Originally Posted by
mechanicmatt
Wow I'm not sure what's going on with the brakes there. More pictures of the bars and cable routing is needed.
Sorry, don't have more pictures (I was just trying to show the 32's I'd put on there and the terrible fender lines). It's functional, but sort of painful to look at. The Velo Orange Crazy Bar looks like this:
(Neither of these pictures are mine - both "borrowed" from Google Images - the ones on my wife's bike are tilted a bit, so the swept back part is a bit downward and the bullhorns are a bit more upward than the second picture)
The swept back portion has mtb diameter, so I have some old Deore LX integrated 8 speed shift/brake levers on it - I've since swapped out the shellacked cotton tape with cork ergo grips.
The forward-sticking part of the bars (shaped sort of like bullhorn bars) are road bike diameter, so I have them wrapped with generic cork tape under cotton tape that I have shellacked. The brake cable from the swept back part (and levers) runs under the tape to the end of the bullhorn-like bars, where I have cyclocross-style interrupter levers at the very ends. Because of the shape of the bars, having interrupter levers there feels like having a slightly fat non-aero cable routed drop bar lever. That way, you can ride very upright most of the time, but if you want to get more aero in the wind or while going downhill, you can grab the bullhorn area and sort of simulate the position of riding on the hoods (I stole the idea for that setup from SS/FG folks who use bullhorns with an interrupter lever for the front brake). The swept back part of the bars gets a bit in the way of your elbows if you try to bend them and get very low (and it's a little flexy if you try to do a lot of climbing out there - not terrible and definitely not as bad as the "in" area of Scott Drop In bars if you've ever used those - but I can feel a little bit of motion).
This is a bike that my wife uses like 95% of the time for cruises in the subdivision of 5 miles or less, so she's almost always on the swept back parts, but it was also convenient for me to hook up my son's bike to with the follow-me tandem adapter when the two of us would go alone before he was able to ride by himself and I liked to try pushing it a bit sometimes on the bullhorns.