There was a box on the doorstep when I got home from work today, which resulted in me spending about four hours in the basement tinkering with bike stuff this evening.

First order of business: install new cranks (Sugino RDs) and new bottom bracket. Involved lots of fighting with said bottom bracket since I stupidly bought a Shimano (ISO tapers) to go with my RDs (that other taper standard). Net result is that my BB spindle is effectively wider than it should be due to the taper mismatch. Fortunately, I had bought a wide BB and a spacer since my BB shell is a weird oddball width for some reason. Omitting the spacer and moving the chainring to the inner spacing gives me a very reasonable chainline for the time being. New 17t cog was installed to reobtain desired gearing with the new 48t ring and the chain was lengthened slightly to match.

Second order of business and the meat of this thread: ditch those annoying drop bars! I don't know how people can stand drop bars. I'm not incredibly flexible, but I doubt increased flexibility helps your lungs inflate fully when hunched over on drops. The gender-specific plumbing accessories were another issue not helped by the drops. Since I always rode them on the tops, I had about 1.5 hand positions that were comfortable to work with. The 'stache bars should increase that to at least 4 positions: outer, front, angle (palms up), and inner.


(click for some more pictures)


I stupidly ordered the 26.0 bars instead of the 25.4 and realized that I don't own any 26.0 stems after it was far too late. Ghettogineering to the rescue! I chucked a scrap of 1/2" copper pipe in the drill press and taped a flap of sandpaper to it. It took me a long time, but I successfully enlarged the stem to fit the bars perfectly with my homebrewed and only somewhat effective spindle sander.

I salvaged the bar tape from the drops as well as the brake lever. The brake cable is insanely short now and actually looks pretty tidy compared to the drop setup where it looped up over the bars. Not wanting to have my computer in the way of the potential innermost hand position, I made excellent use of the suicide lever stub by making an accessory mount that bolted to the brake lever out of a scrap of 3/4" copper pipe. Much trial and error got the shape, bend angle, and hole alignment right, and then I sanded it down nicely and wrapped it with some leftover cotton bar tape for looks. End resut: computer is mounted even further forward than usual (easier to read when leaned down over the bars) and takes up no handlebar real estate whatsoever.



Anyone else running moustache bars? I haven't even test ridden the setup yet since I'm dog tired, but just from sitting on it in the hallway and riding across the house I like it a lot already.