NAHBS 2010 – Boo Bicycles fuses carbon fiber and bamboo to make some lightweight, resilient bikes of all types. Shown above is a fantastically painted track bike (detail photos after the break), and they had a belt drive cyclocross bike and 29er mountain bike on display, too.
Each bike uses bamboo tubes that are hand wrapped with 3K carbon fiber tow (thread). The wrapping technique was the senior thesis project for several Princeton students who then took the idea and are having the frames made in Saigon, Vietnam.
Check out this and the other bikes after the jump…
Handpainted Koi decorate the head- and top tubes on the track bike. The top tube is bamboo that’s been wrapped all the way with carbon fiber thread. The pictures don’t do it justice, but you can see the thread wound down the full length of the tube.
Boo backs their bikes with a 10 year warranty and offers a crash replacement program.
The Boo 29er hardtail was set up with a Gates Carbon Belt Drive and an assortment of Edge Composites components.
Click this one to enlarge and you can get a sense of how painstaking the carbon fiber wrapping process must be.
The 29er and the cyclocross frame (below) share the same sliding dropouts and broken seatstay dropout that allow for the belt to be inserted into the frame. Boo frames are $3,000 for the frame only, and they can offer complete build kits based on your budget and needs. I’ll go ahead and say it: none of these bikes have proper tension in the belts or chains.
The Boo road / ‘cross frame weighs in at about 1,500g (3.31 lbs).
All of the joints are wrapped, cured, sanded, then wrapped some more, putting multiple layers of carbon fiber around each junction.
Click to enlarge and read more about them.
