More like an elk’s head, less like a bull’s head. Recently moving this elk head to a new location beneath a basement window at HQ got me thinking. Thinking that Brooks saddles are good for something and also realizing that each time I reached up to open the curtains above the elk head I was bonking the horns because they protrude from the wall a bit. Envisioning some sort of end caps, I started to tinker. It didn’t take long before I came upon my ALL WORK AND NO PLAY IS NO GOOD AT (AWANPINGA) top cap collection and I knew I wanted to use a couple of them somehow.
Then I started looking for star nuts so I could screw down the top caps legit-torque-spec-like, full on threadless headsets. But I didn’t have any star nuts sitting around and if I did, I’d have to completely mash the shit out of them to get them stuffed into that old steel handlebar’s inside diameter. Labor intensive overkill futility.
The next day at work, I was thinking about bar plugs. Ye Olde School threaded bar plugs would work just fine. I stuck my head in the electric cargo bike cage and asked Alistair if he had any bar plugs, like the ones on an old Free Spirit. He said “what?” and then politely changed the subject.
Recycled Cycles is spitting distance from the mothership, and if they were open on Mondays I might have spent a couple bucks on old bar plugs. But they were closed, so I didn’t.
Later, back at HQ I decided to make my own plugs and started tinkering again. In less than 10 minutes I fabricated a suitable solution with some old shit that was sitting around. In situ resource utilization brings me joy, an amount of joy that’s inversely proportional to sitting in a hotel room in Bozeman waiting for OE parts to arrive from Germany so a local shop can fix my BMW.
I hacksawed a synthetic wine cork in half then shaved the pieces down a smidge with a utility knife so they were a bit proud of the old steel handlebar’s id. Then I screwed the AWANPINGA caps into the plastic plugs with short-stack sheetrock screws. Finally, in conclusion, I plugged the plugs snuggly into the elk horns and stood back to admire my work. No OE, no torque specs, no carbon fiber, no out-of-pocket expense, no sales tax, no shipping costs, no hose clamps, no zip ties, no duct tape, no bullshit.
If you work in a small nonprofit community bike shop and refurbish a few thousand used bikes, there’s a good chance some of those bikes will be Gary Fishers. And there’s a good chance some of those Gary Fishers will have AWANPINGA headset top caps. And there’s a very good chance some of those top caps will end up in your pocket only to reappear on one of your own bikes or JB Welded to a spoke magnet and displayed on your fridge or screwed onto the pegboard in your shop or years & years later used as bar plugs in your Elk horns.
