Foro de Ciclismo en Canarias

Today, I've just finished speaking with a local here in Tenerife about an idea for recycling tyres I saw on the website: www.velo-re.com

At Velo-Re, among other things, they use old bicycle tyres (clinchers) and turn them into fashionable belts.

Since we now go through a fair few tyres every year, I thought it was a good idea to re-use these for something else. I just handed over 6 or 7 used tyres & I'll let you know how this goes when they have made some prototypes.

The light bulb has gone off in the old nogin' again. I plan to recycle used steel bicycle chains by making door mats out of them. Actually, the first prototype will be used as a "heavy duty workshop floor mat". To my suprise, I couldn't find anyone else doing this on the web.

How can I create a steel chain mat out of an old bike chain?

I'll first try to use thin spokes (hopefully thinner than the rivets in the chain) and thread them together forming a 2D mat. If that doesn't work, I can always buy a few metres of cheap steel wire and thread them onto that instead. But it'd be nicer to manufacture this from 100% re-used materials.

There's two or three ways to do this. I could simply line the sections of chain up so that they are parallel & string them altogether. Or I could offset them by half the chain pitch, making a slightly nicer design. The tedious thing to do would be to create a meshed, open chainmail structure similar to a woven crochet weave. That obviously involves a lot more work but might prove to be worth the effort... leaving alternate gaps (for example one 5cm gap for every 5cm length of chain).

I just have to wait about 6 months until I can accumulate enough chains to complete a decent-sized floor mat. I already have 3 well-worn chains in storage.

A full length chain is usually about 1.5 metres long. Each chain is ~7mm thick, so assuming that I want to make a mat that is 75cm wide, one chain will add 15mm of width to the mat. I estimate that I'll need about 30 chains, giving a mat with a final dimensions of 75 x 45cm. If I use the open pattern shape, I'll only need half the number of bike chains to complete this project.

Saw this today: