EBBB Team designing and building new and exciting Products including a Wheelchair
EAST BALI BAMBOO BIKES SOCIAL ENTERPRISE NEWS: December 2018 – March 2019
Our last bike sold in 2018 was to a UK client, who was so happy with the bamboo City Bike he bought in August 2018 when living temporarily in Bali, that he bought one as a surprise Christmas present for his teenage daughter – who was a super fan of her Dad’s bike – which he hand-carried on his flight to UK at the end of December – with great feedback so far!
The quiet period with very few bamboo bike enquiries or orders so far this year, coinciding with Indonesia’s rainy season from October to April, has provided opportunities for our highly skilled team of artisans in our bamboo workshop to be innovative, first by creating our own exciting bamboo bike wheels spokes prototype (see photos), as well as laminated and solid bamboo casings for radios and Bluetooth speakers(see photos), bamboo cutlery and much more.
However, the most exciting project our team has undertaken and are now well on the way to completing, is a bamboo wheelchair prototype, created for a friend newly arrived in Bali who has an imported and expensive wheelchair to facilitate taking his disabled son to the beach. He came to East Bali Bamboo Bikes last year asking us to develop a completely bamboo framed wheelchair that he could donate to families of disabled children who live in rural villages, such as EBPP home village of Ban and the adjacent 3 Tianyar villages, on the sandy slopes of Mounts Agung and Abang, where all the 30+ families with disabled children live far from good quality roads, meaning most of these children can never really leave their home, except when carried by their devoted parents.
Deni, our bamboo bike designer, developed the initial design for the wheelchair using measurements from the beach wheelchair with our professional computer design volunteer in a series of concept computer designs that were rapidly approved by our client.
This wheelchair will benefit from the flexibility of the bamboo frames, the small, solid and wide tread front wheels and the main wheels using wide rims, with tyres and inner tubes that allow punctures to be easily repaired and new tyres and tubes easy to buy in cycle stores. The other great benefit we offer is providing all of the steel components made-to-measure by our specialist partners in Bandung, West Java, from aircraft grade aluminium,
You can also see from the photos that we’ve created the seat and backrest from laminated bamboo as well as the main wheel spokes and the push rims or hand rims: in fact where bamboo can be used, we use it!!
This beautiful innovative wheelchair will be completed quite soon and we’ll give further updates in our next report.
Thank you to all our donors who’ve supported us so far, but we’ve a long way to go and are in need of funds to enable us to allocate some of our bamboo artisans to train more local youth and young men & women with the skills to enable them to consider becoming bamboo entrepreneurs in their communities to speed up their economic development.
