Bikes as accessories and furniture!
More hipster chic for the conspicuous consumption loft apartment cycling scene. Be sure to make it in a FG though – more street cred – esp with an argyle top tube pad.

I don’t think wood / plywood by itself can do the work – a carbon / plywood / kevlar mix would help, much like in lightweight wooden kayak designs – or you have to go monocoque (sp?) construction like the Portland folks – which is a pretty interesting approach.

Wood is not good in tension – (and can actually be quite horrible with catasrophic failure) – so you’d have to design the frame to the strengths and weaknesses of the materials – and be sure that any failure was one that happened slowly – snapping of anything would be a bad thing.

To the ‘fighter plane’ comment – yes – as a cyclist you could possibly develop enough force locally (in proportion to member size of the loaded joint) that you compete with an airplane (think bottom bracket, fork over a bump on a high speed turn, standing and sprinting forces on the whole frame…) – planes and boats made out of wood typically have framework and exterior skins which help distribute the shear forces across the structure – so a comparison to a bike – where the frame is it – isn’t really apt – and many of these structures have redundancies within – structure backing up structure… a bike is pretty simple compared to this – the frame is it – not much cross bracing, wire tension ties, etc. etc.

I’m all for new materials entering the bike world (and I work in the wood industry) – but plywood furniture isn’t exactly dynamically loaded 100′s of times a minute during a ride. I’d be curious to see how / if a plybike could be made to handle the stresses – but my guess is the laminate process – including kevlar, carbon, etc. etc. would play a role – and you’d still have to have plenty of metal bits – threads for the BB, mounts for brakes, bearings, etc. Calfee is essentially using bamboo to its strength – in tubular form. There’s probably a fair amount of epoxy, resin, etc. holding the joints together.

The link to the wooden bents and trikes are pretty cool – looks like he’s taking cues from boat builders and creating shell like structures – something harder to do on a DF design… wonder why he didn’t make wooden fenders?

In addition to the wood bike links left here by Antti, Mr. Beattie, and Tirapop, I have received a few more links by email. Fritz, you will be glad to know that I will put all of those links into another wooden bike post when I get the chance. Keep the links coming.

Oh yeah, thanks for the design suggestions too. I doubt I will take this idea past the thumbnail sketch stage, but I still like to hear ideas for doing so. That is what design is all about. Good discussion.

I like seeing the bent ply sketches. I’ve had an idea I’ve been kicking around for a long time, a wood monocoque bike frame.
http://flickr.com/photos/tirapop/
Laminated wood leaf springs suspend the saddle. The nonsense to the right is a woven basket/fairing with integrated headlight.

My day job is analyzing the structure of airplanes. Looking at thin flat laminated top and down “tubes”, what jumps out at me is the challenge to provide enough torsional rigidity between the handlebars. I haven’t read any reviews of the Waldmeister. I don’t know if it’s excessively whippy when you’re cranking hard on the pedals. Its “down tube” isn’t particularly thin, which would help. You might go thick in the “down tube” and thinner in the other “tubes” and stays.

…yes, the fact that you are utilizing an inherent capacity of plywood, especially in light of the bowed shapes you’ve conceived of, seems to be an intelligent direction to explore…

…w/ the steaming & bending involved, you might consider doing a twist on the seat & chain stays right before the dropout…you would lose very little vertical compliance or lateral stiffness (there are those catch phrases we all joke about) & it might provide a stronger, less problematic dropout…

…maybe we can get erik k to provide a link he has on his site for two more wonderful looking wood bikes…
…one in plywood & one in walnut, i believe…

Check these wooden recumbent’s made by Saku Holma.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/saholm/

BTW. Saku lives in Alvar Aalto’s hometown.

Whoever said that is clueless, pure and simple. I find the hubris of some people in the cycling world to be truly staggering. People will say wood or carbon fiber or aluminum isn’t strong enough for a bicycle and yet we have ships and airplanes made out of these materials. Do you seriously expect me to believe that you as a cyclist are going to put a bike through more stress than what an airplane wing, ship hull, or helicopter rotor sees? Are you serious? Get real. There have been thousands of wooden aircraft – including 300+mph fighter planes – that took more abuse than any bicycle will ever see. Ditto for alloy and composites. The fact that these materials have had issues when used in cycling applications has little to do with the material and lot to do with the incompetence of the designers and mechanics in the cycling industry. Little surprise that two of the best (and most durable) carbon bikes come from Craig Calfee and Bob Parlee both of whom entered cycling from other industries.