Cardboard Bike Hopes to See Commercial Production

OK, you can build a bike out of cardboard, bamboo, hemp, or cow dung if you coat with enough plastic or polymers. It will probably use more non environmentally friendly materials and cost more than if you used plain old steel tubing.

Why, why, why?

After seeing the original video of Gafni’s bike, the concept was pretty fascinating (apart from the solid tires, which really can’t offer sufficient traction a typical rider – but I guess he could be the first to make that happen).

The truly amazing thing about this project is that everyone reporting on it seems to think that it will actually be available to purchase for $20 or less. I have no doubt that $20 would cover the basic elements of this bike, but here’s the thing about manufactured goods: They take time, employees, and workspace to produce.

Materials may be cheap (as raw materials usually are – very, very cheap), but time is expensive. You’re paying for the skilled labor and operating costs involved in turning raw materials into a useable product.

The team of workers in the first video aren’t going to build these things for free. Skilled employees like these cost upward of $150 per day in the U.S. – per person, mind you. Even at minimum wage, a safely rideable bicycle like this would end up costing at least a few hundred dollars. Before these guys even get started, there has to be a sufficient place to actually work. Such facilities are not free to anybody.

I suppose the design specs could be made available to do-it-yourself in the garage at home. How much is your time worth, though? If you take a day or two off work and add $20 in materials, how much did this functionally sub-standard contraption actually cost you? If you have the tooling necessary, and you’re making a menial $150 per day at your regular job and you somehow manage to single handedly produce a functional cardboard bike in one day, you’ve spent $20 and lost $150. So the cost is $170 at a bare minimum, and that number ramps up pretty quickly when you start adding monthly rent, shop maintenance, and basic utilities.

If a shop in your neighborhood is making and selling these things, they’ll likely cost more than you want to pay for a flammable single-speed bike with solid tires.

The only thing I want to know is if it is compatible with a campy seat post ?

“Elmish said the cardboard bikes would be made on largely automated production lines and would be supplemented by a workforce comprising pensioners and the disabled.”

“Elmish said the business model they had created meant that rebates for using “green” materials would entirely cancel out production costs and this could allow for bicycles to be given away for free in poor countries.”

Poor countries don’t need some fancy designs and utopian ideas but simple, effective and economical solutions.
Simple strong steel bikes last ages and are easy to repair/weld in a field or a basic workshop but also use fairly standard components.
Cardboard structure no matter how strong will be relatively easy to pierce/puncture and its lifespan will be very limited in a daily use/abuse.
Even if cardboard bikes end up somehow cheaper than standard bikes they are not going to represent a long term value to any user.

More maths, less ideology.

I’ll also add that I have mistakenly assumed that the tires are solid, but looking at photos of Elmish’s bike, I see what can only be an air valve extending from each rim, meaning that the tires must hold air. This begs a few questions:

Can a card board rim hold the pressure of a clincher tire?

If not, how does a bike mounted with $60 in cheap tubular tires cost just $20?

@Chainwhipped:

If you add a lot of resin (not the cheap stuff, the real industrial thing!) paper can withstand such forces. But with this resin, a bike like this is anything but “green”. And I won’t gift such a bike to anyone in the 3rd world, where nearly no infrastructure exists to dispose such a material, so it will be burned (and even in the 1st world recycling such a construction which uses resin is nearly impossible and will costs the tenth of the building process…)

@Chainwhipped. Menial $150.00/day wage? You hiring?

The Cardboard Bike indiegogo project is now LIVE!

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-cardboard-bike