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RE: What about a laptop made of wood? We made one!
Beautifully conceived and executed. Please don't give up! Of course it would ultimately depend on retail price, but it would almost certainly be a hit given the increasingly "conscious" alternative literary market in readers and burgeoning writers - bring it! Where can I sign up for newsletter / release notes. I want one! (And bamboo is of course one of the most extraordinary sustainable and versatile material technologies available to man <3
Thanks for such encouraging words, @nik9 :)
I'll talk to @lenskonig about how you can keep in touch with us about a possible future release. At the moment the project is stalled until the universe permits us to meet an enthusiastic hardware engineer.
Bamboo is fantastic yes. I invite @lenskonig to comment here on the experience of creating this out of bamboo.
I started by using very thin quarter-sawn maple. Maple is dense and close-grained so I thought it would maintain structural integrity. Alas, all wood—even plywood—will warp if moisture evaporates from one face and not the other, as will clearly happen in this application. I tried reinforcing the maple with carbon fibre bars but wood is very strong so that failed.
Then a man suggested bamboo, which I had not considered. Not only is it ecologically magnificent, but it also has no natural will to warp because the sheet material is comprised of very thin narrow strips instead of honking great tree parts.
The great challenge was to create a lid and base that remain flush with each other. Very, very flat. Bamboo plywood does still like to warp a little, as detailed in the first paragraph, but for this model it worked very nicely, especially once sealed with wax (I think I used wax). Also, once there are guts inside it will be no more than a shell, so will easily retain its form. (This would be equally true with maple of course, but that is a distant memory now because bamboo holds so much intrinsic joy.)
The only issue I found with bamboo is its fibrousness. Once varnished or polished, or whatever, it is strong and reasonably durable. But while cutting and working, the fibres have a tendency to break away. This is a manageable issue with any timber, but bamboo has much less integrity. In particular it sticks to all but the most delicate masking tape. Masking tape is indispensable for clamping wood while gluing certain joints. The ultimate effect is that it pulls fibres away from the smooth, raw surface when removed. I'm sure there is a solution for scaled production, but for this model I had little choice. Maybe @matrjoschka did not even notice. I wonder. Did he notice?
He didn't. It looks perfect.
Thanks for the working insight into production. Have you considered the different bamboo species? For example "Guadua" is a timber bamboo used in South America for structural engineering (bridges, trusses, etc)