Hands-on: Boo! Freighting Good Ride With Bamboo

While visiting the Gates Carbon Drive System booth at the 2010 Outdoor Demo in Boulder City, NV, there was one bike the jumped out as being completely unique from all of the other manufacturers using the belt drive system. That manufacturer was Boo Bicycles from Ft. Collins, Colorado. The feature that really made this bike stand out was the use of bamboo as the main tubes and stays of the frame. Bamboo is one of those materials that has picked up steam as a building material in the mainstream recently due to its beauty and more importantly its sustainability as a building material.

Unlike traditional lumber, bamboo can be harvested for use as a building material in a few years as opposed to a few decades. For centuries, Eastern cultures have used bamboo for everything including building shelters, weapons, food and textiles. Boo is certainly not the first manufacturer to use bamboo in a bicycle frame, but they are one of the few to use the material in every single frame they produce.

Nick Frey created Boo Bicycles in 2009 to produce high-performance frames constructed from bamboo stays and carbon fiber lugs. All of the Boo frames are hand built and reportedly take 50 hours a frame to complete. One of these beauties was available for test riding at the Outdoor Demo. It was a single-speed,  medium sized frame 29er with the Gates CDS, Rock Shox for and Chris King hubs. For most of that day, I had been riding a slew of bikes from Santa Cruz with my friends from Tam Bikes so I was used to a minimum of 4″ of full suspension travel.

It was late in the day of the last day of the Outdoor Demo and most of the other manufacturers were wrapping up their booths. The bikes at the Gates booth were still available, but I did not want to take the Boo out too long so I opted for loop number 3 of the cross country trail. This trail took less than 15 minutes to ride; but offered some quick turns, gullies, loose terrain and rock drop-offs to negotiate. For the past 20 years, I have been riding and racing 26″ wheeled mountain bikes…I have ridden 29ers less than two hours. My impression of 29er bikes up to the Outdoor Demo were that they felt sluggish and turned slow. My mind had started to change earlier in the day after riding a Specialized Stumpjumper Expert 29er and a Santa Cruz Tallboy.

As I rolled out of the Gates booth on the Boo, I immediately noticed how positive the pedal strokes felt. This could be due to the Gates belt drive system, but the frame felt solid. I entered the trail, unlocked the fork and hit the trail with some speed. Though the Boo was a hard tail, it held to the trail and did not have the harsh ride that an aluminum frame would have – the ride felt like a full carbon frame. I tried to push the Boo hard into the corners to see how the frame and the 29er format took the turns. This bike did not over shoot the turns, and only felt slightly slower accelerating out of the turns than a 26″ frame. The Boo rolled easily over the drop-offs without the feel of being on the edge of flying over the handlebars and there were no issues while descending (though the descents were not long on this loop). As I pedaled this bike, the effort felt as if it was all transfered to the wheels without the ride being too harsh. Unfortunately for me, loop number 3 ended too soon and I was truly sad to hand the frame back over.

As I was on the way to return the bike to the booth, I thought of what components I would change if I owned this bike. The only component that i would change would be the seatpost – I would replace the current one with a titanium post. Most of my rides are titanium so I am used to the springier ride that Ti offers and a post made from titanium can take the edge off of the trail. I raced a Trek OCLV a few years back and that was the setup that I chose to use and it worked well for me.

The Boo offers the feel of a carbon fiber frame with the unique look and strength of bamboo. The company is small and more than likely if you have correspondence with the company, it will be directly with Nick. Boo offers road, mountain, touring and fixed gear frames all with the same type of construction. The touring frame even has a rear rack formed into the frame using, of course, bamboo. The standard Boo frames range between $2700-$3000, but a custom build program is available.

Boo Bicycles