So, as I mentioned before, I now proudly rock an old school steel-framed Peugeot road bike, complete with skinny tyres and comically incapable brakes. And while it is now a sleek single-speed machine suitable for silent running and blissfully maintenance free cycling, ’twas not always thus.

My plan, after buying it, had been simple: ‘chop and flop’ the existing drop handlebars — the extension of my elbow is still that bit too restricted for drop bars — remove the derailleurs, big chain ring and rear cassette, and replace all of them with a single BMX freewheel. Voilà: instant single-speed credibility and injury compatibility for the price of one measly cog. What could possibly go wrong?

Let me count the ways.

First, I made the mistake of having the handlebars chopped along at Reckless Bikes, a shop simultaneously more haughty and less knowledgeable than any of the others I subsequently visited. The guy helping me out had little idea of what I wanted him to do, and little interest in doing it.

“You want me to chop the ends off?”

“Yes. It’s called ‘chop and flop’. You flip them over after you’ve cut them and use them like bullhorns. You’ve never heard of this?”

“‘Bullhorns’?”

This bike shop lackey, working in perhaps the single-speed capital of North America, where every second bike is a polished steel Bianchi Pista with a coloured chain and a single cog on the back, where the fixed gear community and their dazzling array of custom Nitto handlebars can be seen at every grungey watering hole on Commercial Drive, could not grasp my plan. In hindsight, he looked and acted more like a fratboy than a hipster. Eventually he shrugged his shoulders, muttered “It’s your funeral,” or something to that effect, and got to work. I watched him as he stripped off the old, grimy bar tape, unscrewed the brake levers and worked the bars out of the clamp. He fixed them in a vice, blew out a deep breath and looked blankly at the bars.

“Where do you want them cut?”

“Here,” I said, erring on the side of caution and indicating a point so that there would be plenty of bar left.

“Okay. Well, why don’t you take a seat outside and I’ll bring it out when I’m finished?”

To cut a long story short, he cut the bars too short.

He wheeled the bike out with a look on his face which managed to be sheepish and defensive at the same time.

“So, er, what do you think?”

Recklessly chopped handlebars

He had emasculated my bike. This moron had lopped about an inch more off each side than I’d wanted, leaving the bars ever so slightly asymmetrical, and still had the temerity to charge me $20 for the honour. With the old brakes reinstalled on the vestiges of the bars there was barely any room left for my hands to grip. I wobbled home, fuming and awestruck at this utterly undoable balls-up.

Back in the apartment, I stared at the bike, which stared back accusingly in turn. Maybe, I thought, just maybe, I can reclaim an inch or so of handlebar if I can fit a pair of time-trial brake levers into the stumps remaining and make them at least slightly useable again. A few phone calls turned up a pair of TT levers in a bike shop over on the other side of town, so off I went.

My destination was Super Champion, on Main Street in the downtown eastside ghetto. The walls are arrayed with pristine fixies with coordinating deep-V rims, coloured chains, Brooks leather saddles and shiny drop bars sans bar tape*, all of them the absolute height of fixed gear sophistication. I looked around in the humbling knowledge that my Craigslist special would forever be a redheaded stepchild in the cutthroat world of bicycle couture. Specialising in faux messenger attitude, the staff understood exactly what I wanted to do with my handlebars and would probably have encouraged me to buy a set of $90 Nitto moustache handlebars instead, or maybe even just steered me in the direction of a gleaming $750 Pista to save me the bother of getting my hands dirty, had they not been rendered careless by the reefer whose aroma which filled the shop. A straggly-bearded guy wearing a T-shirt for a defunct Italian bike company and sporting a thousand-yard stare to go with it sold me the brake levers with a minimum of fuss. “You know, if you’re trying to fit them to chopped bars you might have a bit of trouble,” he mused. “Sometimes they aren’t straight enough.”

You know what? He was right. I wobbled home again, tore the new brakes out of the packinging, and tried to slide them into the ends of the handlebars. They would not fit. The tiny amount of curve left at the end meant that the cylindrical barrels of the brakes wouldn’t go more than a couple of millimetres inside the bars. Perversely enough, they would only have worked if the Reckless fratboy had cut even more off them.

(To be continued.)

* The absence of bar tape is ubiquitous among the fixie elite these days. Practicality be damned; fixed gear bikes seem to be on a road where every last ‘unnecessary’ component — brakes, mudguards, and now bar tape — is left off the bike. I strongly suspect they’ll wind up using tillers instead of handlebars.