Bamboo SCREEN DIY
Here’s a step-by-step guide for building your own woven bamboo screen. You can build the screen in situ, or you can lift it out of the ground and place it anywhere you want screened off.
Tool: Gloves, fine-tooth handsaw, machete, hammer
Step 1
Cut your bamboo to length. Cut six lengths of bamboo to 1.8m each. Look for bamboo that is a reasonable diameter so you can break it into slats, but it doesn’t need to be dead straight as you’ll be weaving with it. Use a fine-tooth hand saw to cut the lengths to prevent the bamboo splintering as you cut.
Step 2
Split your bamboo into slats. Start a split at one end of your bamboo using a machete and hitting it with a hammer. Now ease the split down the full length of the bamboo using a piece of dowel, or something similar. It doesn’t need to be sharp. Split the bamboo in half, then split each piece in half again, then those pieces in half again to give you eight slats per length of bamboo, about 3-4cm wide each.
Step 3
Remove the nodes. Trim the triangle pieces on the inner side of the bamboo with your machete so they’re not in the way when weaving.
Step 4
Make the uprights. Cut six 1100mm lengths of a smaller diameter bamboo using the fine-tooth saw. Cut each length just above a node so the bamboo doesn’t fill with water. Hammer each upright about 300mm into the ground, about 300mm apart.
Step 5
Start weaving. Weave your slats in and out of each upright, alternating so each slat goes around each upright the opposite way to the one before it. Keep adding slats until you reach the top.
Step 6
Finishing. At the top lash the two outside uprights together at each end to prevent them from splaying out.
To watch the video
Search for “Mark Mortimer” on stuff.co.nz/video.
compost bins are just some of Mark’s suggested uses. “Yes, the compost bin will start to break down, unless you line it, but if you have a steady supply of bamboo, you can just make a new one, and compost the old one.”
Fencing has become a big part of Mark’s business as Kiwis look for new ways to mark out their borders. “I really noticed when I first moved to New Zealand just how many fences there were. They’re everywhere,” he says of arriving here 21 years ago from Argentina, with his wife Sarah.
He initially shied away from competing with wellestablished fencing companies, but has found more people interested in trying bamboo as they look for something different and unique.
“Kiwis seem pretty relaxed about the durability aspects of bamboo fencing. They have more of that Japanese ethos of appreciating how things age and weather. They see the charm in it.”
What Mark hopes is that Kiwis will increasingly get past their resistance to bamboo as a plant, and start to consider it as a material for more and more projects.
“At the moment, most people don’t even know bamboo is an option, when they’re wanting to build something. Instead of asking, ‘I have some bamboo, what can I do with it?’, it would be good to instead change the way we think about it to, ‘I want to build this thing, could
I do it with bamboo?’”