It's all been done: Wooden Bicycles

Here's a rushed history of bike frame materials:

In the beginning all bikes were made of wood, starting with the first pedal-driven two-wheelie thing (below), made by a Scottish blacksmith named Kirkpatrick MacMillan in 1830-ish.

Within a few decades the frame material of choice changed to forged steel, joined at the joints by little couplings that had to be manually tightened with a wrench. A few years after that they started using steel tubes, held into tight stainless lug fittings by melting brass into the gap between the metals (brazing). This remained the primary bike construction material and method until being supplanted by welded Aluminum in the 1980s and '90s.

Steel and aluminum are strong, light, cheap, and easy to work with metals, great for building bike frames with the same qualities.

Great for the sheep that is.

Some of us serious bike nerds require some sort of innovation in our favorite machines, or failing that, novelty. It's not enough that they get us from point to point quickly, cheaply, and reliably, but they have to look dope too. Being in the vanguard of technical or fashionable evolution says to the world: "Hey, I'm just really great. Don't you think so?" And the world, of course, is unable to refute.

Cool early carbon bike, 
but the quick release is on the wrong side

One of my favorite bike designers is a guy named Craig Calfee, an early pioneer of carbon fiber frames and components. Though Calfee'd only been making frames for a few years, he made a fleet for Greg Lemond's Tour de France team in 1991 that rode the Minnesotan phenom into the yellow jersey for five stages.

The guy's good. After introducing the world to carbon bikes on the greatest possible stage and bringing about a paradigm shift in the rules of performance bike design* he started messing around with other possible frame materials. He got a lot of press for a bike made from bone, but in 2005 he started selling bikes made of bamboo, and for that he's gotten a lot more attention, spawning dozens of copy-cats.

But I'm here to tell you, ladies and gentlemen of the internet, it is in fact Craig Calfee who is the copy-cat! Behold!

This bike, made of bamboo tubes fitted to steel lugs, was built by the Huseby company in 1910. I saw it at the Museum of Science and Industry on a free day. What's interesting about this bike is that the fork and headtube are wood, as are the rims and the center of the hubs. Most wooden bikes you see these days through, like Boo Bikes or Bamboosero(Calfee's African bike manufacturing nonprofit), only use wood for the larger tubes, but Huseby goes all out.

I'm not trying to throw shade on Calfee, after all, I think he's one of the greats. But I do want to show that in the bicycle's ~180 year history pretty much everything's been tried. True innovation is rare, but there's always room for improvement on old designs, and I'm a fan of this new-wave of bamboo bikes.

Now if you really want to go wild for natural frame materials, check out this mahogany wonder from Renovo:

Forget what it weighs, how it rides, or how tough it is, that bike looks hot.






* it's worth noting that Kestrel made the very first all-carbon bike in '86 and a few other companies had been using carbon tubes since the '70's