By Alex Gecan
I decided to pedal my old aluminum Trek out to Red Hook from Morningside Heights rather than wait for the C-train. I arrived at the Bamboo Bike Studio, at 201 Richards St. a little before 7:00. Sean Murray, one of the co-founders of the studio, was arriving at the same time; he laughingly explained that, while the students had checked in and were receiving a brief tutorial on frame geometry, the real building process wouldn’t begin for another hour.
I had come to watch Murray – who founded the studio along with its mastermind, Marty Odlin, and their friend Justin Aguinaldo – teach six students to build fully-functioning bicycles out of bamboo—yes, bamboo. The students, all cyclists of varying degrees, had paid a little under $1000 each to participate in the workshop. They were as giddy as I was.
I first spoke to Odlin over the racket of a drill press, with which he was boring out spools—“This is my least favorite part of this job”—around which a volunteer would wrap the carbon-fiber roving that would eventually bind together the bike frames. “Every week people come here that have never built a bike,” he said. “People freak out, people can’t believe that they’re riding a bike that they made.”
The group of six began by making sure that the foam joints between the custom-fit bamboo tubes were secure. Then they filed them down to an aerodynamic profile. They gave the joints a preliminary coat of resin, squeezing out the excess with perforated rubber tape, and then wrapped them in woven fiberglass. Finally, they wrapped each joint in the carbon-fiber roving, which gives each joint, or “lug,” its rigidity. The resin on the carbon had to dry, and the studio owners apparently didn’t want to put intricate tools in the hands of exhausted amateurs.
The next step was to file down the lugs to streamline the frames. The students were obliged to put on long sleeves to prevent irritation from the carbon fiber dust, so they turned out the lights and opened all the windows to try—unsuccessfully—to dispel some heat.
The filing lasted into the late afternoon. Finally, the students applied a final coat of resin. As they filed and pasted, I cornered Odlin for a half-hour, tearing him away from the jigs he was building to ply him for information.
Odlin has been building bamboo bike frames since the spring of 2007 when, living in Seattle, he first built a bamboo mockup to practice frame geometry before welding a conventional metal frame. Upon seeing the mockup, a friend of his turned him on to the Bamboo Bike Project. The project seeks to establish bike factories in Ghana and elsewhere in Africa where local residents can take jobs building higher-quality bikes out of inexpensive bamboo to provide an alternative to expensive, shoddy metal bikes imported from Asia. “It’s a cheaper and better bike for people who are very, very cost conscious,” Odlin said.
He moved to New York in 2008. Maintaining a day job as Director of the Center for Sustainable Engineering at Columbia University’s engineering school (his prototype of a solar water heater hangs in the studio), he joined forces with Aguinaldo, a professional bike messenger, and Murray, then a high school teacher at the Churchill School and Center in Manhattan. The threesome continued, using only their own savings, to research the feasibility of bamboo frames; they refer to themselves as the Bamboo Bike Project’s “engineering team.”
In the middle of our conversation, five young women on bicycles, all of them wearing at least some pink, rode by, catcalling each other and loudly making plans for the afternoon. “A bike gang?” Odlin chuckled. As though suddenly aware that I had a tape recorder running, he added, “The sounds of Red Hook.”
When Odlin and his partners used up their personal savings, they started offering workshops, reinvesting the money they earned into research, development and testing (every time they tweak a design, they submit their prototype to 3,000 miles of test rides). They intend to guide the project’s first factory through the construction of the first 100 bikes and then, Odlin said, “Send them on their way.”
Back in the studio, the six participants had gone to dinner. Josh, a professional bike messenger who volunteers to do assembly work at the studio, began training Vince, a new volunteer, on the specifics of pressing headsets, which guide a bicycle’s steering mechanism, and installing bottom brackets, which house the core of the pedal assembly.
Unable to resist, I joined in on the seminar. “Why don’t you install this crank arm?” he said to me, then to Vince, waiting to see if we would attach the arms at 90-degree angles to their counterparts instead of the correct 180-degree angle.
We attached the arms correctly and Josh beamed, confessing that he had expected us to botch the job as he himself had his first time. “When you’re taught the hard way, you tend to teach that way,” he told us.
With wheels, handlebars and brakes (which, of course, are not made of bamboo) installed, Mark, the first student with a completed bike, took a test drive. He disappeared around the corner onto Coffee Street, returning up Richards from Van Dyke a moment later, arms aloft, screaming “Bamboo rules!”
I jealously looked on as Mark finished his test ride. He compared the stiffness and responsiveness of the frames to carbon or aluminum, but praised the bamboo’s ability absorb road vibrations.
The bike gurus and their apprentices kept working late into the night, eventually opening a bottle of wine that Laura, a student from Vermont, had brought from her private cellar. They toasted each other and their new bikes. By that point, most of them were sitting on stools and toolboxes, exhausted from the weekend. “Mama needs a shower,” said Anna, another one of the students, fanning herself and sipping wine.
Murray has since quit his teaching job to devote his full attention to the studio and its beneficiary bike project, and the studio has attracted an avid medley of volunteers and employees. Ben, another volunteer, recently quit his job at another conventional bike shop to work with bamboo full-time.
For the $948 that students pay, they receive a sturdy, shock-absorbent bike frame and a competitive component package—wheels, tires, cranks, pedals, handlebars, brakes, and in some cases, shifters.
Odlin told me that the studio guarantees the bikes against defects; if you somehow damage the frame, you can bring it back and they’ll repair or replace it. I thought about the carbon seat post that I had recently severed from heavy riding and envied the students their warrantee.
The studio has also taught its process all over New York, from a bike-building elective that Murray taught at Churchill to an artist-in-residence program at the Museum of Art and Design. “We aggressively give away our intellectual property every weekend,” joked Murray.
Soon, Murray and his wife will be moving to San Francisco to set up a second studio. Odlin said that he hopes the new studio will be more of a business than a research project so that Murray can earn a living off of it.
“I think it’s really fun to build bikes,” Odlin said. “I think it’s really fun to build anything.”
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