Yeah there’s a lot seems to have been written about bamboo for bikes and Fishing poles (some of it quite contradictory), from what I can tell, flame isn’t actually intended to dry it out, you can apply heat to help seal it/kill the naturally occurring bugs and mould, and reduce the risk of it splitting or warping later, but application of heat has a fair chance of splitting it straight away…
and drying is really a case of letting it hang somewhere possibly using some type of desiccant to draw moisture out.
Apparently it losses a bit of diameter when drying (around ~5%) which would be a bit catastrophic if it dried and shrank, once assembled into a frame… I have a bit of a plan now, some notional geometry I want to produce and an ever growing BOM that I might start pulling together soon…
Cheers OP this has been an inspirational thread…