As many of you know I have a Leo Roadini, that I ran for a good while with drop bars. While I am absolutely a drop bar guy, I decided to convert my Leo to Albastache to establish it's place in my stable as a less-racey road bike. With its long chainstays, high head tube and now Albastache bars, it's a more 'civilized' road machine.
I like the Albastache bars a great deal and I posted a review of them which is easy to find if you care to search. One small quibble I had with my own setup was the brakelever situation. The shape of the Albastache bars (and the original Moustache bars) makes it so I run the brake levers almost flat. That's mechanically the best place so the contour of the brakelever matches the contour of the bars. It also gives me a good flat hand position on the tops of those brakelevers. With the blades of the brake levers out there flat, it can be a somewhat awkward wrist position to get at the brakes. Your forearm needs to be pretty flat, which can be achieved by running the bars high. I handle it by deliberately dropping my elbows, which puts me in a little more of a 'tuck' position. I was running contemporary Shimano brakelevers (like Rivendell sells) and it was fine. Not perfect, but fine. I wished for a brakelever that had the blades dropped a little bit down so I could keep the flat platform on the lever body, and would have a better wrist angle on the brakes. I didn't want to force-rotate the brake levers down because I'd lose the good platform and it's mechanically forcing parts to not-fit perfectly. I've contemplated a number of different modification to brakelevers including bending and grinding and spacers, but never got to the implementation. A recent bike project had me stealing the Shimano levers off the Leo Roadini, and last week I decided to get Leo back on the road. I had a bit of an unconventional mechanics inspiration. The contemporary SRAM and TRP road levers have the blades offset quite a bit. I decided to run a set of SRAM S500 brakelevers 'backwards' on my Albastache bars, to get that dropped blade shape I was after. The results look great to my eye, even though I had to run the cable housing up top rather than underneath. Pics or it didn't happen Cockpit <https://www.flickr.com/photos/45758191@N04/32790255367> Front <https://www.flickr.com/photos/45758191@N04/47680580102> Side <https://www.flickr.com/photos/45758191@N04/46817095675> I haven't ridden it at all yet, but the look is just what I was after when I decided to give this setup a shot. Bill Lindsay El Cerrito, CA -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
