Equipment - Bar End Shifters

So the other day I got mentioned in a blog post by Steve Tilford. It was sort of a round about way of being mentioned, almost a rebuttal. He'd merged the ideas of indexed bar end shifting (his thoughts) with regular bar end shifting (my contribution), resulting in him pointing out his brother invented indexed bar end shifting.

In a comment to a prior blog post I paid tribute to Leonard Nitz as an inspiration for bar end shifters. The reality is that there were a number of riders in the New England area (Nitz was from NY so he'd have seen these riders) using a right side bar end shifter. Some used both right and left, but for us "crit guys" the right side was all we needed. For the left side we just used the simple and straightforward downtube shifter.

However, for me, locally, the real inspiration came from my teammate Mike Hartley. He's the guy that taught me a ton of what I know now. He taught me about leadouts. He demonstrated to me commitment in training, commitment to a race plan. For years he sacrificed his own chances in races so he could help me instead. I distinctly remember two races where he blew up trying to keep me at the front, apologizing profusely as he drifted back inside the last lap of the race (Meriden and Danbury). In other races his efforts helped me place well. I remember Cheshire Crit in CT particularly, and Montague in MA, the first race where we worked together as a team.

To be more complete I have to say that Mike and Lou Kozar were the two guys who inspired the bar end shifter. I wanted to be like Lou - he'd gotten second in the state RR the year before I met him, he was a Junior, he built my first race bike, and he got me set up equipment-wise so I could go racing. Lou, though, got more involved in the shop and eased up a bit on the racing. Also he was a stronger version of me. He was a lot stronger than me and his jump absolutely demolished mine. I'd only have a chance if he wasn't training - I had to do longer sprints to beat him. At any rate when he raced with me I knew my place and it certainly wasn't the lead sprinter spot.

Mike, though, he was irrepressible as a racer-tinkerer. He'd experiment with all sorts of stuff. And he came out and raced all the time.

For the bar end shifter he had a number of set up tips.

Remove Shift Lever Cover

First, remove the plastic shifter cover. The Suntour bar ends came with a hard plastic shift lever cover (the same goes for the Shimano levers). It numbed the feel of the shifts, giving you less direct contact with the bike. In the days of Benotto tape (it's only a bit better than a layer of electrical tape on the bars) and super thin leather gloves, "feel" was everything. You had to rely on yourself to make good shifts, to notice that there's a tick in some bearing, and having the bike connected to your raw nerve endings was a great way of knowing your bike. It wasn't like it is now, where you're sort of riding an SUV that happens to handle pretty well.

Bard end shifter with rubber cover still on.

This is a 1985 frame that I think broke by 1986.

Drop outs were not replaceable back then.

Note tubular tire strapped under the saddle.

When I first started racing I was afraid of changing actual parts. Changing out a part, fine. Altering an actual component, no way. It took me a while to simply slip off the shift lever cover.

You can see the texture on the shift lever here, sort of a ridge to catch your pinkie or ring finger.

The plastic cover hid it, making it less "grippy"

From my post here.

Drill The Lever

Second, if you really wanted to, you could drill out the aluminum shift lever. Holes in aluminum levers fulfill two purposes, one more than another. You might think that holes in, say, a brake lever would help reduce weight, however minutely. You'd be right, if you were talking about homemade holes. But production holes, like the ones in Campy's Super Record brake levers? They were there for grip in the rain. Drilled out Super Record brake levers were actually heavier than their non-drilled out Nuovo Record counterparts.

However, if your levers were slick with water, the holes helped give you traction. It's like the diamond plate metal things on the trucks and such. The raised diamonds give you some semblance of traction.

Modolo Pro brakes, factory drilled.

Typically the aluminum was thicker on drilled out levers, increasing weight or keeping it the same.

Note the WOODEN cable stop on the downtube - I carved it myself.

Finally, the ultra thin Benotto tape. Nowadays you'd probably be sued for offering such a tape.

For those ultimate weight weenies you'd see the Nuovo Record levers (and a Nuovo Record small chainring, for the same reason - the "lightened" Super Record small ring was actually a touch heavier). With a shift lever, in the heat of a sprint, you wouldn't want it to slip in your sweaty fingers. So drilling the thing a bit would help with that.

At home we didn't have a good drill, I was scared of ours, and I really didn't use the drill press at the shop, so my bar end lever remained undrilled. Therefore no pictures as I don't have a picture of Mike's shifter.

