Kids, if you have crashed the bike, carefully inspect your handlebars. If you have a long, deep scratch, it is a pretty good indicator that you should replace the handlebar.
Thorough and exhausting testing went into testing the theory that modern handlebars with the uber-light (sorry, no umlauts on my computer) materials that make them light have a brittle tendency. To make matter worse, the material can break away once there is a sufficient score, much like glass or ceramic.
The particular handlebar in question is the base bar of the ITM Dual F1. The scratch was about 5mm wide X 100mm long X .5mm deep. Had the scratch stayed within the welded part of the base bar (as the hook is welded to the wing), it might have been okay, save some new tape. But it went about 25mm outside of the welded area.
After some super-secret* stress and load testing in the bunnyman Institute Lab, the hook started to break.
What does this have to do with what anybody else uses? If you put a deep enough scratch into your base bars, you need to get home or to where someone can pick you up. You probably don’t need to be on the bike, anyhow, as pumping the blood by pedalling will result in more bleeding (as more than likely, the scrape in your base bars is caused by a nasty crash). After having a competent mechanic look over your bike, get him to order you a new pair of base bars, as you took your one and only fall on those, most likely.
- Bunnyman Institute will NOT reveal its super-secret testing proceedures, protocols, or machinery.