DIY bamboo bike building kit from Calfee on Kickstarter

Calfee Design announced their new bamboo bike building kit at the North American Handmade Bicycle Show on Friday. For the crazy low price of $580, you get the tools and supplies you need to build your very own bamboo bicycle frame.

NAHBS 2016 photo dump

From their experience with the Bamboosero Project, Craig Calfee and his team created a kit to allow the ambitious home maker to build his or her own bamboo bike. For the $580 introductory price, you get a tool kit, a materials kit, and a one month rental for a mitering tool.

The tool kit includes a jig and various other tools you’ll need to build the frame. You still need to provide some other basic tools such as a hacksaw, bench vise, files, knife, and so forth.

Calfee DIY bamboo bike kit tools

The materials has everything else you need to build a frame for a road, mountain, city, or BMX style bicycle: bamboo, casting tape, bottom bracket, dropouts, epoxy, seat tube and head tube. The casting tape is used to join the bamboo pieces together.

Calfee DIY bamboo bike kit tools

Calfee Design’s booth included proof-of-concept bikes built by high school students using this kit. The frames are fairly heavy. You’ll need to provide the forks and all of the components, too: wheels, gears, chain, crank, brakes, cabling, handlebars, steerer, seatpost, saddle.

Calfee explains more over at the Kickstarter page for this project. I personally would love to get one of these for my birthday.

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