Thanks for the props there eagle eye. "wrapping" would have been way more difficult to do than use the acutal tubes. And as somebody else pointed out, where in the hell are you going to find a bike with that type of aggressive geometry?

For the rest who were interested I did cut up an old bike and used about 2" of each pipe as an inner lug to mount the bamboo tubes to. I used expoxy thickened with micro-balloons to do the basic joints and taped, zip tied or whatever else to get them lined up. I used the TLAR method so it's not perfectly aligned but who really cares on a project like this. Then the joints are wrapped with 170lb test hemp and saturated with epoxy to secure them. I've worked with carbon and kevlar for a while so I'm pretty sold on the idea that the bike will hold. Here's a few pics of the work in progress.

This is what I started with.


ended up with the pile you see in the corner


My tubing


After torching to remove as much H2O as possible. Really stiffens the tubing


All the joints drying.


The forks are just extended and wrapped with hemp. I didn't have the balls to run bamboo tubes there. I'm very seriously considering swapping over to a springer front end.

Sorry for the thread hijack, NAES