those are made by Calfee Design, the first one is a road bike made of bamboo:
really beautiful craftsmanship, isn't it?
what I found even more cool is their mountain bike made from a fallen tree branch:
the interesting part is that especially bamboo beats any of the "classic" materials like steel or aluminium and even the modern hi-tech materials like titanium or carbon, you actually have all the good features of those materials connected: the stiffness of titanium, the lightness of carbon, and the crash safety and damping characteristics of steel.
sadly the frames are a bit on the pricey side yet, the bamboo road bike frame goes for $ 3200, but that's most likely because of the small series production, the question is how well such frames can be built in mass production...I guess the material itself can't be machined automatically too well.
another company which is a step further already in context with producing bigger series is Boo Cycles:
http://boobicycles.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
their frames are not fully bamboo though, the "hard to manufacture" parts are still metal or carbon....still a very interesting concept (but also still at a pretty high price).
I will look around a bit, maybe I get a chance to do a test drive with a Boo bike somewhere...
