Guest Lecture: Bike technology from carbon-fiber to bamboo 

Last week bike pioneer Craig Calfee visited UAS Technikum Wien and talked about the history of Calfee Design. The main question of his story was “How can I leverage this idea for the greatest good?”

Let’s start at the beginning: Craig Calfee is the pioneer of carbon-fiber-bicycles. In the 1990s carbon-fiber (for bikes) was a new technology. Only Craig and his team were able to build those bikes. The story of Calfee Design started with a vision in a little garage in San Francisco, when the instant big break happened.

Craig wanted to take his personal level to the highest in cycling. So he expanded the idea, coming up with creative solutions, to help mankind with the problems of the world. 1984 he was on a travel through Africa, when he saw that many people there had many problems. But what do they have too much? Bamboo!

Meanwhile there was worldwide attention for carbon-frames. First, Calfee Design had a big effort with carbon-fiber-tandems. One coasts about 20.000$.

“We have figured our lifestyle out”, Craig says with a smile on his face, as he shows a picture of his team at the company in California, at the beach (near Santa Cruz).

From 1995 onwards, Craig and his team studied bamboo-bikes. A few years later they started to sell them. They created a bike design for Africa and got some help to start the project. The different countries get different names for the bikes, e.g. in Zambia the bamboo-bikes are called “zam-bikes”. “For us it is also important to break with stereotypes”, Craig says and shows some pictures of women working on bikes, which is unusual for many places in Africa. The bamboo-bikes project had to go through a learning-process: first they tried to make them super-cheap with cheap wheels. But in Africa people tend to overload their bikes, so Calfee had to figure out how to make the bikes both super-cheap and super-strong.

In the 1980s, the idea of carbon-fiber-bikes was laughed at. Now people also laughed, as Craig was thinking about bamboos and bicycles. “It is important to think outside the box”, he says.
“The people in Africa try to sell the bikes by themselves and they also do some cycling-tours, which is a fun program.  For them it is important to be able to carry enormous loads of weight and to build the bikes in the middle of nowhere.”

For one world, with carbon-fiber-bikes, it is important to create fast bikes with a minimum weight. With bamboo-bikes, there are completely different problems.

Craig Calfee has another (fun) project going on, with his wife, where they both drove with a tandem through Europe with a self-built solar-panel. The real-world-experiences-testing is important for Craig, so you can find solutions afterwards.

After the lecture, all students and guests were able to raise some money for worldbike.org. A total of 169 Euros was collected and UAS Technikum Wien added another 54, so a total of 250 Euros was donated to worldbike.org