Cork Grips, Woundup Composites and Monoplaners

The combination of the rainy season approaching us and me riding my geared bike more often had prompted me to add a front brake to my fixed-gear.  Remember that white track bike that caused me so many problems?  That’s the one.

As my stock track fork has nearly no clearance between the fork crown and the top of the front tire, it forced me to get another already drilled fork with minimal rake.  The stock fork had an incredibly small rake of 30mm.  I was able to custom order a Woundup Composites track fork (35mm – with the dropouts reversed) at wholesale cost.  I was always curious about these forks.  They look aesthetically pleasing (well, for carbon forks) and I was curious to see how they rode.

I chose Nitto Jitensha handlebars for comfort.  I realized that recently I’ve been really in love with wide handlebars.  I’ve been religiously riding Nitto moustache bars that provide me multi-positions (all relatively wide).  Nitto Jitensha bars are flat and sweep back towards you for comfort.  26.0 clamp and are only made for Jitensha Studios in Berkeley.  Jitensha is a store that I highly recommend.  The owner of the shop, Hiroshi is a master frame designer of his own shop brand Ebisu and also a little higher end, Shulas.  They are very well known in the Bay Area (and beyond) for mainly their all-arounder (touring) bikes.  Check it out if you get a chance.

I chose Campagnolo monoplaners to use as a front brake setup.  I don’t really have a preference on what model monoplaners, but the ones I got were (95′?) Veloces.  They provide VERY good stopping power and are very pleasing to the eye.  In the same generation, the Record equivalent was the C-Record Delta brakes which, while looked nice and bulbous, provided very weak stopping power.

I’ve always been a big fan of cork grips.  They look good, they feel good in your hands, they absorb road vibrations well and they are cheap.  If you do a search online on how to mount cork grips to your handlebars, you’ll find lots of different methods.  My two methods, depending on the girth of your handlebars, are either just using cloth wrap and/or using Hogar’s Household glue.

Conveniently, the Nitto Jitensha bars I was working with this time were thick enough that the cork grips already fit snugly on there.  My theory is always to avoid using glue if you can because cleanup and removal can be a pain to deal with when it finally comes time to change or replace grips.  If you find yourself having handlebars that already are snug against the cork grips, then just wrap your handlebars with Velox cloth wrap first over where the cork grip would go over.  BE SURE not to overlap the cloth wrap otherwise the cloth wrap will come out to be too thick.  Single wrap it over that portion.  After this, directly fit the cork grip over the cloth wrap by twisting in the SAME direction as the cloth wrap.  When you get to near the end of the wrap, finish the job by just pushing the cork grip towards the center of the bar instead of twisting otherwise there will be bunching of the cloth underneath the cork.

If on the otherhand, your handlebars are not thick enough that there is still gap between the cork grip and the handlebar, wrap the handlebars as with Velox wrap as I previously mentioned.  After this step, apply Hogar’s Household glue onto the cloth wrap in lines perpendicular to the direction of the wrap job.  Do not apply too much glue as this will just lead to more cleanup in the end.  Do not get the glue on your hands because it is hard to get off.  After applying some glue on top of the Velox cloth wrap, slide the cork grip over the wrap just by pushing it directly towards the middle of the handlebar.  Use a piece of Seran wrap to wipe off excess glue if there is any at the end of the job.  By not gluing the handlebar directly, this makes for much easier cleanup because it is much easier to peel off glued cloth wrap than to scrape off glue from alloy handlebars in the end.  Please avoid using Gorilla Glue for this application because the glue expands a lot as it dries.  It expands so much so that it is hard to predict how much to use initially.