"My Favorite Museum Exhibit": Awesome DIY transportation

"My Favorite Museum Exhibit" is a series of posts aimed at giving BoingBoing readers a chance to show off their favorite exhibits and specimens, preferably from museums that might go overlooked in the tourism pantheon. I'll be featuring posts in this series all week. Want to see them all? Check out the archive post. I'll update the full list there every morning.

I don't have much information on this piece. I don't know who made it, or when. But I do know that it is a hand-made wooden bicycle, produced by a clearly incredible everyday artisan somewhere on the continent of Africa. It's also Mike Lynd's favorite exhibit at the Birmingham, England, Thinktank Science Museum, where the bicycle is part of a larger section dedicated to transportation innovations.

A quick Google search tells me that a tradition of hand-made bikes with wooden parts exists in lots of African countries. I found a video of a man in Malawi riding a bike he built from recycled metal tires attached to a 2-by-4 frame; cart-like wooden bikes built in Rwanda and in the Congo to carry goods and belongings over long distances; and some stories on Jules Bassong, a wood sculptor who toured his native Cameroon on a wooden bicycle he made in 2008.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

Maggie goes places and talks to people. Find out where she'll be speaking next.

MORE: happy mutants • Innovation • inventions • makers • my favorite museum exhibit • Technology • transportation

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suburbanhick

Holy cow! Now THAT’S what I call DIY.
joeposts

Looks cool, and rides better than a CCM.
CognitiveDissident

So, why weren’t humans building (and riding) bicycles thousands of years ago, are the metal parts completely irreplaceable, or could an ALL-WOODEN bicycle (instead of mostly wooden) be made?

(Maybe the inventors were burned at the stake or stoned or thrown in a volcano?!)
- Allen
  
  They were sued for copyright infringement.
sockdoll

More handmade wooden bicycles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_bicycle#Earliest_unverifiable_history

I love the ingenuity and resourcefulness of improvisers everywhere. Bicycles were my primary mode of transportation as an adult for years, and I loved working on them.
http://www.facebook.com/bkveton Bonnie Kveton

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=AXG-1OoXozw

after a few minutes pleasant searching, i found the above awesome link.

best lantern oil powered wooden bike ever?