road.cc: Racing a Bamboo Bike
It has all come down to this. A race at Castle Combe. Can Dave win? Will the bike fall apart? Will his peers ridicule his bike made of sticks? Only one way to find...
When UK cycling title road.cc wanted to find out whether a home-built bamboo frame could really hold its own, they did the only thing that settles the question: they raced one.
Over a multi-part video series in April–May 2018, road.cc's Dave Atkinson built a bamboo road bike from a Bamboo Bicycle Club kit — from constructing the jig, through "the sanding years", to paint and final assembly — and then took it to a third-category (Cat 3) crit race.
As road.cc put it when the finished bike was ready for the road:
"After a test ride the only other thing for Dave to try is rock up to a race on the bamboo beauty."
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— road.cc, "Building a bamboo bike part 6: time for a ride!", 25 May 2018
road.cc later summed the whole project up in their feature on the easy-build kit: their man had taken the bike "from jigging right through to Cat 3 racing" — a bamboo frame, built at home from a kit, lining up on a race start line.
It's the kind of test we love: not a lab claim, but a real rider racing a frame they built with their own hands.
Read the full road.cc story:
- Building a bamboo bike part 6: time for a ride! (road.cc)
- New video series: building a bamboo bike (road.cc, the start of the build)
- Bike at bedtime: bamboo road bike made with the easy build home kit (road.cc)
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As featured by road.cc. Bamboo Bicycle Club has trained 4,000+ builders across 36+ countries since 2012.
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