Bamboo harvesting for lams/backing

[JulianVdM]

Hi,

At my mom's place there's a crapton of bamboo, but it's always been too thin to be of any use in my bowyery dabbling, but in the past two months we have had unprecedented rainfall and have brand new shoots about 30mm wide and almost 3m tall. My only concern is that it might not be very dense or old enough yet, as it can easily be broken by bending or just squishing it between two hands. How long do you guys think it would be prudent to wait for it to thicken out before harvesting it and attempting a bow with it? And how wide do your shoots need to be to be usable?

Thanks in advvance 

[PatM]

Bamboo needs some years to reach its peak density.

[Eric Krewson]

I don't cut any bamboo for backing that is less than 4" in diameter.

You need it to be about this big;

[JulianVdM]

What specie is that? I've tried to cultivate Moso bamboo but it's damn near impossible to germinate the seeds. And we aren't allowed to import the stuff in South Africa, because of some beetle problem. So I'm stuck with generally thin bamboo because I live in the highveld which is dry and generally crap for wood. Why so thick?

[Eric Krewson]

The bamboo in the picture is Giant Timber Bamboo.

When you flatten the belly of the bamboo, the small stuff becomes high crown and narrow. I have made a few bows bamboo osage bows from bamboo that flattened to 1 1/8" wide. The high crown made the bows an osage belly bamboo bow, very little osage was left after tillering.