tigat

For those of you who may not have been following my earlier posts on this topic, the pictures below represent a single hand control system on a Trek Domane nick-named the Bandit, a project that Trek started for me, a one-handed rider, some years ago.

Some great bikes resulted, but one of the project goals was to make the adaptation easy to assemble, completely with off the shelf parts. Last week, it happened.

The bike uses Shimano Di2 components set up in synchronized mode, so both the shifter on the hood and the climbing button on the bar top engage the full range of gears. Likewise, both the brake lever on the hood and the Shimano GRX bar top, in line lever fire the front and rear disc brakes simultaneously with great modulation and very little lever pull effort. The result: full one-handed control of every braking and shifting component from the bar top/the hood/the drop. The device attached to the outlet portal on the GRX lever is a Pro Edition Double, made by a Korean company named Outbraker, which takes the single output and splits it into two hoses feeding the front and rear.

Long story short - this is awesome! I have never felt safer or more in control on a bike.

Please forgive the duplicate posting on several forums - you just never know where you might reach someone who has a friend who might benefit from something like this.

shelbyfv

From BF FAQ "Disruption can include harassment, multiple user profiles, multiple posting of the same post ...." You can have them all consolidated if you ask.

tigat

Thx Shelby. Feel free to report - there is a virtually identical post in the Adaptive forum, which gets very little traffic, and a thread in the Fifty Plus, where most of the previous stories on the bike have been posted and some members have been keeping track of the project. If the moderators want it taken down, I'd be glad to do so, but I did not see this, given the content, as disruptive in the least.

telebianchi

It's not disruptive if it's really cool. And I'm just talking about the color.

Purely out of curiosity, do the brakes/shifting still work from the left lever? So if somebody else borrowed the bike it would work as typical?

shelbyfv

Not my job to report it, just thought you might want to do the right thing. Carry on....

cxwrench

I'm totally fine w/ the OP posting something like this in more than one place, not that my opinion matter. The bike is super cool! I set one up years ago for a Para athlete but it was cable shifting and brakes, very easy at that time. This Trek is great!

shelbyfv

Yep, my opinion doesn't matter either. I agree, very cool bike, told OP just that in one of the other threads.

Elvo

So a single lever pull actuates both brakes?

mstateglfr 

OP- wow, I actually read about you last summer. I dont remember why, but I had gone down some rabbit hole of a tangent and stumbled on an article about your crash and getting back on the saddle. 100% sure it was you, though I dont know why I am sure. Attorney, if I remember?

Anyways- that bike is a fantastic color. It keeps you looking with the candy shading.
And seeing the shifting setup is really neat. Its elegant and not a hack- it looks purpose built.

topflightpro

I think this is totally cool.

Can you explain better how the shifting works. Do you have to move your hand from the hood/shiftlever to the top buttons to change gears in the other direction or is it that the hood/shifter controls the rear derailleur and the top buttons control the front?

Also, do the brake levers on the Shifters work?

tigat

Nope. The left lever is not hooked up to anything. Hypothetically, it could still shift, but braking would be hard to set up.

tigat

Yep - if you pull the brake lever on the hood the fluid moves through the in line GRX lever into the Outbraker splitter and engages the front and rear calipers. Same if you pull the GRX lever.

tigat

1. Shifting: the brake lever on the di2 has both an up and a down button or paddle as standard issue. In synchronized mode in the big ring, downshifting runs the rear derailleur up the cassette to the next biggest cog (you can go further with a hold rather than a tap) to a pre-programmed point (which you can set in the E-tube software), where the front drops to the small ring and the rear adjusts to a smaller cog so the jump is not too drastic. In the small ring up front, upshifting to progressively smaller cogs will eventually hit a preprogramed point where the front moves to the big ring and the rear adjusts. The climbing button on the top bar has up - down buttons that work the same as the up - down on the brake lever. I have another bike with a second climbing button that only runs the front, but I didn't want to clutter this one. I don't need to move my hand at all to get the full shifting function at either location. bar top or hood, or in the drop.


All of this comes with the di2 if you have the BT-DN110 battery and E-tube programing capability.


2. The brake lever on the right works. On the left it does not.

tigat

Mstateglfr: That must have been some rabbit hole. Glad you made it out.

mstateglfr 

haha, yeah I tried to remember what led me to reading an article about you and the accident but I really don't remember.

Since this thread is about creating a setup for 1 hand to do everything, im pretty curious how you ride now compared to before. Is it significantly slower, a bit slower, the same? Obviously speed is mainly from the legs, but I wasn't sure if there is continued balance and core use that exhausts you sooner or if all that isnt really applicable.

hsuBM

So awesome!

tigat

Hard to say.

I was 17 when I lost the arm. I had been riding a 10 speed for a few years as cross training for alpine ski racing.

Four months after my accident, one of my teammates entered a 100 mile bike race with domestic pros in the field and did a Breaking Away, start to finish solo win. He rose pretty quickly through the ranks until a drunk driver crushed his left side on New Year's Eve as he was walking along the highway. I'm pretty sure he would have been close to if not on the US Team in the late 70s, early 80s. We were pretty even at 17. If anything, I was a tad bit faster. But I never tested it in a race, which is what counts.

In the late 70s, when I would come for visits to Wisconsin from Colorado, where I was teaching adaptive sports, I rode with some folks whose names most of us would recognize. I never felt the arm was holding me back, except in sprints.

Enter 30 years of marriage, kids, career, and very limited riding.

In the 11 years I've been riding again, I can pretty much hang with most folks, although at 64, I'm not doing any county line sprints for money with the 25 year olds.

I've never been much into what ifs, because the activities I've been able to do at a fairly high level have been satisfying enough. If I had to guess, losing the arm has been a 5% drop at the margins in riding but no more, about the same loss I experienced alpine ski racing. That was enough to take me out of thinking I could make a living skiing, but was also motivation for pursuing school and a professional career.

Don't ask me about driving to my left in a pick-up basketball game, Nordic ski racing, golf with one hand, or dentistry - doable but different story.

bOsscO

This is very cool tigat and nice to see your hard work pay off.
Accessibility and adaptability making small, incremental steps in a modern era.

GlennR

Love the paint.

Also 2 thumbs up for you.