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This is a ride that will leave you feeling very good - exercise aside. As Chuah points out, “a handcrafted bamboo bicycle can degrade itself because we're using plant-based ingredient to build the frame. So we do not need to extract new, additional material from the earth. It's always replenishing itself."
"Even though we have technology to recycle iron ore ... we need to look at the longer term,” said Chuah on his decision to go au naturel with his creations.
But as green as bamboo bikes can be, there is just one natural problem with the strong but flexible material that can't be avoided – cracking.
“Why does it crack? The water in the fibre of the bamboo would evaporate and the process would induce the bamboo to crack,” explained Chuah .
But banish all thought of the bike snapping in two like a twig as you race down a leafy lane. That won't happen, assures Chuah, who has a sweet solution provided again by mother nature.
“The main technology, honey-infused... involves infusing honey into the bamboo,” said Chuah.
“The main function is that it would replace the water in the fibre of the bamboo and reduce the possibility of cracking.”
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Being handcrafted, a basic Bamboo Bee bike costs about S$1,000 (US$800).
“We put our heart and soul to produce the bikes. One bike takes about 70 hours to produce, and this is excluding sourcing for the bamboo,” said Chuah, who goes on to explain how the bamboo has to be hand-picked for bike-crafting.
A year into his venture, Chuah will be back on Kickstarter, with his new baby, the bamboo bike for kids!
Bamboo Bee will take kiddy-steps with the children bikes that launch mid-June with a price tag of S$130 to S$150.
Much as he loves his creation, Chuah
doesn’t expect “cyclists to throw their bikes and buy our bamboo bikes”.
All he wants, Chuah the pragmatist states simply, is for “more people to cycle”.
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