Handlebars and Natural Fibers

Those long days are comin’

It feels like just last week—but I think it was slightly longer ago—that I locked up the shop at 5:20 and was greeted with a post-sunset glow coming over Lake Mendota and filtering through the trees of Warner Park.  I was shocked! The sun had been going down well before the end of my work day for, well, you know how long.  Long enough to forget about sunsets.  

Yesterday there was still blue in the sky for the same commute.  We are barreling towards spring, which means a couple things:

1. It’s time for that spring tune-up.  Don’t wait til mid-March when we hit that six-week turnaround at every bike shop in town.  The queue is hot and morale is high!

2. We’re hosting our second after-hours event on Thursday, February 27th and it’s a guided tutorial on the art and craft of cotton handlebar treatments!

Cloth & Twine Bar Tape Workshop

The industry standard handlebar tape, mostly applied to curvy, road-style “drop” handlebars, is some blend of synthetic stretchy stuff, some cork flakes thrown in if you’re lucky.  And it’s awesome.  It’s compliant, it’s cushy, it’s re-doable…sometimes.  

But there’s another way out there that uses more natural fiber ingredients: cotton cloth tape and a variety of dainty twine for finishing the ends (instead of the standard issue electrical tape).  The result is a slimmer outline and a whole different feel in the hand.  Maybe it feels…more direct?  The metal of the bar is right. there.  but you can grip it nicely thanks to the texture of the woven cloth.  If you’ll scroll back up to look at Camden’s beautiful harlequin-style wrap job in the headline photo, I’m sure you’ll agree with me that cloth tape lends itself to really classing up one’s handlebar.  

Camden, a good friend and former co-wrench, will be leading this 2-hour class on wrapping with cloth.  Attendees should bring their bike and their elbow grease and plan to leave with their bars….transformed.

Newbaum’s cloth tape is made in the U.S.A. and comes in 10-foot rolls. Most drop bars will need two rolls, which is a perfect setup for a mix-n-match approach…no pressure though.  You can, as Cam did, wrap the inner section of an upright style handlebar.  There is even a technique wherein cloth tape and twine is used as an outer layer wrapped around a standard squishy handlebar grip.  Below is an example I lifted from Blue Lug’s flickr.

Happy almost-spring!

Your pal,

Zach