Cut Bars

Third, Mike cut down his bar so that the shift lever would sit in the palm of his hand. One major disadvantage of a normal bar with a bar end is that the bar end is about 3" away from your hand. It's fine if you were on a touring bike, which is really what bar ends were meant for, but in a crit, with 200m to go, you didn't want to be sliding your hand back 3" to shift while you were sprinting your brains out.

Before I cut down my bars.

Mike's logical solution was to move the shifter up, and to do so meant to cut down the bars. He cut down his bars so much the bar end was basically pointing a bit down, not back. I imitated him, cutting a bit more at a time, until I reached the same conclusion he did - it was best to have the shift lever basically end the curve part of the drops. If the bar end sat flat it was too far back.

My cut down crit bend bars with Suntour shifter.

From here.

Because I was cutting the bar for shifter placement I cut less off the left side of the bar (no bar end shifter there). I cut at least one bar evenly, meaning the left side was way too short. I don't remember what I did but I think I raced with a "dummy" left bar end mount so my hand wouldn't slip off. Or I cut the bars more and turned them upside down to make a "time trial" set up.

Knowing me I probably did the latter.

When I went to Ergo levers I didn't change bars right away. Therefore I had to race with an empty bar end mount on the right side. When I got new bars I cut them down for no bar ends so I was okay.

Note the empty bar end mount on the right side, even though I have Ergo levers.

I still cut my bars down to this point nowadays, without removing the extra inch of bar for the bar end mount. The flat stuff on the drops I never use because it's useless and frankly a bit dangerous in a field. You can't do anything well from the ends of the drops - can't brake, can't shift, and you don't have as tenacious a hold on the bars as further up the drop.

What I cut off my bar currently; it's conservative as you can always cut more.

This is an FSA Wing Compact bar.

Retrofit Index Shifter

Fourth, Mike actually did retro-fit a downtube Shimano index shifter (SIS) onto a non-indexed bar end mount. It didn't have great ergonomics because a downtube shifter was much longer than a bar end shifter. His shifter ended up sticking way down. I don't remember if he cut it down or not. When I first saw it I was impressed with his work but not with the appearance.

It involved using a downtube frame adapter specific for the SIS shifter, mounting it to I think a Suntour bar end mount. I remember a bolt going through the bar end mount, one that wasn't the right one, probably a retrofitted Cannondale downtube mounting thing. Most frames had their downtube mounts brazed on so they were useless for retrofitting onto a bar end mount. Unless you brazed one on, I suppose.

How an SIS shifter (#7/#13) mounted to a downtube boss (#8)

Lifted off a forum.

However, Cannondale's aluminum tubing meant that the downtube bosses were bolted on, with a long bolt connecting the left and right downtube mounts. Unscrew them (from a trade in frame program that existed back then) and you'd end up with two mounts for downtube shifters that were actually threaded in the back. Perfect for mounting to some obscure place.

You can see the upper left piece is a downtube boss, like #8 above.

Mount the black piece onto a friction bar end mount and an index shifter would fit on it.

The long bolt reaches between the sides of the downtube.

This was lifted off a forum and the poster said they got it from Cannondale.de.

(On an aside we half joked about moving shifters around on a Cannondale. It'd be an easy process, just drill holes and bolt on the downtube mounts. You could have theoretically mounted the shifter further up the downtube, along the top tube, where ever. I'm sure it would have been possible (still is possible?) to mount the downtube bosses to a set of aero bars so you could have your shifters on them. Likewise, because the threaded bottle bosses were rivnuts, you could mount extra bottle mounts where ever you wanted, or, conversely, use the threaded inserts for other purposes, like anchoring a fender permanently to a touring frame. I remember doing this for a customer who took his bike all over the world, we went a bit nuts drilling out his frame and installing "permanent mounts" for various accessories.)

Flip Left and Right Mounts

Finally, when Shimano's index bar end shifter came out, the shift lever mount mounted the shifter below the center of the bar. This meant that the shifter was below where it would be compared to a Suntour shifter. With the whole "shifter in the palm of your hand" philosophy this was less than ideal, and in fact it was horrible. Although I was suitably impressed with Shimano's index shifting, the fact that the shifter sat so low (and also that it would have cost some money) kept me on Suntour. As someone that hasn't used Shimano drivetrains who knows what would have happened if I'd gone Shimano at that point?

Shimano SIS bar end shifters.

Note how the center bolt of the right shifter (top) is below the center of the bar.

Mike's solution was perfect. He flipped the left mount and installed it on the right side of the bars. He had to do some drilling and such but after a little bit of experimenting it worked out. Now the shift lever sat higher than the centerline of the bar, sticking up maybe a quarter inch. His bar end shift lever was literally in the palm of his hand.

