Goldilocks and the Three Bars
September 21, 2009
These bars are Too High. These bars are Too Low. These bars are Too Wide…
I’ve been tinkering with handlebars for years now. The current setup works better than anything I’ve had previously, but scores way high on the dork scale:
The main bar is a Velo-Orange Monmartre bar. I like skinny bars (I’ve tried wide bars, don’t like them) and these are skinny. There’s an upright section for riding upright, but on my old (dropped, 45cm V-O Nitto Randonneur, see banner at top of blog) bars I also spent a fair amount of time on the hoods, so I carried those over. Turns out sometimes I do like to be bent over (especially on a windy day) and the speed picks right up, so with these I can grab the center and rest my elbows on the grips. Maybe I should get some tri-bars, and complete the Franken-bar look.
The vestigial mountain bars below are so I can keep the HANDlebars clean, and so I can fit the SRAM shifter to something.
The only think I don’t like is the weird inward tilt of the brake levers. So this may not be the end; one possibility would be get some narrow mountain-gauge upright bars, put bar-ends where the hoods are, and deploy interrupter levers strategically.
That funny little switch on the left end of the baby bars? That’s my high-beam/low-beam switch.
