bicycles | Operation: Corkfreshen

New wrap job, Dracula!

BAM.

So anyway, when I bought this bike back in 2007, the handlebar "tape" was actually just a pair of sliced-up innertubes:

Totally gross! (Albeit totally functional! It felt fine to ride on, it just stained your hands with black grime.) Then the right one started falling apart and subsequently fell the rest of the way apart, so I figured I should buy some corktape and learn this bar-wrapping business.

I went with white, which was kind of a departure for me, but I was still trying to decide what I thought about that late-'80s teal color on the frame, so I figured I'd go ahead and work that Miami Vice thing all the way and see what happened. Except that I'm intrinsically lazy, and ended up only re-wrapping the one side that had an emergency goin' on. I meant to do both in the same week, honest! And in the meantime, I decided that I actually quite liked the whole one-wing effect of it, so this time I grabbed a two-pack of black tape to stagger with the spool of white I had left.

(And it was definitely time, because the white side was kind of starting to decompose.)

So yeah, that happened. It looks nice! And feels better than it did! I got the Bowden cables taped into proper position this time, and I think I left enough tail on the end that the plugs will stay in for a little bit longer. There was also some comedy with scraping scum off the black side for about an hour with a razor blade, since its gumminess made me a little leery about how well the new tape would stick.

Also, in what possibly no one but me will think is a nice touch, I used opposite colors for the lever clamp stopgaps. No really guys, this is totally sweet.

Stuff:

This page makes things a little more complicated than they need to be, but it's a decent resource anyway.
Do the reverse-spin-at-brake-lever thing, running the tape along the inside, uh, thigh? of the lever. I originally did this on the white side and the drop part started unraveling anyway, but I think this was because a: The plug fell out pretty early and let the tail-wiggle generate too much slack, and b: I was a little too timid with the tension because I was worried about tape breakage. On the other hand, the black side didn't do this, and the upper part of the bars started unraveling for basically no good earthly reason. (Well, I mean, they were unraveling because my hands rotate towards me on the upper part of the bar. I guess that's technically a good earthly reason.)
- Recap: The tape should wrap over the top of the bar towards the outside when it's on the drop portion, and should wrap over the top of the bar towards the rider when it's on the top portion.
- For best results with this, trim the stopgap strip so that the vertical part of the main tape (the part that runs up the thigh of the brake lever) only overlaps it by a few milimeters. Otherwise, it makes a big ol' goiter on the inside of the brake lever, which just looks no good.

The other thing I did recently was put some reflective tape on each spoke, but I haven't had a chance to rig a flash photo while moving, yet. If I can pull that off, I'll post it. (Does anyone else do that spoke-tape thing? I put mine kind of scattered using a stepped pattern, but now I'm wondering whether the wheels spin fast enough to make that look semi-solid, which was my goal. If the stepped pattern just ends up looking kind of razzle-dazzle, I'll probably go for a narrower band on my next wheel, because the increased brightness and solidity seems worth the trade-off of a smaller lit surface area.)