The Kona came with drop bars. Drop bars look fast. They look like you know what you are doing. For 1400 km across Argentina, they were also the part of the bike I argued with every single day.
The problem
I wore progressive lenses. Leaned forward over a drop bar, the only way to see the road ahead is to crank your head back and peer through the top edge of your glasses, like a turtle checking the weather. Do that for six hours in 41°C heat and your neck files a formal complaint.
The other problem was hands. Drop bars promise lots of hand positions. I never used the drops. Not once. That left me the horns, and the narrow bit across the top.
The top is about as wide as a coat hanger, which puts your hands a few inches apart, right next to the stem. Steering 30 kg of loaded bike from there is like driving a bus with a steering wheel the size of a jar lid. Every wobble, I saw my life flash by. Then my looks. Then my happiness. In that order.
So really I had one hand position, for three and a half weeks.
I came home with a list. A short list. It said: fix the cockpit.
The back and forth
Then I spent months not fixing it. Researching, I called it.
I went back and forth between handlebars more times than I will admit. Butterfly bars, the kind every German touring cyclist seems to be born holding. A plain flat bar with bar ends. Swept bars, loop bars, bars that look like someone bent a coat hanger in a hurry. Each had a fan club on the internet, and each fan club was certain.
My plan was simple and thrifty: change the bars, keep everything else. Shifters, brakes, derailleurs, all of it perfectly good.
The bike had other ideas. Road shifters don’t work on a flat bar. The brake levers that do work on a flat bar wouldn’t run my brake calipers. New levers meant new calipers. New shifters meant a new rear derailleur. Pull one thread and the whole sweater shows up on the garage floor.
At some point I did the math on just buying a different bike. It was closer than I would like. But then what would I do with two bikes? I like this one. It carried me across Argentina. It stays.
The solution
The winner was a Surly Moloko, a wide, swept-back bar with a loop out front and more places to put your hands than I have hands. I sit upright now. I look straight ahead, like a person.
By the time I was done, I had replaced everything but the front derailleur and the cranks. So much for thrifty.
And then, after rebuilding an entire bicycle around my glasses, I switched to contacts. Timing has never been my strong suit.
I like everything about the new cockpit. Everything. The choice I will brag about, though, is the least exciting one: the new shifting parts are plain Shimano Deore. Nothing fancy. That is the point. Every bike shop between Trondheim and Santiago has Deore hanging on the wall, and when something breaks in a small town in France, I want the boring part.
The build
I did the work myself. I have been in IT for 40 years. How hard can a bicycle be?
A couple of weeks hard, as it turns out. That is on top of the months it took me to decide.
The box of parts sat on the bench for a few days, judging me. Then the old cockpit came off in about an hour, which should have been a warning. Taking things apart is the easy half of any project.
The new bar is 735 mm wide. My garage door is not much wider. The bike and I have had words about this.
I watched the videos. In the videos, a calm man with clean hands does each step once. I did most steps twice and at least one of them three times, with hands that were not clean, hunting for bolts. Plural. Bolts the size of a grain of rice, each one rolling under the one shelf I cannot move. Somewhere under there is enough hardware to build a second cockpit.
Then came the cable housing. Measure twice, cut once, they say. I measured twice. I cut once. I cut in the wrong place. There is no undo button on a cable cutter, so a new length of housing went on the shopping list, and the second cut was preceded by a great deal of staring.
The brakes, to my surprise, were the easy part. They came filled and ready, and I managed not to ruin them.
And a confession. Once it all shifted, mostly, I cheated. I took it to a shop and had the rear derailleur fine tuned. The mechanic was kind enough not to ask who had set it up.
The bars are still naked. No tape yet. I want to ride it for a while and move things around before I seal every lever in place under expensive tape. Expensive tape is a commitment.
The moment
When it was all set up and dialed in, I rolled the bike out, poured myself a cider, and sat there admiring it. New bars. New controls. I was pretty pleased with myself.
Then something shiny caught my eye. Back wheel, on the rim, right near a spoke.
What is that?
Is that a crack?
Stay tuned for the next challenge. I am about to learn how to build wheels.
What changed
- Handlebar: Surly Moloko
- Grips: Ergon, with bar ends
- Shifters and rear derailleur: Shimano Deore
- Brake levers and calipers: Shimano hydraulic
- Kept: front derailleur, cranks
