More handlebars

[Dead Man]

Howdy

I'm making some changes to my long-distance commuter. I've got three sets of handlebars I'm going to swap through over the next couple weeks and figure I should see what everyone thinks/is doing so maybe my trial/error will be more trial/win than /error...

What are the best applications for the three major shapes out there right now?
What are you using and why?
Where do you have your STIs on the bar, and how do you ride?

Just took off the "ergo" shaped bar and put on a "classic" and have a "compact" in reserve. I spend basically all of my time on the drops, so I had the bar angled down quite a bit and the shifters low- too low to ride the hoods. With the "classic," I found that trying to get into the same hand position, I had basically jacked the bar so far UP that I might as well be using the "ergo" (in duplicating the angle of the flat of the ergo bar with the flat drops of the "classic"), but without the benefit of the extra little flat at the end..... so if my hand ever slipped while leaning hard on a sprint, my chin would be bouncing off the stem.

So I tilted it back down, flat drops basically horizontal, and put the shifters up where the hoods would be usable... can't really reach them from the dops. How the hell do people use these things? Haven't ridden on it yet, guess we'll see what happens once I log some miles. But I'm thinking maybe this design is "classic" and not as common because, maybe, it's obsolete?

Any other thoughts from people who might have run through the same process appreciated

[Dead Man]

I should mention -

I liked the "ergo" bars, but I did struggle with some numbness after 20-40 miles. I also felt like maybe one of the other options would allow me to mount the STIs a little higher while still staying dropped comfortably... and hopefully alleviate the numbness. It's also possible the numbness was due to having too long a stem, which has been fixed... but I haven't logged enough miles yet to see if that fixes that. It probably would have been better to wait to change the bars out after I switched stems, but I'm also replacing my cables and housings and just wanted to kill two birds.

[giordana93]

Unfortunately, trial and error is pretty much the best way to dial this in, and like saddles, what works for me won't for others. Some people really dig ergo, I don't, but there is pretty much no way for classic bars to have *both* a decent reach to levers from the drops and the flat transition to hoods on the tops, which is how the latest shifters tend to be want to be placed. Since I'm a retro fart, I split the difference and mount the shifters about half way between the two extremes (i.e. the ideal for reach from drops and the ideal flat tops to shifter body smooth transition). This yields a spot where I can reach the brakes but they aren't at my fingertips when in the drops, and there is a bit of a drop, say 2cm, between the flats of the tops down to the levers. A compromise, that I arrived at after riding a week or two with no tape on my bars and an allen wrench in my pocket. The drops run a little down from parallel to ground, pointing somewhere between above the rear drop outs to mid-chainstay

[Dead Man]

Ergo is the only style I've ever ridden before this experiment. For clarity... riding on "classic" drops is a totally different hand position than "ergo" or "compact" bars, no? Seems like the only way to ride it is with wrists turned down, thumbs hooked around the base of the hooks...? I do like the way it opens up my wrist- opposite directly my wrist has been bending with an "ergo" bar, which makes me think surely it'll affect my numbness

Will be interesting to see how it goes... gonna try to get a ride in tonight (····ing rain though)

[choke]

For clarity... riding on "classic" drops is a totally different hand position than "ergo" or "compact" bars, no? Seems like the only way to ride it is with wrists turned down, thumbs hooked around the base of the hooks...? I do like the way it opens up my wrist- opposite directly my wrist has been bending with an "ergo" bar, which makes me think surely it'll affect my numbnessI'm one of those that love ergo bars yet unlike you my wrists are straight when I'm in the drops. With classic or compact bars that isn't the case and the drops never feel 'right' to me; I found the compacts the least comfortable of the bunch.