Yeah, I saw that thread. Good stuff indeed.
My comment was more directed at the fact of looking for a better wood stringer alternative, when a better alternative may be no stringer at all. I know it’s not of much help to this discussion.
To your original question, Greenlight should be able to provide some actual factual information as far as bamboo characteristics as they seem to be providing quite a bit of it to the homebuilder market.
Yeah I agree with that…Greenlight seems to be the leading edge on this stuff so I hope they will pick up on this thread and provide us with some insight.
There really is more variety out there than ever before…lots of different approaches have come to the forefront…obviously a lot of the tech stuff is the stuff we did with sailboards and it crossed over to surfboards, but there are some new approaches like the parabolic stringers that weren’t really around during the windsurfing boom in the 80’s. Perimeter stringers are probably the freshest thing I’ve seen as of late…honestly most the other stuff was directly spun from our sailboard R&D…even tow ins and kiteboards are sailboard prodigys…
having worked with most every hardwood out there in the past decade as a hardwood staircase guy, i’d have to echo swied’s concerns about bamboo. everyone seems to be thinking bamboo is the bee’s knees since it grows so fast…
it’s no MDF in terms of toxicity, but it’s just a bunch of little bits glued together with god knows what. personally, i’d rather have a single piece of real wood as my stringer than a bunch of glued up bamboo bits from china.
were it a domestic product, we’d likely have a better handle on just how filthy it was. as a chinese import, your guess is as good as mine as to what’s in there.
interesting thread.
jp
The thing is there are hundreds of different types of bamboo. I not so sure that all the bamboo products are little chopped up bits glued together with some adhesive guaranteed to kill you.
Everyone that has mentioned bamboo seems to be coming from this perspective, which I have to say seems pretty limited. Is it possible that we are just innocently ignorant as to what the possibilities are. A lot of bamboo has considerable longitudinal strands that are inherent to its nature…so I don’t quite hold the notion that it can only be harvested and produced by grinding it up like spam. I may be wrong on this but I have yet to hear anything that resembles a truly knowledgeable person weigh in on this.
Bamboo man, where are ya?
bruce
on going through my notes from long ago
hidden in amongst a lot of timber specs was this little gem
BAMBOO various species of arundinaria, bambusa, dendrocalamus
pseudosasa, phyllostachys and schizostachyum
1 bamboo is not a tree but a very large grass so the felled material
is not defined as timber the material seen in australia is mostly imported
from south east asia but small quantities are grown in the more tropical coastal districts
of eastern australia, needs care in drying to prevent splitting,
splits start at the nodes because the cross walls at these locations are not free to move inwards.
collapse can occur. air dried material is more yellow than that which is dried in a kiln
relatively easy to work it accepts most clear finishes satisfactorily if properly seasoned
resistance to decay is poor in exposed conditions
these are old notes so take it for what its worth
my take on how they get veneer is they slice the bamboo glue it up then peel it
so dust could well be a hazard but then i could be wrong
huie
Huie…thanks for that bit of reveal.
Somewhere else I read the take on it being like grass…
Probably to really give this bamboo for stringers thread more relevancy we need someone that has tested it thru ASTM span and breakage tests using a ram and pressure gauge. You know the drill, take a center width of stringer material of it…say 1/8" thick by 3" tall by 8 feeet long and put the pressure to it…or easier yet just make a babmob 2x2 and test it compared to douglas fir, redwood, cedar, spruce, basswood, etc. .
Then we would have an idea if we even want to mess with this sustainable resource. The cross wall mention in your notes may be a telltale characteristic of its inherent limits and why it has to end up ‘chipped together’ as stated earlier.
I googled “how strong is bamboo,” and found someone’s research. I’d heard that bamboo has similar strength to weight properties of steel…
The vascular bundles are what makes bamboo strong. They are similar to the steel rods in reinforced concrete, and make bamboo, when it has been laminated, as strong as soft steel. The vascular bundles also make it easy to split bamboo stems vertically, increasing the number of uses they can be put to.
