“Could you earn a living, feed your family, get to school if you could only travel on foot?”
Craig Calfee’s pit bull/Labrador retriever mix gave him the idea - an idea that recently drew mobs of bike gearheads to his booth at the 2009 North American Handmade Bicycle Show in Indianapolis, and is creating new, sustainable micro-businesses for craftspeople in developing countries.
“I was playing stick with Luna and she chomped down onto a piece of bamboo,” Calfee said. “We were playing tug of war with it and I expected that she’d crush the bamboo to splinters with her powerful jaws.”
To Calfee’s surprise, the bamboo didn’t break under the intense pressure; her teeth only left a few shallow nicks on the surface.
Luna’s crude and accidental tensile strength and compression test piqued her owner’s interest in bamboo as a viable material for bike frames.
Calfee is no stranger to building bikes. In 1987, he pioneered the use of carbon fiber for elite bicycle frames. Greg Lemond, the first American to win the Tour de France, was one of his first big customers, ordering 18 frames for Team Z.
Calfee made his first bamboo bike as a trade-show attention-getter.
“After the show, I used the bike to get around. And I found that it rode quite nicely,” he said. “The bamboo had a natural vibration dampening quality. So I kept playing with it, working out structure issues and joining techniques. And then I built a few for friends. Word spread and people kept asking about them so I decided to offer them to the public.”
The high-end bamboo bikes made out of Calfee’s Santa Cruz facility sell for around $3000.
“I started thinking about what I was making,” Calfee said. “And I kept going back to when I was a young and foolish traveler at 22 (years old). I traveled across Africa by truck and saw people riding bicycles everywhere, I saw bamboo everywhere.”
Calfee came to the realization that bamboo grows in many third world countries where affordable personal transportation and self-sustaining businesses are desperately needed.
“There isn’t much that these poverty-stricken places can export that isn’t from extractive industries like mining and logging,” Calfee said. “But there is value in labor and manufacturing. And bamboo is plentiful. So why not train Africans to build bicycles to use and sell?”
Calfee first began training bike frame builders, called “bambooseros,” in Ghana a few years ago. Now, bambooseros in Zambia, Mexico, and Uganda are nearly ready to begin production. The Phillipines, Cambodia, and El Salvador are next on Calfee’s itinerary. Even the Peace Corps is helping to set up his bamboo bike workshops.
“We pay bambooseros a premium for the frames, ship them to our facility in the US or Europe, inspect the frames, assemble the parts on the frame, test ride it, and then ship the complete bike to you,” the website, www.bamboosero.com, explains. Frames - available for road, mountain, city, and cargo bikes - go for $425 to $759; a complete bike will cost you $925 to $2800.
The frames have been popular among foreign individuals (for both racing and pleasure), tour groups, and safari companies in Africa.
At the North American Handmade Bicycle Show, a constant crowd hovered around his odd but beautiful bamboo creations. People stopped, stared, and didn’t budge, as if they were in an art museum admiring a masterpiece. And really they were.
The frames are obviously labor intensive to make. Craftspeople hand-wrap each joint with sisal – a natural fiber used for making cordage and rope. Calfee’s goal was to teach bambooseros to build frames without using power tools; most of these communities lack electricity.
Each piece of bamboo has its own unique shape and coloring, and as a result every finished frame is truly one-of-a-kind – literally a traveling piece of sculpture.
But don’t let the elegance and artistry fool you. “These bikes are tough,” Calfee said. “We’ve really put them to the test. One of my favorite stories was from a friend of mine. He was riding his bamboo bike and a woman cornering a turn on her Harley took it too sharp and laid her bike right down on top of him. He crashed his bamboo bike with a Harley and the only thing that broke was the carbon handlebars. The frame was just fine.”
Calfee beamed when he told this story. But, still, he plans to let science be the deciding factor. He is sending a Bamboosero frame to a testing lab in Germany, hoping to certify the quality of his materials.
To find out more, visit calfeedesign.com and www.bamboosero.com.
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