We love all bikes on The Spoken, but sometimes the most impressive ones are those that push the boundaries of frame design and materials. Right now, we’re totally bugging out on these bamboo bikes from Germany’s Ozon Cyclery.
It’s always a challenge to use non-traditional materials for a bike frame and make it look good as well. Looking good isn’t the ultimate goal of a bike, of course, and it’s completely subjective, but it will help it to make them commercially viable.
Ozon Cyclery has successfully managed to engineer a bamboo bike construction system that hits the apex in the curve between aesthetics and structural integrity. Not only that, they’ve distilled it into a kit form so you can make one yourself.
The company began in 2009, formed from a group of friends fascinated by the possibility of making bikes out of bamboo. They refined the process until 2013 when they began teaching workshops in Lichtenberg, Berlin.
These days Ozon Cyclery are more focused on providing support for other workshops and DIY enthusiasts. They launched a Kickstarter project to supply kits to their backers that contain absolutely everything they need to make a bamboo bike.
The bikes are constructed from bamboo and a special fiber weave similar to custom carbon frame makers, using jigs that are basic yet effective. The range of kits includes kick bikes, commuters, sport-tourers, gravel bikes, track bikes and cargo bikes.
The kits offered to Kickstarter backers included everything required to build the frame: jigs, bamboo, epoxy resin, additives, varnish, dropouts, steerer tube, seat tube sleeve and bottom bracket shell, composite cloth and the CAD drawings.
The finishing kits aren’t included, so you can build up the frame to your own spec. Ozon Cyclery’s Kickstarter goal has already been reached, but you can still secure your own kit.
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