HED Vantage Eight Aerobars (tech question)

Triathlon Forum
1

Does anyone have the user/instruction manual for these bars? I just got a set and need to know what the torque specs are when mounting to the stem. These bars are beautiful and I don’t want to take chance messing them up. I’m going to try and contact HED tomorrow, but wanted to see if anyone has the answer in the mean time. Thanks in advance…

Keith

2

They have great customer service. I’m not sure of manual though. I have a set and after having a couple of issues I used carbon paste and they told me to get the two smaller bolts set and then use the larger one to really tighten it down. I have a torque wrench and it’s quite high.

3

Thanks for the reply. I’ll give them a call in the morning.

4

Thanks for the reply. I’ll give them a call in the morning.

If you get the torque specs for these, would you mind posting them here? I’m about to receive a set of these and I’d like to avoid retracing your steps.

Thanks,
Gene

5

I went through one hell of a time trying to get this right with these bars. There was a post here on ST about carbon fiber joints (I’ve lost the link) that finally worked. Here’s the recipe:

  1. Remove burrs caused by cutting.
  2. Lightly sandpaper contact surfaces, including alu parts.
  3. Clean contact surfaces, including alu parts.
  4. Apply friction paste to cf and alu contact surfaces.
  5. Tighten bolts (I used loctite blue).

As another poster here has said, HED recommends tightening the two small bolts on the flip-lites first, using the single large bolt for final torque. This didn’t work for me, YMMV.

Using the above recipe, I tried 5Nm per bolt (beam-type torque wrench). This worked… until I hit a pothole, at which point I nearly went over the bars. After repeating steps 3-5, I tightened everything to ~8Nm, and it’s held since (6 months and counting, now). It was important to check the torque on the small bolts, too. Also, be sure to back off the extensions 1mm or so from the basebar - it’ll creak on hard effort otherwise.

I like the V8 - they’re sweet looking bars - but the number of pieces makes it tricky. Be careful, take your time. Or have someone with liability insurance do it.

Cheers,
-Dave