By Ling Hui
KOTA SAMARAHAN, Aug 24: The Pusaka Furniture Industrial Complex (Pusaka) here has successfully produced its first four eco-friendly bamboo bicycles with bamboo from China.
With the guidance of experts namely David Wang from Brook & Breeze, Shanghai and Professor Dr Zeng Weiren from China, 15 Sarawakians underwent the bamboo bike manufacturing course and built the first four prototypes from scratch.
The four bikes, with their entire chassis made with bamboo, were designed each for different terrains. There was a street bike, a leisure bike, a road bike, and a mountain bike.
Sarawak Timber Industry Development Corporation (STIDC) general manager Datu Hashim Bojet said the prototypes will soon go through testing, inspection and certification by the Standards and Industrial Research Institute of Malaysia (SIRIM).
He said this is to ensure quality and safety of the designs before similar products, but with Sarawak bamboo, are commercialised and exported.
“We plan to reproduce more of these bikes using our own Sarawak bamboo. The bamboo we have here are solid bamboo, so they will be better suited to build bamboo bikes.
“And before we release the products to the public or other stakeholders, we want to introduce our bamboo bikes to our chairman (Datuk Amar Awang Tengah Ali Hasan) and also our Sarawak Premier (Datuk Patinggi Tan Sri Abang Johari Tun Openg).
“If all goes well, we will start (mass) production in January next year. Give us these four months to settle everything,” said Hashim when officiating at the ‘Bamboo Bicycle Train-the-Trainer Course’ closing ceremony at the Pusaka Complex here today.
During the ceremony, the 15 trainers who graduated from the bamboo bike course received their certificates of participation.
After this, Hashim said, the trainers would train more Sarawakians how to build bamboo bikes using bamboo locally grown in all corners of Sarawak. — Dayakdaily
