The SplinterBike Quantum ready for London Olympics

In Offcuts we’ve featured an all-wooden bike named SplinterBike in a previous issue that went on to be viewed by over 320,000 visitors to the Power of Making exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. A second version was used to set a new speed record for 100 percent wooden bikes in August 2011 and now the creator of both, Michael Thompson, has built a special SplinterBike Quantum (SBQ) edition for the 2012 London Olympics.

A few design changes have been made to allow a variety of visitors to the Adain Avion event at the London 2012 Festival to mount up and ride an all-wooden bike for themselves including adjustable seat height and a different gearing setup.

Thompson says that he's so far spent around 1,600 hours designing, prototyping, building and testing the various versions of SplinterBike, and has put all that experience to good use when creating the Quantum edition. The SBQ is made up of 88 individual components which took 40 hours on a CNC machine to produce.

Thompson spent another 400 hours sandwiching all the pieces between the new bike's monocoque frame and, despite design decisions aimed at keeping the weight down, the Quantum actually ended up being 6 kg (13.2 pounds) heavier than the original at 39 kg (85.9 pounds).

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