhere.

The outcome

The frame's place in the exhibition put our engineering in front of more than 70,000 people over the show's run, and the live build earned coverage in the design and cycling press — BikeBiz, Core77 and the London Standard among them. We filmed the build ourselves, too: loose bamboo tubes coming up to a finished, rideable bike, with carbon lugs in place of the usual hand-wrapped joints.

In their words

"The bamboo bike performs extremely well in all three dimensions of the 'triple bottom line', as well as showing excellence in the emerging field of sustainable engineering."
— Dr Shpend Gerguri, Senior Lecturer in Engineering Design, Oxford Brookes University

Why it matters

The whole point of the club is that an everyday person, with their own hands, can build something genuinely good. Cycle Revolution was that idea taken to its limit: a bamboo frame built the way anyone could learn to build it, holding its own in a national design museum — and a live experiment that tried to make frame-building even more open to more people.

Proof and links

• Design Museum, Cycle Revolution (18 Nov 2015 – 5 Jun 2016), curated by Donna Loveday — 70,000+ visitors. A temporary exhibition; our aero frame was on display for the run of the show.
• World's first bamboo bicycle with 3D-printed lugs, built live in April 2016 in collaboration with Oxford Brookes University — nylon-reinforced carbon-fibre lugs, eight-hour build
• Build video (our channel): "Bamboo Bike with 3D-Printed Carbon Lugs (Live Build)" — youtube.com/watch?v=XCnFSZhhUgY
• News video (The London Standard): "London company 3D prints bamboo bike in just 8 hours" — youtube.com/watch?v=co9AdgisNQY
• Coverage: BikeBiz, Core77, University Alliance, The London Standard