Thanks Gugie.

The white is for a future project. Today's project is this bike:

That tape was my first experiment with shellac. Lessons learned from the first experiment:

1. Shellac on bar tape is fairly easy and cheap, especially if you buy a giant roll of upholstery tape.
2. The cloth tape doesn't really stretch, so you can't use it as a substitute for new hoods like you kinda can with foam tape.
3. Brooks honey saddles would match nicely with amber shellac. Too bad I don't have any honey saddles.

This bar set has three different experiments on it:


On the bottom is a two layer cloth wrap with white paint. It doesn't look too bad in this picture but I would say the paint is a failure. Not only was it not very white, it ended up looking spotty in places due to flaking.

In the middle is tape that was dipped in a VERY diluted brown paint, then squeegeed and allowed to dry before wrapping, then amber shellac on top. I think this is a success - it doesn't exactly match Brooks brown but it is much closer.

On the right is a one layer cloth wrap over a piece of inner tube slid onto the bar for padding. So far it seems like the shellac will be pliant enough to work OK over the rubber, although it hasn't completely hardened up yet. The downside is that the black inner tube really shows through the whitish tape, so if you wanted white you would either have to do a super job on the wrapping to make it look even, or perhaps double wrap it. I'm planning to do the inner tube layer with the brown wrap, so it probably won't show through too badly.

Has anybody tried a padding layer of any kind under cloth with shellac? I'm planning to ride this bike a fair amount, so just plain cloth tape is not ideal.