What the machine is made of.

Bamboo is treated as a material for garden furniture and inexpensive flooring. This is a misreading of what the plant actually is. Mechanically, structural-grade laminated bamboo is one of the most useful materials available to a small workshop — comparable to aluminium on a stiffness-to-weight basis, comparable to mild steel in tensile strength along the grain, and dramatically better than either in damping.

The material we use is moso bamboo (Phyllostachys edulis), harvested at five years of growth from managed groves. The five-year window matters: younger bamboo is too soft, older is beyond its mechanical peak. Properly aged, split, and laminated stock is dimensionally stable, quiet under load, and beautiful by accident.

Material comparison

Property	Laminated bamboo	6061 aluminium	Carbon fibre
Density (g/cm³)	0.7	2.7	1.6
Tensile strength (MPa)	~ 200	310	~ 1500
Specific stiffness	comparable	baseline	highest
Damping	excellent	poor	poor
CO₂ at production	net negative	~ 11 kg / kg	~ 24 kg / kg
End-of-life	composts	recycles	landfill
Field repair	workshop tools	welding	impossible

Two cells of this table do not favour bamboo: ultimate tensile strength and specific stiffness at the very top end. Carbon fibre will out-perform bamboo in those metrics for the foreseeable future. We accept this. Most parts of most machines do not need ultimate performance — they need good enough, repairable, and made of something the earth replaces.

We work with two managed groves — one in Yunnan province in southern China, one in Kerala in southern India. Both are family-operated, third-generation, and certified for sustainable harvest. We have visited both. We have eaten meals with both.

Both groves ship to a small finishing facility we operate near Bristol, where stock is split, heat-treated, laminated, and graded before it enters the workshop. Total transit emissions per drone-frame's worth of material: ~ 0.8 kg CO₂. We monitor and publish this number quarterly.

The full process from grove to airframe takes about fourteen weeks, most of which is waiting. The active workshop steps are these:

1. Selection & aging

   Only five-year culms, harvested in the dry season. Aged in covered storage for four to eight weeks before processing.

2. Splitting

   Hand-split into 8mm × 12mm strips along the natural grain. The grain is the engineering — we never cut across it.

3. Heat treatment

   Caramelised at 180°C for six hours to kill starches that would otherwise attract insects, and to stabilise the moisture content.

4. Lamination

   Strips bonded into structural billets using cardanol-based bio-resin (cashew-shell origin). Eight-strip layup is our standard for airframe stock.

5. CNC machining

   Frames and arms milled from billet stock. Bamboo machines beautifully — we use carbide tools designed for hardwood, slow feeds.

6. Joint finishing

   Hand-finished with bio-epoxy and a hemp-linen wrap at every load-bearing joint. The linen does the same job as carbon-fibre wrap on a CF airframe — distributing stress at the junction — but composts at end of life.

7. Test, fly, document, repair.

   Every prototype is bench-tested for vibration, then flown, then dismantled, then iterated. Repeat until honest.

Bamboo is the dominant structural material, but it is not the only one. Each of the others has a specific reason to be there.

• walnut Reclaimed black walnut for high-stress hubs. Dimensionally stable, dampens vibration, takes a brass pin without splitting.
• hemp linen Joint wraps and tension members. Specific stiffness comparable to flax fibre; available locally in the UK.
• bio-resin Cardanol-based, cashew-shell origin. The same family of resins now used in surfboard and bicycle production.
• beeswax Membrane treatment on Ornitos. Old craft applied to a new problem.
• brass Hinge pins, mounting screws. We do not pretend brass is renewable; we use a tiny amount, and we recycle it.

Motors and batteries are not bamboo. Lithium chemistry is not renewable in the way a forest is. The semiconductors in our flight controllers are not, either. We will not greenwash this.

What we do instead: use the smallest possible amount of these materials, design for replacement, and partner with cell-recovery programmes at end of life. A Davinci Robots drone uses approximately one-third of the lithium-equivalent of a comparable carbon-fibre quadcopter at the same airframe weight, because the lighter airframe means smaller motors, smaller battery, smaller everything.

Our motors come from a UK manufacturer that publishes its supply chain. Our cells are sourced from a recycler-partner programme: every cell that goes into our drones is registered against an end-of-life recovery contract. We are small enough to keep track of every battery we ship. We intend to stay that small.

The numbers, currently

• renewable 78% of dry-weight (bamboo, walnut, hemp, bio-resin)
• recoverable 19% (motors, electronics, brass — all in recycle programmes)
• honest 3% (consumables, fasteners, miscellaneous)

We update these numbers per machine, per year. They are not as good as we want them to be. They will improve.

Every Davinci Robots machine is designed to be taken apart at the end of its useful life. The bamboo composts. The walnut composts. The hemp wraps compost. The bio-resin breaks down with the bamboo. The motors, controllers, cells, and brass hardware go back to the recycle-partner programmes that supplied them.

We accept retired airframes back at the workshop, free of charge, and will give the customer a written breakdown of where every gram of their drone went. This is the contract.

Talk to the workshop about an end-of-life return →