They aren't quite rare, but they seem fun.
Built by 3TTT and licensed by scott.




Paid $10 and they came with a stem, some beat up campy levers, and the foam/rubber arm pads in good shape.
I need to weigh them but they are a lot lighter than anything in carbon these days.

Whoa, thats pretty sweet

Awesome find.
For the full mid-90s retro triathlon bar effect, whack on a pair of original Gripshifts. I have them on my Gitane TT bike and they work beautifully.
Are the bars going on a ´vintage´ Tri bike?

Not to seem too stupid but, were tri bikes from the early ninties as specialized as today or just road bikes with different bars?

Well, mine is a TT frame from the mid 90´s, so not triathlon specific.
As far as I know the tri bike geometry (increased seat tube angle) is a fairly recent phenomenon.
TT bikes used to have all sorts of funny geometry going on. I think mine is a development of the Lo-Pro frame idea, where you had a 28" on the back, 26" wheel on the front and a very short head tube, to get the rider´s torso as parallel to the ground as possible.
At the bottom is a piccie of a similar Gitane to mine (the Mach 310) - you get the idea.

This shot is a lo-pro bike with the 2 different sized wheels.

My KHS came with the same bars. I passed them on to another BF member.

I'd like to change your thread title.

Vintage + Triathlon - Swimming =

Dang those things are scary looking ------ Lp

Yeah. I'd have to be real cautious riding one of them around here during hunting season.

Man in the day I always wanted a set of those. I finally found a set at a Play it Again sports. I bought them for $2. After I paid the owner, he asked what they were. I now have two pair, but have not put them on anything, I don't think I can tuck that tight anymore.

How 'bout this:

These came on one of my Gitane's along with a set of drop bars. The shop put the drop bars back on but I couldn't get rid of these things. I probably won't use them but I figured they were so different I had to keep them for history.

Even back in the eighties, tri bikes were "different". You have to appreciate that most athletes who took part in triathlons were primarily runners or swimmers and those disciplines don't use most of the same muscles that cyclists use.

Triathletes pushed aero into the mainststream, because they couldn't draft. One of my friends still uses those bars on his bike. They are lighter than most clamp-on aeros. I have an '86 set of Scott one-pc clamp-ons for my '86 Ironman. Just for looks, I'm too uncoordinated....

I always thought of them as more like this:

I recently acquired and then sold this project:

that's funny...were you the craigslist seller or the guy that bought it right before i could? ;-)

I also have a pair. They are very light, but man do they ever flex, it's more than a little disconcerting.

Good luck with that, I've been trying to find a pair for ages, the times I've seen them come up on eBay they've gone for much more than I want to pay. The problem is they are one of those items that is hard to search for efficiently.

The profile bars or the insect? I just thought the shadow from the bike was pretty spot-on.

They come up pretty often on ebay.de , in fact I´m watching a pair at the moment that will go on my wife´s cheapy tri bike build up (next project)

Tri-bars…they became popular when I was actively racing triathlons in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There was no more popular way to screw up the balance of a fine Italian racing bike. I recall that they put a lot of extra weight over the front wheel and in front of the stem. I bought a pair back then, used them on no more than two or three training rides and then removed them forever…never raced a Tri with them on my bike.

Specific tri-bikes were designed shortly after the advent of the aerobars. Aerobars debuted in triathlon in 1987 and I think the first specialized tri-bikes came out that same year.

Initially a lot of folks did put aerobars on road bikes, though.

i sold it on PDX craigslist

Another photo of a Nishiki triathlon bike from my hard drive.