The Wooden Bicycle: Around the World (English and German Edition)

Though the first bicycles were made from wood, this is not a book of historical bicycles for collectors so much as it is a snapshot of 137 contemporary individual craftsmen working out details of how to make a bicycle out of wood as they create the future. While a few wooden bicycles are included in almost every book of collectible bicycles, this book is focused on exploring wood as a current medium for experimentation. The bikes shown all have wildly different varieties of construction. Though many of the bikes are available for purchase, such as Renovo as well as Craig Calfee Designs, a number of them are not & were included for winning a design competition or a school project. Each bike is displayed on a 1-2 page photographic spread of 3-5 pictures with a couple of paragraphs from the designer describing his vision. The main shortcoming of this book is that there is too little copy describing each bike. There is no review of how the bike rides or an important table of frame weights & specifications. The text is limited to each designers' brief statement describing each bike. Though the amount of text varies between 114-370 words, it usually averages about 200 words. The section on Craig Calfee's bamboo bicycles are a 2-page spread with 9 photographs & 204 words of text to describe his building the carbon-fiber bikes that Greg Lemond's team rode to victory in the 1991 Tour de France. The section on Renovo, one of the biggest and most most successful wood bicycle companies, that makes a hollow-tube split and pinned design is also a 2 page spread with 6 photographs with 550 words of text. Unfortunately, it does not show the internal cross-section that was featured on Renovo's website. Sadly, after the book was printed in 2017, Renovo closed on 10/4/17. If you are interested in historical wooden bicycle designs such as the Elliot Hickory, there is a page on American Wood Bicycle Components 1896-97. This is followed by a page on bamboo bicycles. As a historian who has presented at The International Cycle History Conference I was very happy to see these pages so carefully documented. This book documents current manufacture and makes a valuable addition to the library of any cyclist or carpenter.

Interesting subject, not really done enough credit by the author. If you're not all that keen on reading, and you would like a glossy, wooden bike builders business directory, then you've found it.

A really good book! But you probably can find all of this online.

Perfeito, um lindo exemplar muito bem ilustrado, uma bela amostragem da diversidade de projetos espalhados pelo mundo. Muito útil o glossário de sites, para aprofundar a pesquisa.