Yellow Fang
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Several years ago, I read an article in Cycling Plus about a road cycle frame made mostly from flax with a bit of carbon fibre. I believe it was a Museeuw frame.
Now I see Schwinn have made a cycle frame entirely out of flax.
I am currently reading a book about hemp. Its fibres are at least as strong as flax. It's pretty hard to tell them apart, although one way is to wet it. On drying, flax will twist clockwise and hemp will twist anticlockwise. If it is possible to make a bicycle frame out of flax, then surely it is possible to make one out of hemp.
(Hemp is such an incredibly useful plant, but is illegal to grow without a licence in the UK because people like smoking some forms of it. Hemp's other names are cannabis and marijuana. Marijuana is really the drug, while hemp is the name of the fibre as well as the plant, like cotton. According to the author, the plant was banned in the US because the US Tresury Secretary, Andrew Mellon was also a major financial backer of the DuPont petrochemical company. He perceived hemp as a threat to his business interests because it was a cheap source of cellulose from which plastics could be made. Another scumbag in the conspiracy was William Randolph Hearst, whose company used Du Pont's chemicals to make paper. He was was also a major logger. Paper from hemp is better quality than paper from wood pulp, and you can get four times as much per acre of land. Hearst owned a newspaper chain and ran loads of scare stories about Mexicans getting high on marijuana and going on violent rampages. Another of Mellon's allies was Harry J. Anslinger, who was appointed head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Anslinger collected any newspaper scare story he could find about marijuana, and when that wasn't enough, fabricated some more. Then they effectively got the drug banned by dressing it up as a revenue tax bill, so that it could be rubber stamped by other allies without it undergoing discussion in the full house. By the time hemp farmers were aware of what was going on it was too late to stop it. One reason why the hemp industry were slow to react was because they were not aware marijuana was hemp. Marijuana was a name picked out for the drug by Hearst, taken from a Mexican song. Industrial hemp had very low concentrations of THC, the chemical that makes you high. The way it was farmed entailed cutting it down while it was still green and laying it out on the ground for a few days to get wet, a process called retting. By the time it had retted, the leaves had fallen off, so there was no THC left. The book does not explain why hemp was banned in so many other countries, except that Anslinger was involved in drawing up the UN Single Convention Treaty on Narcotic Drugs in 1961.)
Now I see Schwinn have made a cycle frame entirely out of flax.
I am currently reading a book about hemp. Its fibres are at least as strong as flax. It's pretty hard to tell them apart, although one way is to wet it. On drying, flax will twist clockwise and hemp will twist anticlockwise. If it is possible to make a bicycle frame out of flax, then surely it is possible to make one out of hemp.
(Hemp is such an incredibly useful plant, but is illegal to grow without a licence in the UK because people like smoking some forms of it. Hemp's other names are cannabis and marijuana. Marijuana is really the drug, while hemp is the name of the fibre as well as the plant, like cotton. According to the author, the plant was banned in the US because the US Tresury Secretary, Andrew Mellon was also a major financial backer of the DuPont petrochemical company. He perceived hemp as a threat to his business interests because it was a cheap source of cellulose from which plastics could be made. Another scumbag in the conspiracy was William Randolph Hearst, whose company used Du Pont's chemicals to make paper. He was was also a major logger. Paper from hemp is better quality than paper from wood pulp, and you can get four times as much per acre of land. Hearst owned a newspaper chain and ran loads of scare stories about Mexicans getting high on marijuana and going on violent rampages. Another of Mellon's allies was Harry J. Anslinger, who was appointed head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Anslinger collected any newspaper scare story he could find about marijuana, and when that wasn't enough, fabricated some more. Then they effectively got the drug banned by dressing it up as a revenue tax bill, so that it could be rubber stamped by other allies without it undergoing discussion in the full house. By the time hemp farmers were aware of what was going on it was too late to stop it. One reason why the hemp industry were slow to react was because they were not aware marijuana was hemp. Marijuana was a name picked out for the drug by Hearst, taken from a Mexican song. Industrial hemp had very low concentrations of THC, the chemical that makes you high. The way it was farmed entailed cutting it down while it was still green and laying it out on the ground for a few days to get wet, a process called retting. By the time it had retted, the leaves had fallen off, so there was no THC left. The book does not explain why hemp was banned in so many other countries, except that Anslinger was involved in drawing up the UN Single Convention Treaty on Narcotic Drugs in 1961.)