Cross section of a piece of bamboo:
It’s stuff like this that attracts me so much to bamboo…anything that is inherently unidirectionally (or largely thereof) for surfboard stringers seems a natural choice. Of course there are concerns about how green it is…but if I’m getting real here (go ahead chastise me) there are a ton of things out there that are environmentally perfect by any means.
I want cheap, strong, light, good. I don’t want it to be a nightmare to work with. I want it to be easily available and a plentiful resource. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, for what you get you give up something.
Oh, and although this was a statement I made in another thread about TDI blanks versus MDI (Methyl Phenyl Di Isocynates…soy, sugar, etc.) I was contacted by what I feel is a reliable source stating that MDI blanks have a considerable amount of petrochemicals (oil) in them too.
So my assumption that MDI blanks aren’t prone to price hikes due to oil increases may be entirely off base. Everything gets impacted by the oil per barrel prices including getting goods to market. Food has reportedly gone up 70% at the supermarkets in the last year in the United States. So what cost $100 is now $170. I feel for the families with five kids.
from the “master” of bamboo’d NFC (Natural Fiber Composite) surfboards
http://bamboosurfboardshawaii.com/composites.html
you can get some “natural” veneer with something like this…
I’m sure you can lam some of these sheets up saturated with epoxy to make some decent but expensive stringers.
Wow! Thanks for the link, cool stuff there:
I would guess that a limiting factor in using boo for stringers is it ability to be planed. As you know, the most common stringer material is basswood. That stuff planes easy. Consider that the easiest cheapest mat’l for stringers is thin plywood, yet it isnt a common mat’l, b/c it planes poorly. I tried using plywood a couple times and really disliked the way it shapes.
One thing to try is to sample the boo flooring as stringer mat’l; you’ll need a really good resaw bandsaw with expensive blades and lotsa horsepower.
I bought some of the boo flooring at HD a few years back as part of a loudspeaker project I was planning. I still have the boards; actually use them as tools. Maybe I’ll run the hand planer a few times and get back to this discussion. The stuff is very hard, like hickory…good for old style golf shafts and drum sticks!
Btw, pound for pound, boo is stronger than steel.
Here’s a boo board I made…its showy.
and here is one I made recently
Man those boards are gorgeous. I really like the shape of the first one…that pup is a Rincon crowd please (or punisher depending if you are on the giving or receiving end).
BTW, what’s up with this thread? I meant to say earlier that "there are a lot of materials that are not enviromentally friendly, but there’s no edit on this thread, or at least on my post to correct…did we get a ‘governor’ put on us for speaking racy stuff in the past?
And who was Roy and why did he get ejected…or maybe I should just leave well enough alone. Someone can PM me and fill me in. I’m gonna stay warm n fuzzy!
Thanks for all the really good info on this guys.
Im in the Philippines and have been making boards here for a good 4 years now. Im not too happy with the wood we have readily available for stringers and have been thinking about using bamboo to make stringers as it is all over the place here. From what I know (and feel free to correct me on this) the bamboo that one would use for stringers is not put through a recycling process but dried, planed, clamped and glued into planks unidirectionally using the same wood glue as you would use with timber or in some cases glued with the same epoxy you would use for glassing. once glued to into a plank around 1/2" thick it can be run through a shop planer to desired thickness and cut to your stringer template. extremely high tensil strength as mentioned above and not too bad to work with. I have no information or experience as of yet working with the dust of it. Im still looking into the kiln process and am going to start toying around with it by next week. Ill try to post pics and let you know how it goes.
hello,
not exactly stringers, but i can tell you that they are nasty like a mistress with a big f… whip
the shape sucked, but the feel of those rods in the board is stiff, hard, with a very very quick and powerful return
as far as shaping, you can just rough them up with sand paper, epoxy bonds great.
and you can also plane them down easily, but i tried to keep the knots in, natural strength…
stringers with veneerlike bamboo should shape and bond the same
some pics to show for
[quote=“$1”]
I was in Home Depot the other day looking at plywood, and saw a warning sticker on the wood that said “This product contains chemicals known by the state of California to cause cancer.” I don’t know anything about any of the bamboo manufacturers, and what chemicals they use.
