smontanaro 

My Schwinn Super Sport badly needed new handlebar tape. It's my winter road bike, so gets very little attention unless something really goes wrong. (I did put fenders on it back in January to minimize the need for mid-season maintenance even more.) I decided I could no longer put off this task. The tape itself was getting to be pretty far gone, it looked like there were (unexplained) burn marks in places, the housing loops were huge, and last time I'd mounted the levers much too low on the bars (41cm Nitto B115, Shimano BL-6207 levers, FWIW). I didn't take a true before picture, but you can get an idea what shape it was in back in January.



I went to work. This is partway through the process. The rag is covering up some Goo Gone. Man what a mess the bar was in. These bars have been with me for quite a while. They were mounted on my Trek 520 when I crashed in 2017 and had cork tape then. I think the last time I retaped it I didn't get too carried away removing adhesive residue from the old cork tape and it showed.



Of course, the first thing that went wrong was the ancient hoods took this as a cue to deconstruct themselves.



I can't really complain. The levers came to me with the hoods attached, and I'd never touched them. Fortunately, I had a pair of SOMA hoods left from a batch of five (I think) I bought a long time ago. I never really liked them as Campy repop hoods because they were too translucent for my tastes. (These were probably from their very first batch. They may well have reformulated things slightly since then. I know people generally seem to like them. Don't put too much weight on my opinion.) See through or not, they would do for my winter ride. I was mildly surprised at how well they fit.



A couple hours later, I had clean bars and more-or-less properly positioned levers. That was yesterday.

This afternoon I decided to finish things off. Taping handlebars is my least favorite bike maintenance task, so it was sort of surprising that I didn't leave the bike tapeless for a couple weeks or months. The right side went okay, as did the left. Now to take care of the too long cable housing. Oops...



Oh well, I decided I would live with the bike "winking" its left eye. An hour or so later some nagging OCD got the better of me. I thought, "maybe I have some more yellow housing of the right shade." It turns out I did, and it seems it was the right length. All I had to do was dress the ends to remove sharpies from previous cuts. No more winking.



Should be good for another four or five years...

The Golden Boy 

Congrats on the new tape!!!

I've been thinking about getting around to putting new tape on the Miyata for a few years now- but that's a lot like work.

smontanaro 

Yup. In this case, the momentum actually increased a few days before when I installed some new tape on my bro-in-law's bike. That job didn't totally suck, so I figured I might get lucky with my own bike.

The Golden Boy 

Is that velour-ish bar tape?

Again, the Miyata has this plastic-y Ritchey bar tape, and I don't like it- I do like the Brooks "microfiber" tape- but velour tape... hmmm....

smontanaro 

Yes, it is. He dropped off the bike with a new saddle and said tape (in box). Later, when I got started, I noticed the texture. Here's our text exchange.

Me: You okay with a smidgen of velour texture?


Andy: I guess

Me: You'll be stylin'

Andy:

steelbikeguy

"Ntd" = "new tape day"?

New tape... <sigh> ... this is one of those things that doesn't become obviously necessary, like a flat tire does.
Instead, it just looks a bit dirtier and rattier month by month, year by year. At some point, you actually look at it and say "I really should replace it, but it's low on the list of things to do".
My Olmo is in that sort of Limbo, waiting for salvation and freshness.
In the right light, it isn't looking too bad...



... but it really is wearing about 20 years of accumulated grime that refuses to be washed off.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a similarly vibrant semi-padded yellow tape?
I'm not thinking of cork tape, nor cloth, nor something thin like Benotto.
Have I reduced the number of candidates to zero yet? Well, let me know what might be a good option.

Steve in Peoria

jonwvara 

When I went to UBI bike school some years ago, one of the instructors there said he had worked at bike shop in Chicago for years, where he became the expert handlebar taper. He said there was an old Polish guy, a former track racer, who used to bring his road bike into the shop once a month or so for new white bar tape. The job had to be just perfect or the customer would make him do it over--which was tolerated because the guy spent so much money at the shop. Stressful, he said, but it did teach him how to tape bars just so.

Personally, I don't replace bar tape until I get a registered letter from the Vermont Board of Health telling me that I have to.

Velo Mule

Back when I was a teenager in the late '70's, I probably changed my handlebar tape every six months or so. But I rode almost everyday and didn't have other things that took too much of my time. Then when I worked in the bike shop I was wrapping handlebar tape often, just about every day.

Wrapping handlebar was a little easier back then because there was only one way to wrap, (top down and fold the tape into the bar end and insert the bar end plug) and for our shop there were only two styles of tape, cotton Velox or Schwinn Hunt-Wilde slightly stretchy plastic tape. We had some Benotto tape but I don't remember doing any bikes with Bennoto tape.

There was one variant though. If the brake lever didn't have hoods we would put a wrap around the base of the brake lever then go back to wrapping the handlebars.

The_Joe

I guess I'm the outlier. I love wrapping handlebars.

smontanaro 

Too bad you don't live closer to me.

randyjawa 

Really? You can change bar tape...


Been riding it like this for the past four months. Looks even worse now but still works. The saddle, however, just might not last until my Jamaica winter is over. You should see it now - coming apart...

Rick_D

You bring up a question I've been meaning to ask: when did tape install switch from top-down to the reverse? Is it a result of adhesive tapes, padded tapes (kind of the same), complicated lever designs?

Beginning at the top looks cleaner than finish tape and the overlap at the drops is in the correct direction. I retain too much SoP from the last century and frequently need to unlearn since-discarded practices for this one.

bulgie 

For a couple years in the early '80s, I used to wrap with fresh new white cotton tape before every race, or at least the important ones. It was quite the psych factor to have unsullied white tape on the start line. And of course with white tape, you have to wash your cycling gloves too, so I had 3 or 4 pairs in rotation to always have clean gloves for new tape. Yes that was pretty pretentious for a mid-pack Cat.3 like myself — I knew that and didn't care, I just liked it!

Though my dad taught me in the late '60s, I really learned to tape at a big bike shop during the early '70s bike boom. Lots of mechanics, all competing to be fastest and best at taping. A "smile" of bare handlebar showing through a gap would get you endless razzing. Then I went to work at a total-concept Schwinn store where the service manager had just been to Schwinn school, and he drilled the rest of us like a Marine drill sergeant on taping (among other things) until we could do a Varsity in about a minute. Yes, those bikes came without tape on the bars! The shop had a vise with special jaws for holding the stem, at each mechanic's station. It really speeds you up to have the stem clamped in a vise. I seem to remember entire Varsity/Continental builds were 15 minutes from cutting open the box (which had to be done the special Schwinn way) right through to polishing the wax. Yes every bike (including Sting-Rays and other kid's bikes) was waxed and buffed before it went on the brightly-lit sales floor. That place sparkled!

So I got fast at it. But now I feel like I've taped enough bars for a lifetime, so I'm more the "ride it until shreds are falling off, then a few months more" kinda guy. I'm pickier about the tape on my wife's bike.