Originally Posted by
blakcloud
It is true you can bring the bar in closer or buy a bar with a larger sweep. This does affect the depth of the fold. This may or may not be a problem.
When switching out bars, the recommended housing and cable length, need to be fine tuned by the user. My mistake was measuring my wife's M bar thinking it would be fine because my bar is slightly lower. But my brakes that sit further out on the bar and the angle of the cable run, actually makes the housing longer than the M bar. This is where buying my own housing and cable was a good solution. Even when I had to buy the gear shift cable and housing from a Brompton dealer, since you can't buy the cable by itself, I purchased the P version so that I had ample length to work with.
You should post a photo of your conversion it would be nice to see.
I can't disagree. The Octane bar wasn't that big a change in geometry and length from the original M-bars, so I guess I avoided most of the problems you ran into. The only (tiny) issue I had was the brake cable could get caught on the C-bag frame-handle if the handlebar was twisted more than 70 degrees to the left - highly unlikely if riding at any decent speed.
The first pic shows a cable on the wrong side of the C-bag frame handle, and could catch in very rare circumstances. The second pic shows the O-bag (which is hers, the C-bag is mine) has no such problems at all.
