September 29th, 2018
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I finally ended up buying some handlebar tape online from the UK a few
weeks ago, after being pretty thoroughly disappointed with the range
from my LBSes. I got the "superlight classic" tape by Fizik in "honey
brown", which looks pretty nice.
Before putting tape to bar, I watched a video tutorial from Park
Tools. It was focussed on dropbars, naturally, but moustache bars are
really not too different in this regard. If anything, they're simpler
- it's rare to grip the part of the bar that's inboard of the brake
levers on moustache bars, so it's not as critical to reverse the
direction of tape wrapping.
Obviously applying bar tape neatly and accurately is the kind of thing
that one simply has to get better at by practice, so one's first
effort is never going to be perfect, and indeed, mine wasn't, in
various respects. It is, however, perfectly adequate and I don't
think it looks bad at all. You can see a photo here[1]. Most of the
imperfections relate to the area around the brake levers, and mostly
on the underside, so none of them are obvious in that photo. What is
obvious is that the finishing tape is not remotely symmetric, but oh
well.
Regardless of how neat the whole thing looks, what I can say without
hesitation is the bar feels a lot comfier and a lot safer. I can
easily grip the bars right near their ends without any sliding, which
was not so easy before. This is a big improvement in the usability of
the bike and I'm really glad I did this.
[1]
gopher://circumlunar.space:70/I/~solderpunk/bikes/franken-peugeot/photos/bartape01.jpg
