This man's bamboo bikes proved the Shark Tank hosts wrong

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This man's bamboo bikes proved the Shark Tank hosts wrong Mexico News Daily

It wasn’t the very first question out of my mouth, but it was close.

“How can bamboo be stronger than metal?”

A tinge of exasperation swept across Diego Cárdenas’ face, but he launched into an explanation anyway.

“Metal has the characteristic that if you bend it, it starts to take on that form; it has a certain flexibility if you apply force to it,” he said. “It’s resistant, but the truth is you can bend a piece of metal and it stays bent. Bamboo receives force and sends it back to you. It doesn’t have that flexibility, the plasticity. Bamboo will do nothing until you hit it hard enough to break. In terms of compression, it’s the same; it’s much stronger.”

Later, he explained that this was the No. 1 question that people ask him about his bamboo bikes, his face giving away his fatigue at convincing people of this one simple fact.

Knobby and earth-toned, Cárdenas’ bamboo bikes appeal to cyclists who want something completely unique but also super slick. Their base prices range from the more economical — about 8,000 pesos — all the way to bikes costing in the neighborhood of 35,000 pesos.

He started building bamboo bikes in his mom’s garage in 2010. The first model was just for him. But when he rode it through the city, people peppered him with questions: where and how they could buy a bike just like it? After a while, he was convinced that bamboo bikes might be a good business.

In his shop, Bamboocycles in the San Miguel Chapultepec neighborhood of Mexico City, sit delivery bikes, skinny-tired street bikes, fat-tired mountain bikes and piles of bamboo tubing and carbon fiber, the latter for the lugs that connect the bikes’ bamboo frames.

A returning client (who already owns two of Cárdenas’ bikes) arrives to discuss the recumbent bicycle that Diego will build for him in the next few weeks. Three other customers test out models, riding up and down the street.

“I mountain bike,” says one of the women...

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Bamboo could be considered as "nature's fiber glass." It has incredible structural properties that are not well appreciated—except in Asia, where people have been using it to make incredible structures for millennia.