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Wrapping Bars – Fun and Frustrating

05.18.2010 by Ray Niekamp // 14 Comments

This afternoon, I put my bike on the workstand and remounted the handlebar. Why the bar was off in the first place is a whole other topic, and I’ll probably post on it next week, when that saga comes to an end — I hope.

Anyhoo, I got the bar positioned the way I want it, then got the brake levers back on.  I even rode the bike around the block to make sure the levers were just where I was most comfortable with them.

Back in the garage, it was time to do one of my most favorite bike maintenance activities — wrapping new bar tape.

Freshly wrapped. Looks pretty good -- but wait. (Notice the leftover tape dangling from the shift cable?)

Why fun? Well, if you’ve never tried it, take a shot and see for yourself. With a little bit of care and patience, your bike can assume a whole new character in a matter of minutes. Or, you can do as I did, and use the same old black tape. I think it gives my bike a slightly understated look, and that’s fine with me.

There’s only one problem with wrapping tape: starting and stopping. Okay, two.

To start, you leave a bit of tape hanging down at the end of the handlebar. Then you have to make sure you pull the tape taut while wrapping it, or you’ll get gaps in the wrap — and we can’t have that.

Eventually, you get to the point where you want to stop, and here’s where one of my continuing bar wrapping problems crops up. I see all these pictures of nice bikes with one wrap of contrasting color tape to seal the wrap job. When you buy bar tape, you get a short length of the end tape — maybe it has the manufacturer’s logo on it, maybe not. But it’s all of three or four inches long, and only a half inch wide.

But the bar tape itself is wider than that. So one wrap of the contrasting tape won’t cover the whole end of the bar tape, and you get a square-edged corner sticking out from under. I don’t like the feel of that.

So I do it the Bike Noob way. I use black electrician’s tape to seal the job, and I cover the entire width of the bar tape, plus some.

At least it's a comfy place to rest my hand.

This is one of the reasons I prefer black bar tape. My electrician’s tape overdose is not so obvious to the casual observer.

Once I’ve overdone the electrician’s tape, it’s time to go back to the beginning. The length of tape left hanging from the bar end gets pushed into the bar, and kept in place with a bar end plug.  Sounds easy, but mine always comes out like this:

Lumpy on the left, lumpy on the right. Help!

No set of instructions on bar taping clearly explains how to cleanly get all the tape into the bar end and plug it without leaving unsightly lumps. Anybody got any pointers?  I’d love to hear ’em. In another week or so, I’ll be replacing the handlebar, so I’ll be going through the whole process all over again, and I’d sure like to get a clean looking end.

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Categories // Accessories, Maintenance Tags // bar tape

Rude Cyclists

05.16.2010 by Ray Niekamp // 14 Comments

I saw a tweet recently complaining about rude cyclists. Thinking it was another rant about bikes interfering with cars, I replied to the writer (twitterer? twit? This person is definitely not a twit) asking for clarification.

What I mean, she wrote back, are cyclists who are rude to other cyclists, not motorists. They pass without warning, don’t call out, “On your left,” and generally have an arrogant attitude toward others they meet on the road. That attitude could contribute to accidents.

I chewed on that for awhile, and tried to remember instances I’d run across where other cyclists were rude to me. But then I experienced first hand what I think she was talking about.

I was taking my weekly run around the Veloway, chatting with my friend David. The Veloway is wide enough for two lanes, with a white stripe painted down the center. Slow cyclists are supposed to stay in the right lane. In practice, things are less formal.

As we rode along, catching up (I hadn’t seen him in weeks), he was in the right lane, and I was in the left. We didn’t hear anyone, but suddenly, the call, “On your left,” came from right behind me.

Before I could react, a rider passed me on my left side. He was down in the drops, moving fast. I didn’t think much of it — the lanes are plenty wide enough for two bikes to pass without a problem. But suddenly, a second cyclist shot between us without warning.

He was obviously the riding partner of the first guy, and was going just as fast. I looked at David, and he looked back at me and raised his eyebrows.

“Good thing you didn’t move right when that first guy called ‘On your left,'” he said.

“I would have, but he was by me too fast,” I replied. “We could have had a pretty good crash there.”

The problem, as I saw it, was that the first rider indicated he was passing on the left, but his partner passed me on my right. Now, you never pass on the right. And this guy was more than a bike length behind his buddy, so why didn’t he grab his wheel and follow him around me on the left?

The whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth. I know I’m not the fastest guy out there, but I do get out of the way when faster riders come by. There was no reason for this cowboy behavior.

What kinds of rudeness from other cyclists have you experienced on the road?

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Categories // Safety Tags // rudeness, Safety

Don Blount Crashes!

05.16.2010 by Ray Niekamp // 5 Comments

In a sling with ice.

Don Blount, who frequently guest posts here on Bike Noob, is the worse for wear today. He was riding his first century yesterday, the Sunrise Century in Lodi, California, when his front wheel caught in some railroad tracks that arc across a road he was on. Don went down and broke his wrist.

“I have an ulna skyler fracture of my left wrist and maybe torn ligaments,” he wrote in an email to his bike club. “This is my second wrist fracture in 9 months, altho this one is much worse. [Note: same wrist.]

“The first kept me off the bike for 3 weeks. With this one I’ll be fortunate to be back in 6 weeks. Both falls occurred when my wheel got caught. I’ll have plenty of time to figure it out.”

Rotten luck, Don. And just when the nice summer biking weather is hitting. Here’s hoping you have a speedy recovery and are back on the bike soon.

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Categories // crash Tags // Blount, crash

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