You are reading a single comment by @Captain_Blight and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@Captain_Blight
It sounds like Bobby Dids is gagging for it. Lookin' fer a good time, Thailor? ;)
Is it a productive use of my time? Certainly. I am, in addition to a Merchant Marine deckie, an owner of a small business, developing and marketing specialty tools for the riverine tugboat industry. My fiancee is a welder-in-training, and we are always looking for ways to integrate our skills and expand the business. In the Northern Midwest of the USA, oak and ash are a drug on the market; I can buy quartersawn white oak for about a dollar US per square foot, green, from my cousin the independent sawyer. Ash runs about 20% less. So for me to try this idea out in my fairly well-equipped shop doesn't cost me anything but my time, and I'm out there half the time anyway. If nothing else, it would show me what doesn't work, and helps me hone my steambending, jigmaking, and glueup/lamination skills. And I can always burn my mistakes for heat.
Drop bars? Sure, why not? Actually making them wouldn't be that hard. Setting up the jigs for the bends, that's the tough part. That would create lots of little plywood scraps, I think, while I figured out how to do it.
As far as strength goes, consider this. Remember the Olympics? Remember the parallel and uneven parallel bars? Wood laminate. Consider further that wood fails progressively; carbon explosively. If a stack of laminates starts to break, each ply fails before the one beneath it fails. Plenty of warning, and how much weight do you carry on your hands and wrists around the city anyhow? How often do your elbows and shoulders start to ache under the strain? Hardly at all, that's how often.
Nothing, nothing can take as many load cycles as wood can. Not ally, not steel, certainly not CF. Never crystallizes, never rusts, never corrodes galvanically.
Wood is an excellent material for some engineering applications. To get a better strength-to-weight ratio, one can't do better than Sitka Spruce or Douglas Fir (I believe you lot call it Oregon Pine) with a layer of fibreglass over it until you start getting into the true exotics like CF. So yes, weight is an issue (though I can't help but think wood bars would really help absorb the high-frequency vibration and might even flex a little over the big bumps) but not as much as you'd think. The Mosquito bomber was built of plywood and solid lams; I don't anticipate pulling 6g with a ton and a half load at 400 mph with my handlebars. The Fairey Swordsman race boats were plywood, and they won the Round Britain race several times.
Nothing on a bicycle turns fast or takes heavy loads, by aerospace or maritime or industrial standards. Wood handlebars would actually have a pretty easy life. As far as crashworthiness, what profit it a man if his handlebars hold but break his wrists?