This is not the handlebar I happened to have sitting around. This is a klunker bar. A belated Christmas present. At MSRP it’s about twice as much as I paid for the complete RockHopper at BikeWorks when Obama was in the whitehouse.
This bike has been built up like this for years with 3 or 4 or 5 different handlebars. None of them felt quite right. Kinda halfass with what happened to be sitting around. The klunker bar pulls it all together. It just feels right. Heavier than all get out. A metric shit ton of steel. It's a 1991 RockHopper bro.
I’d like to draw your attention to the $5 price scrawled by Andy Voight on the best brake levers in the world.
Not that I’ve ridden it much. But a brief Saturday morning spin in the rain was enough to feel that feel. The just-right-feeling feel. So anxious to get out and ride it, my left grip slipped off when I dropped the curb. A true test ride rookie mistake. I didn’t crash but it kinda woke me up. I will get the grips to grip before I really ride the shit out of it.
I shimmed out the 25.4 clamp diameter into a SUL Salsa stem with a strip of aluminum cut from a Warchild can. Why Warchild you ask. Because that’s the beer I was drinking at the moment so I sliced up a shim with a fresh IPA residue on it leaving just a hint of a millimeter peeking out so I know that you know that I know that you know I shimmed it out with a beer can.
It takes a lot to get me to wrench on a bike these days. It takes something special to get me to scrape up enough giveashits on a Friday night after a week of commuting to work in the winter and working in the vicinity of bicycles for 40 hours to want to wrench on my bike. But I dove into this klunker last night wearing my new Free Range shirt.
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