With the blades carved, the next step was to heat treat the bamboo to see how the properties of the blade are affected. While I am by no means an expert on heat treating bamboo, my basic understanding is that the heat cooks the natural sugars in the bamboo and turns them into glue. At the end of the day, the bamboo blade smells a lot like caramel. I’d write more about this, but we spent the rest of the day smelling the blades…
I used two methods to heat treat the bamboo. The first involved simply cooking the bamboo over a gas stove until it turned golden brown in color. The second method involved steaming the bamboo using an interesting contraption created with some PVC pipe, a pressure cooker, and some toast!
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