Student makes bike out of unwanted golf clubs

"Imagine a peloton of golf bikes cycling along the highway or the fairway," says Kingston University graphic design student Calum Ray. He says his bicycle-made-of-golf-clubs creation is “a representation of the way social sport has evolved for the 21st Century's middle-aged men."

Ray said he was struck by the numbers of cyclists on the roads when he returned to his parents’ house in Hertfordshire after a year studying in London. At the same time he noticed a lot of golf clubs were closing and wondered if the two things were linked.

A few other golf clubs told him that membership was on the slide and a bit of online research seemed to confirm his ‘cycling is the new golf’ suspicions. Ray then came up with the idea for the bike, which he calls Par 12.

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"I started by purchasing a set of golf clubs from eBay for 99p, they were unused and that really supported the point I was trying to communicate," he said.

"The biggest challenge was that golf clubs are so thin and so light they are incredibly difficult to weld. We found that the joints could be strengthened by double welding and you could file the join and grind it down so that it was smooth again. It was a very long process but we got there in the end."

The finished product is a fully functional bicycle with the pedals an especially striking element.

"Some elements, such as the golf club head pedals, revealed themselves as I was in the workshop. Initially I wanted the handlebars to be shaped using the golf club grip, but because the clubs are so thin, as soon as you started to bend them, they snapped. There was a lot of trial and error to figure out what could be done with the material."

Ray now has plans to produce a range of golf-inspired cycling attire, such as tartan jerseys. While he is reluctant to sell the bike, he says he is also putting together an open source manual so that other people can turn their old golf clubs into bikes, as well as to highlight the humour in the idea.