It’s been a long time coming but I’m finally back in the saddle. The journey to work has been completely transformed from rat-race slog to open air ramble and I am almost pathetically grateful. I sleepwalk out of the flat and lug the bike down the stairs, and whether it’s misty, muggy or has that cool breeze that lets you know it’s going to be blazing hot later, I jump on with a smile on my face and Michael Jackson-style cycling gloves on my hands.

So, without further ado, on to the bike-tech wankery.

  • Deda Crononero Team handlebars: the whole point of this rebuild was to find a set of handlebars which would keep my arms and hands in the same plane as if they were relaxed at my sides. A brief test cycle after the accident had my gammy arm twisted at an unnatural angle, and also seemed to have me reaching further than the restricted elbow really wanted to.

    The solution was a pair of bars with grips in line with the frame (like road bike drop bars) rather than perpendicular to it (like MTB bars). Because my reach was restricted, I couldn’t really use drop bars, and pursuit or “bullhorn” bars looked to be just the ticket.

    I ordered a set of Profile Airwing OS bars at first but gave up on them after a week; they drop about 10-20mm at the bend, have too long a reach and kick up at the end so that the brakes are only reachable when you’re heaved right over in a pseudo-triathlete “aero” tuck. In short, you can either stop or turn.

    I did a bit more browsing and came across the Deda Crononero bars, which did without the drop and which, on the team version, had a shorter reach and avoided the kicked-up ends of the Profile bars. They arrived a day after I ordered them from Ribble Cycles*. Nice!

  • Cane Creek 200TT brake levers: track bars need track levers but this ain’t no carbon-fibre triathlon primadonna, so I went for the cheapest I could find. The return springs are a little weak and I’m slightly worried that I’ve managed to bend one of the levers after only a couple of weeks, so my short arms/long pockets approach remains to be validated here.

  • Avid BB7 Road disc brakes: moving to road levers also means road brakes, since road and MTB levers pull different lengths of cable and the brakes aren’t interchangeable.

    Neither old-school cantilever brakes nor older-school calipers would fit the frame, so the only option left was to go for road lever-compatible discs. Avid’s BB7 looked to be the best of these. Maybe I’m more paranoid since the accident, but dropping an extra ten or twenty quid on the best brakes money can buy didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

  • Shmano M525 disc front hub: sigh. Surely, I told myself, having my front wheel rebuilt to use the existing, perfectly viable rim with a new, disc-compatible hub would be the cheapest option?

    It would not.

    Had I been able to swallow the crushing indignity of colour-mismatched wheels, I should almost certainly have gone for a pre-built wheel. As it is, I have (hopefully) a rather better hand-built wheel which matches the colours of the back one and which cost about half as much again.

The rebuild went reasonably smoothly, mostly because of a couple of decent BB7 setup guides I found on the web. Having fitted, calibrated and tied down everything, I set off for a test ride.

I pulled the brakes gently and continued on at exactly the same speed.

I pulled the brakes harder, and coasted gently to a stop. Turns out disc brakes need a fair old bit of use before they start working properly. “20-30 hard stops,” said one web forum post. “Rub mud on them!” said another. “20-30 hard stops in muddy conditions, and pour water on them after every stop,” said a third. Now, after a couple of weeks riding and endless tweaking of the cable length and brake pad adjusters, they seem to be more or less acceptable, but as yet they’re no better than good old fashioned V-brakes. I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve done another week or two of commuting to let them bed in that bit more, but I’m not overly impressed so far.

The handlebars, on the other hand, are absolutely perfect. The Profile bars were a handful for the first couple of weeks, but with the awesomely-named Crononero in place the difference is incredible: the bike feels like it’s been waiting for these bars all its life. All of a sudden it’s more maneouvrable, more comfortable and easier to thread through traffic because of the narrowness of the bars. Bionic arm or no, I wish I’d tried bars like these sooner!

One thing which switching bars taught me, and which did sort the brakes out to a degree, is that the internal routing for the brake cables on pursuit/time trial bars isn’t worth the bother. The tortuous path the cables follow to gain you a couple of inches of marginally more comfortable handlebars makes the brakes feel spongy and unresponsive, and in my case seemed to decrease the braking power a bit too. I just ran the cables under the grip tape on the Crononero bars, and they’re much better as a result.

* Alan Gray at Ribble Cycles was really helpful—more so than either Profile or Deda themselves!—and was able to measure accurately the drop and reach of both of the Crononero bars for me. Also, they dispatched them mere seconds after I placed my order, or so it seemed. Excellent service!

** As an aside, the woman across from our flat had her bike stolen from the foot of the stairwell at the weekend. The thief just broke the banister column it was locked to, took the bike with the lock still attached and left the broken strut neatly arranged at the side of the stairs. Bastard.