For me it was too much. Honestly the budget was the big part because to get into Shimano's index shifting system (key word: system) you had to have, primarily, their freehub rear hub. I had no such hubs in my own inventory, nor any cassettes. Therefore to get into SIS I'd have had to spend money for shifters, the rear derailleur, rear hubs (for the cassette hub - I had all freewheel hubs), cassettes, cables, housing, chain... I just stuck with my Suntour stuff. It was free because I already had the whole set up and it worked fine.

And then 1988-89 rolled around and Shimano's STI levers became widely available. I saw an immediate effect at races, or, more specifically, in sprints on training rides. I used to be able to take advantage of my "shifting while out of the saddle sprinting" but now that advantage eroded pretty quickly. Not only that but STI worked when climbing out of the saddle on the hoods. Now I was the one being left behind as riders shifted gears in the middle of a slope.

The real kicker were the SUNY Purchase Tuesday Night Sprints. I used to be able to clean up there, out jumping the stronger sprinters and out sprinting the stronger jumpers. If you could jump better than me I'd out sprint you after shifting into a higher gear. If you could out sprint me I'd out jump you by jumping in a lower gear. When STI showed up suddenly it wasn't quite so simple. One rider started regularly beating me when he didn't have to jump in the same gear he sprinted in - Eric Min. He'd go on to found Zwift.

Sprinting at SUNY Purchase, or, more precisely, sitting up just after winning a sprint.

I had to wait until 1992 when Campy came out with their Ergo levers before I got back on a semi-level playing field as far as shifting while on the hoods went. Since then I've only ridden Campy. The lever + thumb button works well for me.

Anyway, that's my experience with bar end shifters. I was lucky to start racing in an era where one could pretty easily tinker with their equipment. It was a bit more modular, a bit more "parts put together". I used to do all sorts of stuff with my shoes, mainly drilling out new cleat mounts and adding straps to lace shoes (which makes me wonder what the attraction is to laced shoes again). I fiddled with hubs and brakes and rear derailleurs. I used the shop facing tool to steepen my head tube angle a bit, "facing" the bottom part of the head tube and removing a solid few mm of material off the bottom of it.

Currently it's not like that, with more integrated stuff, carbon stuff, etc. Even switching derailleur pulleys is sort of a big deal - back then everyone did it. And I highly doubt you'll see people altering Ergo lever mounts and such, it's just not worth it. There's very little optimization going on.

Or, perhaps more accurately, now that I think of it, perhaps it's more that I no longer have the time or inclination for such tinkering.

In a way that's sort of sad.

Tsunami - 1.0, Take Two (1.1?)

A while back I got that first wonderful custom-fit frame from Tsunami Bikes.

It changed my world.

That year I found I could train longer, race harder, and, for the first time ever, managed to get a Cat 2 upgrade.

Even so I found a few details that I could change. The biggest was the chainstay length - with a front end so much longer than before, the geometry unweighted the rear wheel significantly. I found that going through corners under power I could almost always break the tire loose. On particularly fast laps I could break the tire loose even without pedaling.

Okay, fine, I could move my weight back a bit and anchor the rear wheel more, but after seeing a few pictures of me cornering I realized that it would be better to bring the wheel closer in to the bottom bracket. If Mohammad can't go to the mountain, move the mountain to Mohammad.

This led to the second Tsunami frame, the black one. Although its aero styling made it look different, it fit exactly like the orange frame. Out back, though, the stays were shorter. 39 cm for the chainstays to be exact, the shortest the builder could do without massive tire rub.

It's tight. I'm going to file/sand it down a bit.

(I get some pretty horrendous sounding scraping going when I ride over sand and such - the sand sticking to the tires scrapes the frame, jamming into it. I can feel the grit jamming my tire and frame, slowing me down. It's that tight.)

The second frame gave the nod to aerodynamics over weight. I asked for it with the thought of running just a CamelBak, i.e. no bottles, and trying to get more aero by eliminating the big clunky things in the frame. Real world experience led to me installing two cages - my aero bike experiment failed, mainly because I found it so cumbersome to take a sip of water with the CamelBak on.

The experience made me look at my lighter (by over 200g) orange frame with a different eye. I wanted the slightly lighter frame back but with the shorter stays.

This is where Tsunami Bikes made the difference.

Joseph Wells, the welder behind the name, agreed to modify my frame with shorter stays. He'd have to cut off and replace the seatstays to accomplish this, in order to relocate the brake bridge. He would be sending the frame back unpainted (I asked him to strip off the rest of the paint).

