Bamboo Bicycle Club

16/10/2026

Jim Clossick built this bike in his garage in Miami. Then he rode it 206.9 miles through the mud of Unbound Gravel 2026, finishing in 20 hours 21 minutes, at 63. Nearly one in five riders in his race didn't finish.

It's our Gravel Lugged kit, painted black and named MNLB: My Next Last Bike. It's his fifth home-built frame in ten years, after a single speed, a 17 lb race bike and a balsa-wood bike. In his words, it "held up superbly in a race where many store-bought bikes failed."

Next stop: the seven-day Gravel Burn across South Africa's Karoo, from 25 October.

Read Jim's story: https://bamboobicycleclub.org/blogs/club-news/jim-clossick-bamboo-gravel-bike-unbound-200

15/10/2026

Our new ebike, it’s our 3rd version and we’re really happy with it, we’ll release some ride images and content this week.

11/10/2026

Image of a bicycle, what’s missing? Learn the parts!

11/10/2026

How many parts in a bicycle frame

04/10/2026

Our most accessible build is great as a gift or a new project. It’s run as a STEM project with schools and at the core of our prison work, acting as a tool for family connections and training

29/09/2026

Gravel lugged kit simple to build!

07/09/2026

Can a bamboo offcut make your phone louder?

This 45-second Foundation activity turns a bamboo offcut into a passive phone speaker. Learners shape, test and evaluate the result—bringing craft, sound and engineering together.

Explore the free Speaker introduction and our wider education pathways: https://bamboobicycleclub.org/pages/programmes

28/08/2026

A confession: we've been building bamboo bikes since 2012, and until this summer we'd never once seen our bamboo before it reached a warehouse.

So we went to the source. A trial order, harvested for us in India at the end of May — and this time we followed every stage. Node punctured so the treatment gets right inside. Hot-dipped in boric-borax. Dried when the monsoon allowed. Checked pole by pole, packed, certified, and off towards the ship.

And then the half of the story we usually forget to show: the same material, graded and labelled as bike tubing, built up in the London workshop, and finished as joints strong enough to ride hard for years.

It's all part of our work with researchers at the University of Manchester on bamboo as a serious structural material. When the poles land, we'll build with them and tell you exactly how they compare — good and bad.

From a grove in India to a gravel bike. Which photo surprised you most?

25/08/2026

In the last 4 months we've opened our 4th prison site at HMP Lindholme. Somthing different feel free to ask any questions!

Our six-week bamboo bike-building course is now live at HMP Lindholme, Doncaster — hand tools, an OCN London Level 2 course, and a first cohort...

29/06/2026

Five years ago a man named Kirui came over from Kenya on a scholarship, sat at our bench, and built his first bamboo bike. We waved him off and didn't hear much for a while.

Last week he turned up on Kenyan national TV — and he's been busy.

Kirui's building bamboo bikes in Nairobi now. Lovely natural frames, no paint at all, and instead of metal lugs he binds the joints with flax and resin — so the whole bike stays repairable and honest to the stuff it's made from. He builds them for people in Kenya to ride, not to ship abroad, and he's teaching a younger generation of Kenyans to build them too. He calls it climate action, and you can see why: bamboo's a grass, it grows back fast, and soaks up carbon the whole time.

Here's the bit we love most. His mate Abel in Ethiopia — who builds bamboo wheelchairs, of all things — learned the craft alongside him. Two people, two countries, helping each other out.

He learned a skill and decided what to do with it. That's the best part of this job.

Tag someone who'd love this. Full story (he was featured on NTV Kenya) 👇
https://bamboobicycleclub.org/blogs/impact/kirui-bamboo-bikes-nairobi-kenya

Still: NTV Kenya / Earthwise Mtaani
Music: "Tea Roots" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/