maybe i’m just slow, but I just got a bike w/ these bars on it (thanks ST’ers). love the bike and the setup, but I’d like to get the bars a bit lower. i’ve already got the basebar as low as it’ll go (bike is a kalibur) but the bars as they come have the armrests pretty high up.
is there a way to adjust this? or a part from bontrager that lets you sit the pads lower, like P-D has for some of their bars?
doesn’t seem to be anything i can find on the bontrager website.
I have a pair of bontrager X carbon bars (http://www.evanscycles.com/products/bontrager/race-x-lite-carbon-clip-on-aero-bars-ec017849) and I mounted the extensions below the base bar and raised the elbow pads with aluminum spacers and longer bolts so my forearms wouldn’t smash against the base bar.
thanks, but i have the carbon xxx lite bars that are “integrated”…as far as I can tell, you’d need another bracket of sorts to be able to mount the extensions under the basebar like you can on the bars you have, or on a number of other bars.
i can’t be the only ST’er with these bars, and the pad height is 60 mm…super-high…anyone else w/ thoughts? thanks!
if you are talking about bontrager’s race xxx lite carbon aerobar, then you’ve got it as low as it can go. this is a great bar. and it’s a valuable bar. still, it’s value is in its ability to provide a rider a tall position on a frame that’s not built to offer that tall position (relative to the rider).
example: a rider wants to ride a p3, but, he’s not sufficiently athletic; or he’s long-legged versus his torso; and this bike, while desired, has a head tube too low for the rider to adopt his optimized position without a lot of spacers, or a stem sticking up like a teenage woodrow. this bar to the rescue.
its pads sit 7.5cm above the centerline of its pursuit bar, making it the king of hi-risers (it beats a syntace c2 by 5mm).
this is why i say (ad nauseum) that bars should be treated as portable sub-assemblies. if you put this bar on, say, a cannondale slice, or a blue triad, or a specialized transition, a scott plasma, a bh crono, a valdora, well, you’re going to be up in the air. you have the opposite problem.
trek speed concepts (let’s assume you’ve got a 7-series) feature middle of the road geometries. it’s very likely that these bikes equipped with these bars will not be able to get an athletic, steep-riding, and/or long-torso’d, rider low enough.
if you were in my fit studio, i’d fit you on a fit bike, find out your optimized position, transfer your optimized saddle position over to your existing bike, then figure out what needs to happen to get the armrests where they need to be. maybe a new, really downward-pointing, stem (-25°, -30°). perhaps with a replacement, lower-profile, headset top cap (but i think speed concept 7-series bikes already come with these standard). however, it might be that the bar needs to be changed.
best to find this out before the bike leaves the shop, because, this is a very expensive aerobar, and the shop ought to be willing to absorb this back into inventory on exchange toward a different bar with lower-profile armrests. this, because this bar is, as noted, a very helpful bar in opposite cases. if this retailer carries cervelo, felt, if he’s got QR
CD0.1 bikes in inventory, guaranteed he’s going to need this bar for those customers with the opposite problem.
Dan,
Thanks for a very informative post. It is indeed the bar I’m talking about. Well, that’s a shame. I bought it here on ST so my options were a bit limited, but I probably could have researched this a bit better. I have it on an '09 kalibur which I think has a lower HT than even the P3 by a good 20 mm, so at least I’m not that cramped.
Could you recommend some negative stem options (or could anyone) that I could try?
Also does anyone know if i can replace the headset cap on an '09 kalibur to give myself some more room as Dan suggests?
I have one of these Dimension adjustable stems that seems to work pretty well. I like it more than the Ritchey adjustable stem, which had a split down the middle of the stem part to adjust the height, this one is more mechanic friendly, IMO.
http://www.google.com/...&ved=0CFkQ8wIwAw
they also make fixed deep drop ones too:
I have the same bars and am in the same boat. I need to drop the pad height by about 10mm.
I am thinking that a +/- 17 degree stem flipped over should do it.
I think that’s the easiest option, off the top of my head anyway.
