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Any recommendations? Preferably not too expensive, as it's not like they'll get used every ride, but something sturdy enough for a season to see if they are useful or not.
Ta!
i'd be intrested to know too.
What sort of bike? What is your budget? The "normal" length ones are far too long to get a good fit on a well fitting road bike imo. The stubby short drafting triathlon legal ones are better - something like a vision tech mini, the Profile Jammer or the Deda clip black or clip one have the ability to be set short enough to get your upper arms vertical as they should be when you have a top tube of the correct length to work when on the hoods or drops.
Normal road bike (Giant OCR) and probably around £70 tops. Not expecting Olympic performance, just a more slippery option for the odd club 10. I'd imagine more or less any were better than just using the drops, or am I wrong?
How does the OCR fit you - are you stretched or quite sat up. Trying to ascertain if the top tube is quite short for you or a bit long. The head tube of the OCR is longer than the more racy TCR range so a tribar that sits quite high on your drop bars would also not be so good.
Around 1997-2003 I was racing Giant TCRs, bought deliberately a little small as triathlon/tt bikes fitted with conventional length tri bars. At the time I thought they were fine but looking back at the photos of me now the position looks very wrong. A pure tt bike has a significantly shorter top tube than a normal road bike - hence the compromise when you lob tri bars on a road bike.
Personally, without seeing you and bike, for what you want, I'd go for one of the ones mentioned above - although the jammers sit quite high on your bars which might be an issue if you are already quite upright. The Dedas are good as there is a lot of adjustment possible.
Old On-one 2" risers sawn in half and clamped into place using beer can shims:
[img] http://images.fotopic.net/?iid=12zkso&outx=600&noresize=1&nostamp=1 [/img]
(Rest of the clip-on apparatus were some v old cheapo ITMs from way back when). Works a treat 🙂
It's quite an old OCR - I think (though am probably wrong) when I bought this the headtubes were more or less the same - the OCR range was just cheaper rather than being aimed at sportives as they are now. I rode a TCR at the same time on loan and it didn't feel any different.
I feel relatively upright, but I'm at the top end of height for a Medium at 5 10 ish and I flipped the stem upright as I generally do longer slower rides on it. Thanks for the suggestions though I'll google a few up, and maybe flip the stem to get down a bit too.
Thurman, that's fantastic - if you hadn't annotated I'd have been asking when On One did their tri bar offer 🙂 Though as it's STW do I have to point out the logo is upside down :-D?
I'm an inch taller than you and used to TT a size small TCR with a 100mm stem and "bull horn" base bars (slanting down for the bar position) then went on to a medium carbon tcr ridden mainly with a 90mm stem and carbon clip blacks (sometimes with drop bars, sometimes with aero bars as the base bar) if that gives you any indication of sizes.