Building a Recumbent Bamboo Trike Frame

Step 5: A Plastic Trike

Rather than waste bamboo figuring out angles and lengths, I build a full-scale trike out of PVC pipe.  I had purchased the bamboo in 1 1/2" and 2" diameters so I used the same size PVC.  Very cheap and you can make a lot of mistakes.  This proved to be very helpful later on as I could simply cut my bamboo pieces to match the PVC and eliminate errors.  It also taught me that I needed a method for maintaining the plane in which the PVC was cut.  I'll show how that works in the next step.  

Comments

[veryrealperson]

Was the pvc version rideable?

[kentdvm]

No. It was pretty flimsy and only dry fit together. Simply a model for cutting and orienting the bamboo pieces.