a little cut and paste of a post I made on CTC:-
Following various discussions, here and elsewhere, I thought I'd post up some info and links to piccies that may be of help to others. This is the link to my flikr photostreams:-
http://www.flickr.com/photos/37729119@N08/sets/
So, I was unhappy with flats, bar ends didn't do it for me so I went with butterfly bars with the open section nearest the rider and the controls on that flat part. This was comfy and provided plenty of hand positions but gave poor access to the controls. I found I liked to ride on the sides, or corners, and this meant bringing hands backwards for braking or gear changes. If you think about it the controls are ahead of the hands on almost any other bar setup(I know bar end shifters and downtube shifters). Being of the, mistaken, belief that you couldn't get controls round the bends on butterfly bars I tried drops. Didn't work for me at all, an elbow problem meant that I found it very hard to get a comfy setup and the ride was too jarring. Funnily enough the only comfortable hand position on drops was actually in the drops. Next I tried North Road with a big sweep back, great for getting controls on the sides but only gave one decent hand position. So I tried inboard bar ends as well, which helped a bit. The North Roads were very good but made a big difference to reach. As they were narrower, and swept back, the main hand position was 10cm nearer to the saddle. As I already had a 130mm stem it just wasn't proving easy to dial in. I then ordered the Titec version of the Jeff Jones H-Bar, basically a flat riser bar with angled lengths welded on each side, think the letter H with angled sides. These are good and will be going on my Karate Monkey build but have limited option for mounting controls and are no good for twist shifters. Jeff Jones does a model that addresses this, the Loop Bar, but at $550 each I gave them a miss. For the KM/Titec bar build I've sourced a set of Deore MTB STI shifter/levers, which will mount at the base of the forward extension, thus allowing shifting and braking from either side position. While this was going on I also upgraded the weekend bike to dual control units to reduce to just the one clamp area on the North Roads. This left me with a set of levers, shifters and 2 sets of butterfly bars kicking around. I started tinkering and found that I could get the clamp to travel all the way round the bars with no difficulty(just shows you shouldn't always believe everything you read).
This led to further experimentation, the dimensions on the butterflies, these are BBB Multibars from Dotbike, are:-
side to side - 570mm, front to back at deepest - 160mm, gap at open section - 165mm, clamp to open section - 70mm, clamp to closed section - 90mm and rise/drop is 30mm in either direction. I use a combo of BBB 40cm tubular foam grips and ergo style rubber grips on them. They are a 25.4mm clamp section and the bar diameter is standard MTB 22.2mm.
On the Surly with the hub gear twist shifter I've mounted the bars rising up with the open section furthest away. The brakes, twist shifter and ergo grips are mounted here, the rest of the bar has the tubular grips. Towards the centre I've mounted a pair of Titec L bend bar ends which give me a couple of extra hand positions, including one really stretched out and quite aero. I took some pics of this tonight and they're at the end of the Surly photoset.
On the Giant the bars are mounted with the open section nearest and the bars dropping rather than rising. Again I've used the same style of bar ends mounted inboard followed by the dual control brake and shifter pods. This allows me to access the brakes comfortably from the sides/corners, front flats and the hand position at the base of the bar ends. I can change gear from all three but the sides/corners is the most natural. Again pics at the end of the Giant photoset.
On both setups I've also used the tubular grips on the bar ends, the position of these won't be finalised until I've fully dialled in the bars. But they're very easy to move so will just keep tinkering until happy. Because of the orientation of the bars on the Giant I'll need to use a shorter stem to get them correct. Each bike has 54-55cm nose of saddle to top/side centre of the stem/steerer clamp. Measuring nose of saddle to far corner hand position I currently have 680mm for Giant and 620mm for Surly. I only switched it all round tonight so tweaking and new stem for Giant awaited. I'm guessing that about the 630-640mm mark for this measurement will be the end result.
The only other consideration is around the rearward flat hand position, this will be handy for those sit up and beg moments. It'll be nice if pootling in company to be sat up chatting but I'm concerned about lack of braking ability from there. So I've looked at a set of brake levers from Pauls
http://www.paulcomp.com/crosslever.html
I was thinking about buying a pair of these and mounting one on each bike with a Problem solvers 2:1 cable doubler. These levers have an open clamp design and can be used for long or short pull brakes. The cable doubler would allow me to operate the front brakes from two levers. It may be I'm 'over engineering' things here but would hate to be the cause of mayhem in a group because I was riding well away from a brake lever.
I hope all this may be of use to others, or at least stop them making some of the costly errors I have
The follow up:-
Little update, took the Surly for a run today and, despite various tweaks en route, the open section of the bars forward isn't going to work, nor is having them rising. It wrecks the main side position for my hands as the bars flare out, as opposed to in, at the side in this orientation. So the Surly has now converted to the same setup as the Giant, but I've had to accept that the twist shifter will remain mounted on the open flat section, now at the rear of the bars.
I have a new stem to try out to reduce the reach a bit. If anyone has any old riser stems kicking about, 1" bar clamp and 1 1/8 stem clamp I'd be interested. Looking for around 30-40 degree rise and 80-105mm length.
