It's the off season: the perfect time for bike upgrades!

This year Nat has signed up for her first 70.3 triathlon so her TT bike will become the weapon of choice for training and racing with a long course focus. She is currently getting around on this Cannondale Slice Women's specific. It is the XS size with the 650c wheels which suits as Nat stands 156cm (5'2")

It was bought second hand and has served her well for a couple of seasons but it has fairly entry level specs:

  • 105 mechanical shift
  • Semi internal cabling
  • Basic aluminium cockpit
  • Conventional stem
  • Standard Tekro brakes
  • Ok 30mm deep aero wheels

 


So starts the project we will Blog about over the next month or so.




Sunday 5 July 2015

HANDLEBAR FINAL SELECTION

The upgrade of the time trial handlebar setup was one of the more difficult decisions due to the sheer number of options available in the market.

Since my last post on this topic Nat has and tested the the low stack height we achieved by experimenting with the existing stem and bar setup. So we now have a reasonable idea of what dimensions we need and so we concluded:
  • The trial stack height is lower than required
  • The new underslug TT bar geometry is uncomfortable
So with this info we decided to use top mount TT bars.  This ensures the TT bars and arms pads always move together when the pad stack is changed. See images of the different configurations, the far right option is our preferred style.

The top mounted bars add about 22mm of pad stack (diameter of the TT bars) but the flat stem will take that back down 15mm and we are happy with that height.

So with we searched the major online bike stores to see what was readily available on a budget.  At the time there were some good deals going on 3T Cycling and Profile Designs.

There were some great looking options from Pro Components, Vision Tech, Zipp, Deda and I did spend quite a bit of time verifying prices and sizes for many of these before ruling them out.

3T Cycling had some great information available in their online catalogues.  Bar Width, length, drop and pad stack were all published which enabled an informed selection based on our experiments with the existing bars.

The final decision mostly came down to price and appearance, we liked the style and colour options of the 3T Brezza.

Wil these dimensions we fashioned a paper template to overlay on the existing bars which comfired the base bar horns were going to be exactly where Nat has been resting her hands now and the 75mm long stem length was ideal.  With this we ordered a 75mm long x 17 degree stem also from 3T Cycling.


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