kach

Hi all
I now ride with a 42cm handlebar salsa cowcheaper and 100mm stem
but I'm getting a new bike
and would like to try something wider like 46 or 48cm with a shorter stem
on Rene Herce's website, wide handlebars are praised for their stability, comfort, gap for a bag , and even for aerodynamics
a lot of the things they talk about like wide tires work for me
I often drive off the road
who has any ideas?

clasher

I have the Nitto B135, their 39cm model... which measures 39 at the ends of the bar, but since it's flared the hoods are only ~32 apart. I absolutely love it. I ride on gravel roads with that bike, but it's mostly a brevet bike. I don't like wide handlebars, feels like driving a bus. My mountain bike has really wide bars and I keep thinking about cutting them down, or buying some narrower ones. I guess on a gravel bike designed with the wider bars it might handle better but my bike has bog standard "endurance road" geometry so I doubt it'd like the feel of wider bars.

GhostRider62

Wide tires and wide handlebars are aerodynamic?

I ride either 40 or 42cm bars. I'm 191 cm tall if that helps

For comfort, I find flat top bars very helpful and a suspension stem a little helpful or about the same as carbon vs aluminum

79pmooney

The ancient rule of thumb was that your handlebars should be the width of the balls of your shoulders; that you should be able to fit your shoulder balls into the unplugged bar ends. For me, on the road, that works very, very well. Wider is less aero. I haven't seen the numbers or have forgot them but I have thousands of miles logged going upwind. Narrower is better.

Now I do like a little wider on gravel and considerably wider on my climbing fix gears. Better control, less concern with aero on gravel and on fix gear climbs, the wider the bars, the more leverage and less force required from my arms. (My avatar photo - those forearms are so tensed up trying to wrestle that bike up the 14% grade you see in a 42-17 gear that when I touched them with soap a few hours later, it hurt! On 44 cm bars. I don't even want to think about what the 39s of my shoulders would have felt like.) On the fix gear, that wider bar has another real benefit. Aero, Yes, you heard me. A real aerodynamic benefit. More drag means big time downhills are slower, easier to pedal, better control and more fun.

unterhausen

I think as wide as I would go is 42cm. Narrow bars were in style for pro cyclists for a while, but the UCI shut that down IIRC. I like to use a front bag, and even on my bike with 38mm bars it seems okay. I suppose the side pockets might be easier to use with wider bars, but those side pockets don't seem too useful to me anyway.

Steve B.

740mm on the mt. bikes, 46cm on the road bikes

ThermionicScott 

I tend to think they're on the right track about handlebar width and trail. That is, wider bars with high trail, narrower bars with low trail. How much trail will your new bike have? If custom, now is a good time to think about how all that integrates.

kach

my new frame have high trail about 68mm
and I want to use my bike 65/35 gravel off-road/road

Tourist in MSN

My touring bikes and rando bike are all at 44cm (center to center), my road bike is 43cm. I was curious so I measured them, I had bought the bars so long ago I could not recall what they were except the road bike that I bought as a complete bike. I am 6 foot in height.

Tops of my bars are about the same height as the top of my saddle. I am not a racer, aerodynamics not that critical to me.

My touring bikes with that width have seen plenty of gravel with panniers, front and rear. That width was adequate for me for leverage on rougher terrain with panniers. My bars are regular drop bars, not the cowchipper style.

If you are contemplating a bag on the handlebars, make sure you have the clearance you need. In the photo, I have the room I need but if my bag was higher the pocket on it would interfere with shifting. The bag in the photo is the biggest handlebar bag I have, I use that for touring. I have my bag mounted lower on a second stem which lowers my bag. This photo is on my rando bike when I built it up seven years ago, I was checking for clearance so used the widest bag I had when I checked for clearance.

kach

my height is 5 feet 8 inches
my setup is now 42cm shoulder width about 42-43cm
my bikefiter said that 46 handlebars will not cause problems
I don't think that I will have problems with switching because I use the Gevenalle shifter

antimonysarah

I have the Rene Herse Maes bars on my gravel bike (and the old Velo Orange copycat on my brevet bike although it seems they don't make it any more -- I got the VO one because the RH was out of stock when I was building that bike -- in fact you can see them pretty clearly in my userpic, which is a head-on view of my brevet bike). 44cm in the lightly flared drops, 40cm at the hoods. I'm 5'5" and broad-shouldered for a woman my height, probably average-shouldered for a guy my height.

It's amusing to me that you say Jan/RH are big into wider bars, since when they introduced a lot of these bars there was considerable outcry that they only had "narrow" versions, especially from some very tall gents but also just people who like their bars wide, though they have added some sizes. (Alas, no comments on the blog these days -- while comments are always one step from deteriorating into nonsense on the internet, there was actually a lot of good advice and friendly chats in them back in the day.

Tourist in MSN

In your initial post, you mentioned that you might use a bag on the handlebars.

A friend of mine had the older Shimano brifters that had a cable run that was similar to yours. He used V brake noodles to change his cable direction so that it did not interfere with his handlebar bag on his touring bike. Photo was cropped from a bigger one, so it is not a very good photo but it shows the noodles and cable run.

GhostRider62

I would not go wider than shoulder width myself on a road only rando bike but YMMV. I would focus more on the bend and in particular how the wrists are angled and hands are supported. The angle of the hoods to the bars. Some bars are flared meaning they are quite wide in the drops and narrower than on the hoods. Modern compact bars have a flat transition to the hoods. Personally, I find this flat area around to be very comfortable because the forces are dispersed on the meat of your palm. It make take several purchases to get what you want, sort of like shoes or saddles.

adamrice 

40 cm. I've got 42 cm on one of my bikes, but really should change that. I've contemplated trying 38 cm. I'm 173 cm tall, fwiw.

zandoval 

I am wondering if other Geezers have experienced the same trend as I have. A wider handle bar now feels more comfortable. Of course I no longer ride aggressively either...

kach

I'm also interested in this
aerodynamics is not as important to me as comfort and stability on and off the road
but aerodynamics matter so much that I won’t put myself an XL handlebar like 52cm and wider

Tourist in MSN

I am not a geezer, I am only 69 years young. Maybe some genuine geezers will respond?

But I have always liked wider bars, but I mean the conventional drop bars, not these new ones like the Cowchipper, etc. When I use the drops, I do that solely for more aero position in headwinds, and the logic of the aero position on a Cowchipper being wider and therefore anti-aero fails to make sense to me.

But I am not obsessive on aero positions like some that brag about their times for various rides. I spend maybe 30 percent of my time on the drops, maybe 10 percent on the tops, then 60 percent on the hoods. And since the top of my bars is about the same height of my saddle, I clearly am not working too hard on aero position.

I lost about 15 percent of my body weight about 13 years ago, prior to that I used the drops about 5 percent of the time, they were quite uncomfortable when my belly was that big.

Looking in a mirror with a ruler, my shoulders are about 48cm wide at outer edge to outer edge, bars are 44cm center to center on most of my bikes. My road bike came with 43cm. I do not recall what my folder has, and that is folded in a bag, not going to dig it out to measure.