For the Love of Bar Tape

I like to think I am good at taping handlebars. Not pro-mechanic good—I don’t have the speed that comes from the muscle-memory developed from hours, days and years of wrapping bars, but my taping is on-point.

A well-taped handlebar is a thing of beauty: Evenly spaced wraps that account for the curve in the bars, end plugs pushed in neatly, no bulges and the finishing tape immaculately tapering to the bar, the final overlap imperceptible. Some people can, and there are some who shouldn’t.

I got to thinking about this recently as I helped to sort through an accumulation of many decades-worth of bike parts in my Mother-in-Law’s spare room. While working through the collection of handlebar/stem/shifter/cable combinations, stripping them back to their component parts to determine whether anything was good for eBay, I picked-up some Cinelli handlebars on a 3T quill stem. They were wrapped in red padded bar tape and must have been used on a fixed-gear road bike, as there was only one brake lever; the left side was just an empty hood.

It took me well over an hour to strip that bar, probably closer to two.

The adhesive on the padded tape had bonded well and clumps of tape stuck to the bar, or rather, stuck to the red electrical tape – clearly intended to match the padded tape – that I found beneath. Yes, the bar had an entire wrap of electrical tape under the padded tape. At the stem end the electrical tape had been anchored in place by blue gaffer tape: Six wraps of it. Halfway through unwrapping the gaffer tape on one side of the bar, I found an inexplicable wrap of celotape. Go figure. Also, a roll of electrical tape isn’t long enough for taping a bar this tightly and, such was the maze of tape around the brake levers, it took me a while to realize that at least two rolls of electrical tape had been wrapped and I needed to find the end of the second roll to be able to finish unwrapping the tape. Underneath the electrical tape I found another layer, this time a foam sleeve, also red.

The maze of tape around the brake hoods existed because there were three layers of electrical tape covering the lever clamps, carefully cut like those small pre-cut pieces of bar tape you get in the box and which immediately go in the bin. On the side of the bar without the brake lever, the hood had been packed out with a small piece of rolled-up inner tube to stop the lever mounting points rattling and then all of this had been covered in multiple criss-crossed layers of the beloved red electrical tape.

Given how long it took to strip that bar, I had plenty of time to try to understand why they had been wrapped that way. Perhaps, as with some house renovations, rather than stripping back the old layers, the previous owner just decided it was easier to add a new layer on top. Whatever the reason, they were clearly a psychopath.

It turned out that the bar had belonged to the late Sandy Wallace, a legend of the Scottish cycling scene and bike shop owner. When it comes to taping bars, some people shouldn’t.