By Pete Dreyer
Wooden Tech: 5 Stylish gadgets made from trees
Branch out with the wooden gadgets you can buy now
Branch out with the wooden gadgets you can buy now
This audiophile turntable weighs in at 35kg. It's not all wood; the 60mm string-driven platter is aluminium, with a leather protective mat. The chassis, however, is a fat, 70mm-deep piece of plywood with cherry veneer. This helps give the Wood MPX its rich, natural resonance and accurate stereo image when listening to, say, Justin Timberlake.
Price: £2,650 | bd-audio.co.uk
A wooden bike? Aha-ha-ha! Oh, bamboo has a higher tensile strength than steel? Bamboo is an incredibly consistent natural material? Bamboo Bikes' frames rival artificial ones for stiffness and, thanks to flax-reinforced lugs, they're also highly shock-absorbent, thus great for mountain biking? Oh. Good job bamboo is also highly sustainable, then.
Price: From £1,750 | bamboobike.co
Save for the mechanism – a Citizen “Miyoto” movement – and the link screws, this time-telling eco-bling is hewn wholly from hypo-allergenic timber. It comes in a selection of eight woods from light maple to blackwood. WeWood works to preserve forests around the world, and plants a tree for every watch it sells.
Price: £89 | we-wood.com
Magnos are the brainchild of top Indonesian designer Singgih Susilo Kartono, who buys all the wood from local villages himself, them builds them in his Java workshop, assisted by a crack team of handicraftspersons. Each FM/AM radio takes 16 hours to cut, fit and polish. Then it's sent on a six-week odyssey to its Hamburg-based European retailer.
Price: 200 Euros | wooden-radio.com
Orée is a three-man, southern French operation that makes keyboards out of “bois”, as the French call it, in a small workshop. The keyboard is crafted from a single piece of maple or walnut from sustainably managed forests, each being polished and oiled by hand. Every Board is unique, and a variety of fonts and layouts are available.
Price: 125 Euros | oreedesign.com