I believe there’s formaldahyde in many imported bamboo products.
-You need to be careful with all plywoods and particle boards. There is formaldahyde to keep the wood from rotting, and the glue is super caustic. it’s not just bamboo plywood. it’s MDF particle board, marine plywood…Anything wood product that is glues up and man made.
For long lengths and consistent flex, a lot of machining and gluing takes place. Yes, the glues are in some cases toxic. That is not to say they’ll kill you but… over time with enough exposure, you might encounter some problems.
Aside from one example here of actual bamboo stalks glued in to the blank, most engineered bamboo materials are highly processed. The thing that keeps it on the cheap is that it’s done overseas where labor costs are minimal.
A good example of what it takes to extract prime material from bamboo stalks as used in fly fishing rods is outlined here. What is curious to me is the apparent non-linear quality of raw bamboo. Each node appears to be a “knot” of sorts and although I would expect a strip to break at that knot, in my experience with bamboo stalks it’s usually somewhere in the middle of the stalk between the nodes where failure occurs.
Once the stalks are planed down to consistent thickness and laminated, the physical properties become far more consistent. Like Hemp, it really is fascinating stuff and surfboards aside, might be used effectively in many industries where other raw materials are running scarce.
The knots are called “nodes” and they are actually the strongest part of the stalk.
There are many manufacturers of bamboo ply, and just like every other ply mfgr, some use toxic stuff…some don’t.
My experience with bamboo as a stringer is positive, except for how hard it is to plane.
It is extremely strong. The strength comes from not only the material itself, but from the fact that the strands are layered and the nodes end up stacked randomly. Each layer reinforces the previous layers. I have yet to see a board with a bamboo stringer snap. Maybe some of you guys have…but I haven’t.
It is also quite flexible, but not in that noodley way. I tend to refer to it as a “uniform flex” pettern. No, that’s not any kind of “hype”…that’s just what I call it. My guess is that it is because of the way the layers kind of “interlock” and the structure of the strands,
Just my 1.874 cents
Bamboo flyrods… The good ones fetch more than collectible surfboards, by far. Check some of the math involved in the ‘‘how to build’’ texts from 100 years ago. If you think we obsess about surfboards, these guys beat us to it by centuries.
A flyrod’s main performance criteria is casting. The flex characteristics in the tip are primary determinates. Given the same taper and dims, variations in wood quality and craftsmanship would make the difference between a great rod and a dog.
You could borrow the ‘‘stripping’’ tech from the rodbuilders and build your own stringer, tapering it in any aspect you like. Some interesting possibilities there…
Any idea where to get veneer like this? I have searched and searched and have only found essentially this: http://www.made-in-china.com/showroom/jptrade/product-detailLqMmPgrOhnky/China-Bamboo-Rotary-Veneer.html
Ordering through a distributor like that whom represents some place in china is a bit intimidating for me and I bet you have to get pallates of it at a time, I dont have the means to do that. I have spoken/emailed GY and he politely ignored my questions about his veneer source, dont blame him. btw GY is a great guy. He recomended a book to me: Bamboo: The Gift of the Gods by Oscar Hidalgo. There is a relatively short section in there about bamboo-composites and surfboards but the book as a whole is full of amazing info. Want to know about bamboo, shell out the $80 and get that book. You will be amazed.
I am interested in this type of veneer vs the stuff that Frank’s (and others) sell here in the states because this is raw and relatively unprocessed. The stuff Frank’s sells is made from bamboo pieces glued up into a large block, then veneer shaved off and it has to be backed to hold the bands together. The “rotary cut veneer” is simply cut off a chute of bamboo and ready to use if Im not mistaken.
Sources for rotary-cut bamboo veneer anyone?