Tag: homemade

  • bamboo bike Part 4: brake bridge and water bottle holder

    bamboo bike Part 4: brake bridge and water bottle holder

    Besides the lugs, the other metal bits on this frame are the brake bridge and the screw bosses for the water bottle holder. For the brake bridge I started with some 1/2″ thick aluminum plate. I sketched a shape on cardboard, traced that onto the metal, and cut it out roughly with a bandsaw. The […]

  • bamboo bike Part 3: lugs

    bamboo bike Part 3: lugs

    With all the tubes tacked in place on the jig, I could start wrapping the lugs. This is a crazy messy business, so I wrapped everything besides the lugs in tape and plastic to minimize the epoxy clean up later. Here’s the frame with the first layer of epoxy on it: Definitely not ready to […]

  • bamboo bike Part 2: fitting the tubes

    bamboo bike Part 2: fitting the tubes

    After building the jig that holds the lugs in place, it was time to fit the bamboo poles together. I found that Orchard Supply Hardware was the easiest place to get bamboo (neither Home Depot or Lowe’s near me had it). You can definitely order bamboo online, but I found OSH to be much cheaper, […]

  • bamboo bike Part 1: Frame-building Jig

    bamboo bike Part 1: Frame-building Jig

    Almost 9 months ago I built a frame jig for a bamboo bike. Between work and life, I didn’t actually finish the bike until Thansgiving, and I’m only getting around to blogging about it now. Here’s the finished bike: I’ve wanted to build a bamboo bike for a long time. More than a year ago, […]

  • micro drill press

    Hence concludes the many months where I couldn’t get my act together to post about my projects!! Here is a small one that I did a few weeks ago on my last visit to MIT. I spotted the chunk of aluminum (that makes up the base of this drill press) in a scrap bin. The […]

  • Treescooter! (part 1/2)

    I made this scooter in response to Charles’ creation way back when. I started mine soon after he released his to the internet actually, and yea…so its taken a while…but here it is in all its 2-part-blog-entry-photo-filled glory! I live in a place where people leave their tree clippings in a pile by the curb […]

  • Homemade Hand Tapper

    Hi friends who read my blog. Here is a project that has taken just short of forever to finish mostly due to my new Real Person job and its associated Obligations, and minorly due to some tool troubles… “What is a hand-tapper?” Why, it is simply a tool that can hold a tap way straighter […]

  • Dowel Maker

    Today I needed some dowels (for a project I will hopefully post about soon), but didn’t feel like going to the store, so I thought I would try making a dowel maker.There are some awesome plans for dowel makers that use routers and produce fantastic results, so this is for any folks who may not […]

  • A Woodcart

    Now that I have moved away from MIT and am no longer spoiled sick by the awesome machine shops on campus, I am forced to resort to …other methods of construction. Fortunately, I still have one of those benchtop drill presses, though, and a power hand drill, so here’s a project that just uses those. […]

  • Small Bike (part II)

    Small Bike (part I) covered most of the front end and the dropouts. Next I worked on the front and rear forks, which were very similar. Both are essentially 2 dimensional shapes. So I cut them on a waterjet, and then used a boring head on a mill the clean up the tube clamps. For […]