Thursday, 18 June 2009

Environmentally-friendly, but Financially-fiend [bikes]

Summer has hit. I can see bicycle commuters all around London town in their masses. And as the love for bikes grows, so will the love for mother nature.

And then suddenly, a company called The Calfee, decided to go over the limit and build these..
http://www.thedailygreen.com/cm/thedailygreen/images/CalfeeBambooMountainBike-TDG-GreenSport-fb-91693558.jpg
MTB Calfee.

it looks surprisingly quite astonishing knowing that it's made from Bamboo and Hemp (what? Hemp? GANJA that's more like it) fibres. The bamboo is freshly picked in remote mountains of Taiwan's Yushan National Park, which is then shipped on water to California. This is where the bamboo stems are smoked and heated so it doesnt split. Once that's done, the bamboo stems(which now are tubes) are joined with the others with lugs made of hemp fibre (LEGALISE IT). Then, to top that all off.. it is coated in a satin polyurethane sealant. The frame of the calfee weighs about the same to the metal ones, but the thing is, its not drinking our Earth as much.




http://modculture.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/03/05/calfee.jpg
Racing Calfee.


It's all good cause I've got several points to mention about bamboo:
  • It's the fastest growing plant. Some bamboo species can grow about 1.5 meter a day. Nevertheless, four or five years is needed to have the right quality to build a bike.. and each bike requires only around 3 meters of bamboo.
  • Bamboo absorbs greenhouse gasses five times more than conventional trees that we usually see in boring westernised parks.
  • Also, if everyone start to ride this bike, it would make the whole hectic city, feel like a beach town, feel like living in the tropical weather, feel like home.
So I read some reviews here and there, and found that smoked and heated bamboo absorbs more vibrations out of rides than any other material. They are also more flexible than carbon fibre, however, i don't think they'd be as strong as carbon.

You see, all this sounds so nice doesn't it? OK. Now let me tell you the bad news. First of all, they cost 3000(three-thousand) sterling fucking pounds. Straight away it made me think that this is a fucking intimidation in progressing process! So they want the rich to be environmentally-friendly and leave all the poor to be the bad-guys to Earth? FUCKING POLITICS, man. Bamboo's clearly the fastest growing plant in Earth. Dedicate one whole fucking country to plant only Bamboo trees and then you'll be able to give the whole planet Earth a Calfee. You see, us cyclist we need to work together to intimidate the CAR DRIVERS or more like the VAN DRIVERS out to history, not the other way around!!

At the present, this whole Bamboocycling at 3k quids for being eco-concious still aint making sense and still aint worth the understanding. I mean c'mon, man.. even the NJS approved frames are by far cheaper than these Newbies called Calfees.