Building The Big Bamboo

**overkill** · 22nd January 2016, 22:19

Put the weapon switch on a cord and have a co-pilot like the Beauty 2 & 8 team does. Have you thought about how to join the bamboo frame parts together?

**Albear** · 23rd January 2016, 02:38

*raises hand* ill be the co pilot lol, ive got a mean thumb and nowt better to do!

25th January 2016, 06:31

Originally Posted by overkill

Put the weapon switch on a cord and have a co-pilot like the Beauty 2 & 8 team does. Have you thought about how to join the bamboo frame parts together?

Yes I have, there are a few options available. I will either go down the route of using a piece of metal that sits inside the bamboo, or a piece of metal that sits outside of the bamboo and the bamboo connects inside the metal, or have a bracket of some description. I've got some bamboo ordered which I will be picking up this week, so once I have the stuff I will start to see which is best to use.

**overkill** · 25th January 2016, 06:50

That was pretty much what I was going to suggest. The bamboo is stronger in compression, so metal around the outside is probably going to be stronger. Google 'bamboo bike frame' for plenty of ideas.

25th January 2016, 08:33

I thought about it a lot over the weekend while doing other things, and I think the fact that if I can get a metal pipe to act as a link I can then thread a bolt through the metal then the bamboo. I don't think it'd be a good idea to glue it, as going down this path means if a length of bamboo breaks I would be able to unscrew the section and replace it fairly easily. However I've read that bamboo can split, so working out the optimal location for a bolt needs to be worked out too.

Hopefully either tonight or tomorrow I'll have the bamboo I ordered, then I can start to lay the robot out.

**maddox10** · 25th January 2016, 08:41

Wood, mother natures own carbonfiber.

If it was good enough to build the fenomenal Mosquito it should be possible to build a competitive machine with it.

25th January 2016, 09:00

There is a de Havilland museum down south and they're rebuilding a Mosquito. It's in the hanger and you can look around it while the volunteers rebuild it. It's some machine I can tell you. There's also a WW2 glider there that you can sit in, and an example of a training plane that's built from wood and canvas. You can touch the skin and it bends. When you think that the material was used on a machine that could fly hundreds of feet in the air and deliver some damage, it's just quite incredible to think the primary material was wood.

**overkill** · 25th January 2016, 09:31

Another way to hold the bamboo together is with a bolt down the length, like this cross section:

Its basically a huge barrel bolt

. As long as the bamboo has metal sleeves on the ends, it shouldn't split under tension. one problem you are going to have is that the bamboo doesn't come in fixed diameters, so finding steel tube that fits over the ends tightly is going to be difficult.