Can you imagine a huge downpour and when the warm sun comes up, little sprouts of bicycles begin to grow in your backyard? Yes, go back and read that again.
Can you imagine a huge downpour and when the warm sun comes up, little sprouts of bicycles begin to grow in your backyard? Yes, go back and read that again.
Vijay Sharma, has built himself a bicycle from bamboo — and the next bicycle is already growing in his backyard. A designer from the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology, Vijay spends his time designing furniture for large companies. And he breaks the monotony with interesting projects on the side.
So one fine day, Vijay cut down some bamboo and began to build the bicycle that could lead to a sustainable, eco-friendly bicycle manufacturing unit. Because bamboo is not uniform, it can be quite tricky to make the bamboo tubes meet the metal parts. But Vijay used fibreglass in place of epoxy and glue to assemble his first prototype.
The prototype looked nice, worked well, but Vijay discovered it had a bug - actually, quite a few. Literally, woodborers were eating, albeit slowly, into his bicycle. So, he called in a friend, Vaibhav Kale, an expert in building bamboo homes to understand how to treat the bamboo before moving it into production. Although Vijay won’t tell us the exact process — mostly because he is still experimenting and refining it — he is close to a solution.
Using bamboo to build a bicycle frame results in saving about 3.5 kgs of non-renewable steel. That’s quite a saving when you think about bicycles in millions. The good part about bamboo is that it is strong and makes a great natural shock absorber. The real problem is getting all the metal parts to sit in the right place, with the right degree of permanence!
Vijay believes that his bamboo bicycle is so strong that he can take it on the 900-km, eight-day ride called the Tour of Nilgiris. The tour, which is the longest organised bicycle ride in the country and goes through punishing terrain, could very well be the litmus test for the bicycle.
For the moment, Vijay is about to turn out the country’s first eco-friendly bamboo bicycle exclusively for the Tour of Nilgiris. The special bicycle is going to be gifted by Vijay to the organisers of the Tour of Nilgiris — the not-for-profit RideACycle Foundation (
www.rideacycle.org).
In the US, a bamboo bicycle frame alone would cost $500 and a complete bicycle could be $2,500. But Vijay’s bicycle will cost around Rs8,000. Vijay has inquiries for his bicycle from the US. However, he is keen that his bicycle finds a market in India. Behind him is Kannan Narayanaswamy, a Chennai-based promoter of small businesses. It was Narayanaswamy’s idea, in the first place, to move this bicycle to commercial production.
At his HSR layout workshop, in the middle of his hot cup of chai, Vijay looks up as it begins to drizzle. “Yes,” he says putting his hand out in the rain, “My next bicycle harvest is going to be a good one.”
DNA is the official print partner for the Tour of Nilgiris that begins on 15 December 2009. For tour details visit www.tourofnilgiris.com
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