Fast Furniture: Renovo Hardwood Bicycles

While fiddling around with airplanes I learned that the engineering properties of wood made it a superb candidate for bicycles. So, borrowing from the knowledge base of both the marine and aircraft industries, and after extensive study, design and testing, I developed wooden bicycles which are lightweight, durable, sustainable, and of course show the beauty of wood in a context which surprises most people. Um yes, there are skeptics... many.
The frames are hollow, weighing from 3.5 to 5 lbs, yielding bicycles weighing from 16 ½ pounds to 20 lbs. Wood allows us to tailor the ride qualities of smoothness and stiffness to the needs of the particular owner, which is not practical in production bikes. While not quite as lightweight as carbon bikes, we can exceed them in stiffness while retaining noticeably superior ride qualities.
We test every stick of wood we buy for stiffness and other properties, and have accumulated a substantial database of wood properties. This enables us to predict the stiffness and ride qualities of our bikes made from a wide range of woods. The FPL data is a rough guide to properties, but completely inadequate for our purposes.
Our designs are modeled in Solidworks, edited in AutoCad, and toopathed in Alphacam. Aside from the usual woodworking machinery, the mainstay of production is a Routech 220 CNC router. All laminating and bonding is done with high-temp Pro-Set Epoxy, oven cured. The finish quality and durability is crucial, so all frames are coated with epoxy, then shot with linear polyurethane. We have sold bicycles all over the world, and some will soon pass the 10,000 mile mark, still looking as good as the day they were delivered.
renovobikes.com