Just unpacked after it arrived.

After several weeks I got the frame back. Shorter stays, no paint, and looking admittedly a bit sad. No glowing Candy Orange paint, no decals, no battle scars.

 I weighed it out of curiosity. Without a rear dropout, without the cable adjusters, no bottom bracket cable guide, the frame weighed in at 1210g, a full 230g lighter than in its original form. I'll weigh the small pieces but I don't think they'll break 50g, leaving the frame at about 200g lighter. I'm guessing the shorter tubes will count for about 40-60g (based on the 30g I saved by cutting down my heat treated aluminum bars), so the luscious paint probably weighed about 150g.

After talking with a few people I decided to make some unauthorized changes to the frame. I started by drilling holes in the bottom bracket shell, swiss-cheesing the dropouts, and even the back of the head tube. I also honed the inside of the head tube and bottom bracket, thinning the tube diameters. Finally I acid etched the tubes with muriatic acid to thin them out.

(pause)

Okay, I didn't do any of that.

I did start filing down some welds, shaping some of the cable stops, and and basically trying to get rid of any superfluous material. I gained a new appreciation for the artisan frame builders; I also realized that I could do this shaping stuff for a long, long time and not be satisfied until it was perfect.

(I realized I was paralleling another rider's experience, albeit in a slightly different way. When Chris Boardman was laid up for a while after breaking a bunch of bones, he whittled away at a Mavic crankset. It looked beautiful when he was done but, based on seeing and feeling others done the same way, it was probably super-flexy. Nonetheless the idea of "honing" a finished product appeals to me in some way, I guess the same way I want to mod a brand new car.)

I've been filing a little at a time, after my trainer rides, maybe once a week. I weighed the frame after a few filing sessions - 1190g, or 20g lighter than before. I wanted to get rid of any excess weight but not reduce strength. I even looked at pictures of the frame bits before they got welded (I looked them up) so that I'd have an idea of what I was working with.

A friend happened to be painting his Mini a bright red color. He is doing part of another project for me, and when I realized he was painting yet another Mini (this is his fifth one), I asked if he could maybe shoot some paint on my frame. Since I had to work around his schedule I had to accelerate mine - I dropped off the frame at about 80% complete.

My friend promised me some miracles, using a really heavy (gulp) primer that puffs up and fills stuff out. He'd then sand it down. I must have looked a bit alarmed because he looked at my face and mentioned that he'd try and keep the weight down.

(On an aside I realize now that I could have spent months filing and sanding the frame, and if I were selling the thing under my own name I'd feel somewhat obligated to do that if the finish was an issue.)

With Junior occupying my time a bit, I kinda sorta forgot about the frame. Then I realized, oh, he's probably done with it. I went to call him and saw that I had a missed call on my phone.

From him.

"Dude, your frame's all set."

I headed over.

With Junior in the car too, of course.

 Frame hanging up.

Mini is in the background, with "Actual Size" already in the window. Right now he's doing the jambs and stuff, the stuff that isn't visible until you open doors.

Painter is off to the right.

My painter friend said he brushed on the primer around the joints so as not to spray too much of the heavy stuff on the frame, then went over it with a bunch of different sandpaper, then shot the whole frame. I haven't weighed the frame yet so no report on the total paint weight.

I had to take this shot. Expo Wheelmen's sponsor Manchester Cycle sells Bell helmets, and because of Expo I now race in a Bell. That Bell sticker is on the Mini.

The frame is now red. It happens to be a Hyundai color (I think).

Originally my friend was going to paint the mini a Viper red. Even though that would have dovetailed nicely into my "what car should I buy" post because I briefly contemplated a Viper, ultimately it was his choice. If he picked yellow my frame would be yellow.

 Note the smoothed out welds.

 I also filed away at the base of the cable stops. I wanted them to be more "formed" than just triangular blocks.

 Another view of the front end, with the formed cable stops on the downtube.

 The bottom bracket got cleaned up a lot.

So did the welds around the rear drop outs.

The Missus said "Wow" when I opened the door holding the frame. I'm psyched to build it up now. I have all the frame's small parts downstairs (dropout, seatpost collar, stuff like that), a lighter fork, and the actual parts kit. I also have a second SRM crankset, including the special 104mm spindle, for this frame.

I hope to incorporate a couple pieces off other frames - I have a Ti seat collar, for example, that I'd like to use.

We'll see how it goes. It's not that I don't have the stuff to put the bike together - it's just finding the time that'll be the trick.