Treehugger: build your own bike at the Bamboo Bicycle Club

In November 2018, the sustainability publication Treehugger ran a feature on the Bamboo Bicycle Club, written by Katherine Martinko: "The Bamboo Bicycle Club Will Teach You How to Build a Bike in a Weekend."

It captured what makes the workshop unusual. The Bamboo Bicycle Club is the only place in the UK where people with no frame-building experience can build a bespoke bamboo bike from scratch — guided, over a two-day weekend course, in a small group. You arrive never having built a bike. You leave with one you made yourself.

The piece also featured Dr Kate Rawles, the environmental writer who built her bamboo bike — which she named Woody — at the Club, from bamboo grown at the Eden Project in Cornwall, with the joints wrapped in Yorkshire hemp and a UK-made plant-based resin. She then rode Woody 8,288 miles down the spine of the Andes through six South American countries, reaching Ushuaia in Patagonia in February 2018.

On how the bike held up, Treehugger quoted her:

"As for Woody, the bamboo bike proved to be extremely tough and reliable, coping with extremes of heat and cold, rain, dryness and altitude. I had virtually no mechanicals on the whole journey!"
— Dr Kate Rawles

Read the original Treehugger feature: <https://www.treehugger.com/bamboo-bicycle-club-will-teach-you-how-build-bike-weekend-4854522>