more wooden bikes

Regular readers (I may have up to four of you by now!) may remember those Basque wooden bike frames that I thought were such a dumb idea. Well, there's a company in Portland, Oregon, that is making them, as well.

I still think they're a dumb idea.

Portland is famously the "bike-friendly" city, and I suspect that leads to a number of bicycle-related industries, some brilliant, some useful... and some, not so much.  My complaints about wooden frames are weight and lack of stiffness. Below are some snippets from the company website about these concerns:

Stiffness: A Renovo frame can easily exceed the stiffness of a carbon frame by 15%, but that’s not our goal. Instead we customize the stiffness of each frame to suit the owner; a 260 pound rider gets a much stiffer frame than a 100 pound rider...

Weight: Our frames are hollow; road frames are 4-5.5 lbs, about the same as a high-end steel frame. Since we make the frames in our own shop, we could easily make them as light as carbon, but then we too would have broken and cracked frames. Think of the slight extra weight of our thick-wall hardwood frames as durability.

Piffle. I don't need extra weight for durability; modern metal and carbon frames are better in every way than wood.

These are beautiful frames, though...

...and I suspect that's what Renovo Hardwood is really selling. Prices (frame alone) range from $1950-$3250. I think these are bikes for the folks that collect beautiful frames... and then don't ride them much. On the page for the triathlon bike, there's a testimonial from a rider who used one in 2010. I'll admit I don't follow competitive cycling... but those of you who do: have you ever seen a serious rider on a wooden-framed bike?

Hrmph. (As I so frequently say.)

(I saw the original picture on today's Oddman, and I had to do the research and look it up.)

Addendum 1/23/13: I had linked to the photos in this post direct from the manufacturer site, and when I looked today, the pics were gone. The same pics were on the site, but the links were broken. Fair enough; if I'm not gonna say nice things about 'em, I shouldn't also steal their bandwidth. So now I've copied the pics to my Photobucket.com album.