". . .drove it into a telephone poll?"

Now THAT I'd like to see. Sometimes my own typos make me giggle.

I built a couple of motorcycle engined wooden formula cars (one of them a kind of cross between a Lotus 72 and a Morgan. Why waste a perfectly good motorcycle suspension? I never took any pictures of those in the first place) as well. I really do like wood a lot (see Sloane's book A Reverence for Wood) and think it's often a shamefully overlooked engineering material these days, but there is a place and reason for metal.

And disposable aluminum cooking foil is a much bigger sustainability problem than a few pounds of reusable and recyclable bike frame.

Well there ya go. My argument exactly. Now go out and recover a steel frame from the scrap yard and put the whole thing back into service for another generation.

"Do you have any pictures of your "wooden" bike?"

In one of those "life events" most of the photographs I took before 1980, including the ones of the bike. have been lost to me, negatives and all (things like that were prone to happen before we could back them up across the Internet). If mine and yours were parked side by side an onlooker would likely guess that they were by the same builder, but that mine was the prototype. I did a cruder job, but mine really did look that much like yours. I was influenced by the Bowden Spacelander. Were you as well?

Wanna see the pictures of my '68 Triumph GT6 after my brother drove it into a telephone poll? For some reason I still have those. I hope it ended up getting recycled into bicycles instead of just being tossed into the heap to gradually return to unrecoverable oxide. I hate that sort of waste.

Then I built a conventional lugged steel frame, which, as it happens, is sitting right across the room from me right now as I'm giving the bike an overhaul decades later. If I live long enough there's no reason I shouldn't be giving it an overhaul decades from now. There's a 30 year old Peugeot right next to it that I've just finished overhauling.

There is a *125* year old child's tricycle on the bench over there; and when I'm through with it some kid will be riding it – and them maybe HIS kids.

Lord only knows where the remains of the "wood" bike are now.

I ride steel bikes; for all the reasons already listed here by others.

This wood bike (and mine before it) isn't a wood bike at all; it is a wood and METAL bike; and epoxy resin, and urethane foam, and . . .

It's very energy intensive, very petroleum intensive and very chemically toxic, but at least it won't have a life cycle anywhere near as long as a steel bike and will be almost entirely non recyclable; so it's got that going for it.

It's a cool project. I'm glad I did it. I'm glad YOU did it; but you're, ummmmmm, barking up the wrong tree, as it were. There is no sustainability issue with metals that have such a long duty cycle, are being used in the most efficient manner possible and are so easily recycled into as new raw material.

Let us say the average bicycle weighs 25 lbs. How many bicycles do you think you could build by recycling the steel in just ONE Chevy Big Block?

How about how many from just ONE industrial beam recovered and recycled from a building or bridge being taken down?

The problem with metals isn't sustainability, the problem is WASTE, the DISPOSAL of perfectly good "stuff."

Your bike will do nothing to address this issue and will mean the waste of formerly living entities (which when alive happen to ALSO be atmospheric CO2 scrubbers) instead of lifeless minerals.

But it IS cool.

Now go out and build a steel and aluminum bike. Your great grand kids will probably think it's pretty cool to be riding a bike built by an ancestor and this one isn't going to last that long.

It´s a great Idea

Thanks for helping our planet with its ideas..

Good Job!

Seeya

João Underground