Mystery wooden bike

Soon after I mentioned the JANO bike in June of last year, a reader, Roberto, sent me this image of another wooden bike. The message and image kind of got lost in the shuffle until he recently sent me another email about something else. Anyway, Roberto doesn’t really remember where he found this image. He thinks it came from online coverage of Eurobike at some point. He wants to find out more about the bike, so I am wondering if any of you can help him out? The cables reminded me of the old, and I guess also the new, Slingshot frames (something Roberto mentioned as well). If you can identify this bike, leave a comment; I am a bit curious about it too.

This is only tangentially related to bicycle design, but I just received a flyer in the mail for the Systems, Cities, & Sustainable Mobility Summit. The event takes place February 5-7 at the Art Center in Pasadena. It sounds pretty interesting, but I won’t be able to travel to California for it. I am just wondering if any of you west coast readers are thinking about attending. Paul Hawken will be the keynote speaker and, having read a couple of his books, I would love to hear what he has to say. Fill me in if you decide to attend.

Update 2/4/08: Thanks to Peter at Velo Vision for identifying this bike and it’s designer. Apparently it was made by James Coleman of Loughborough University and was on display at the Cycle 2002 show in London.

Posted

January 4, 2008

Wooden Bike

James

Tags:

eurobike, MTB, wooden bike

Comments

7 responses to “Mystery wooden bike”

eradler

January 4, 2008

looks like IKEA design 😉

some suspicious candidates:

http://www.xylonbikes.com/
http://www.waldmeister-bikes.de/
http://gp.co.at/works/jano/
http://digilander.libero.it/felixpetrelli/index.htm

cheers

Reply
Fritz

January 5, 2008

That’s a sharp looking bike.

Hey, I have press credentials for the Tour of California. Team BMC is in town for training. Are there any intelligent questions I can ask the riders who are here?

Reply
Carlton

January 5, 2008

James

That looks an awful lot like a bike that was on the ‘innovators gallery’ at the London Cycle Show some 3-4 years ago. It was by a design student. I’ll have details somewhere – I ran some details on the design students in the mag version of BikeBiz.

Reply
eradler

January 7, 2008

forgot to say- that I assume that this bike does not work – if you hit a rock then the upper frame bar is bending- there is only a cable on the lower side- which cannot take compressive forces….

Reply
James

January 8, 2008

Fritz, you are asking me for intellegent questions? that is a lot of pressure, but I will try.

Carlton, thanks; it looks like a possible student design. Let me know if you find the issue of Bike Biz that featured that show.

Eradler, you are probably right. You wouldn’t want to ride this thing straight into a big rock or curb head on. The same is probably true for Slingshots though I have never actually ridden one.

Reply
bikesgonewild

January 8, 2008

…my assumption would be that the top bar is a laminate and would have an inherent amount of vertical flex…however, your point is taken, eradler, in that if you stuff this bike headfirst, you may get splinters in places you really don’t want ’em…

…it is interesting how many one-off wood framed bikes one encounters on the i-net…

Reply
Anonymous

January 19, 2008

great. another wood bike.

i have news for you- wood is NOT a good material for bikes. enough already!

Reply