My friend Danny, who is a bike mechanic and generally awesome thing builder, and I began work on a bike trailer made of bamboo today.

We decided on bamboo for several reasons. For one, bamboo is fairly cheap, light and strong. Also, we don’t have the means to weld (and neither do most people). And best of all, bamboo can be grown in your back yard, which is pretty cool. We did not grow this bamboo (we bought it at the Bamboo Hardwoods on Roosevelt). We also got some thin bamboo from someone in the neighborhood who was cutting a bunch of theirs down.

After looking at many different plans for homemade bike trailers, the bamboo design from Carry Freedom seemed sturdy enough, easy enough and cheap enough. The plan also has many variations for each step, allowing us to easily adapt it to the materials we have/can find.

So, after going shopping today to three hardware stores, we ended up finding a strip of sheet metal and all the nuts and bolts we need (we think) at Stoneway Hardware.

Our goal is to build a trailer sturdy enough to carry the majority of cargo we want to haul for under $100. So far, we have spent $55. We expect to need up to $20 more in bamboo. So we are under budget at this point.

I will be updating the blog on our progress. If you have any suggestions, feel free to let me know.

Now, off to make the trailer hitch.