Getting back up to speed pt 2: Bike Project!

For those of you following my bamboo bike project progress, I previously left off at how my inspiration came about.

For the engineering classmates, my "BME" inspiriation was not Biomedical Engineering (sorry!), but rather a fellow by the name of Brano Meres. From is "About BME" page, you can easily tell he is a seriously smart bloke, and has produced some truly drool-worthy pieces from carbon fiber and bamboo. http://www.bmeres.com/bambooframe.htm

I took the inspiration from him to build my frame jig, though mine is probably nowhere near as robust as his. Still, it got the job done and I was ready to do the carbon fiber layups.

The layup process was very similar to his (using perforated electrical tape to apply pressure, etc), so with some help from my roommate, we finished the first layer for a couple of the joints in this time lapse:

After the first layer of CF, I added some high density foam to help fillet the corner and reduce stress concentrations...

As the project stands now, I've finished almost all of the layups... It's just waiting for a final sanding (to smooth out the CF and get rid of excess resin..) and then it'll be ready for assembly. The project is a bit of a standstill now because it is physically difficult to work on something when it's over 1000 miles away...