Did you hear the one about the wooden bike?

Bicycle manufacturers are going to ever increasing lengths to make bicycles out of state-of-the-art material.

Reynolds 531 steel tubing was all the rage in the 70s and 80s, then along came aluminium and titanium. Carbon fibre was the zeitgeist of the late-90s and now bamboo bikes are set to be the next big thing.

Well one academic from China is trying to reverse those trends by going back to basics. We're not talking steel here, we're talking good old fashioned ply-wood.

Xu Quan Long is staking a claim to get China recognised as the country that invented the bicycle, claiming that the Chinese inventor Lu Ban invented the bicycle in China more than 2500 years ago. Historian Xu Quan Long discovered pictures of Lu Ban's bike in ancient manuscripts and set about painstakingly recreating it.

The bicycle is usually quoted as a French or German invention, with a number of two-wheeled devices appeared throughout the 1800s, until cycling's popularity began to take off in the 1860s.

You can read more about Xu Quan Long's bicycle in today's Metro newspaper or on Metro's website.

If you've got your own inventive bikes tell us below and upload your pictures to the photo gallery.