Behind bars

It’s 2019 and I was reminded the other day that this will be the 45th year that I have spent behind bars. Of course I am speaking in motorcycle terms not penitentiary ones so I thought it would be a neat idea to talk today about the various types of motorcycle handlebars that I have been behind for the last, dare I say it, nearly half a century.

When I started riding in 1974 most riders rode Japanese bikes and most Japanese bikes came from the factory fitted with what we now call hi-rise handlebars.

This made sense because the major focus of all motorcycle manufacturers, not just the Japanese ones, was to sell in volume to the American market. Though America’s investment in money and materiel had been monumental during WWII, the land mass itself remained free from incursion by the enemy. Added to this, American industry had geared up for the war, even before Dec 7 1941 but hugely more so after that date. America brought the full weight of its unprecedented industrial muscle to the game and it was due to this in considerable degree that the Allies won the war in the end.

So, even into the sixties and seventies, the other nations which had been heavily involved in the fighting, were still recovering from the battering their industries and cities had taken during the struggle. The only market that was ripe for the picking if one wanted to sell consumer goods was the USA. And, courtesy of the Marshall Plan, the massive investment of money and resources directed towards rebuilding Japan, it was the Japanese who were first to be in position to try and conquer the lucrative American market.

Once their motorcycles started being imported into the USA, the floodgates were opened. With their first try at tiny bikes and the famous, “You meet the nicest people on a Honda” advertising campaign, Honda and soon the other manufacturers started to bombard the Americans with big bikes, bikes that could cover the enormous distances that were the American landscape, bikes like the 750/4 and the Z1 and the GT750. And, since the Americans were used to their big bikes being big and making a statement, all of the early Japanese bikes came with hi-rise handlebars as standard.

But this soon became a problem. Firstly, the pre-war and immediate post-war American motorcycles were slow, so having your chest battered by the wind while you sat upright in the saddle wasn’t a problem. When you hopped on a Z1 and did the same thing you soon found that the pain in your sternum was not a pleasant thing. Remembering that these bikes were all naked bikes with no factory fitted fairing to break the wind and next to zero after-market choices available either, riding them, especially for long distance, became a trial. It didn’t take long before owners started ditching the hi-rise bars and fitting low-rise bars instead.

These bars became known as Clubman Bars, named after the type of bars that an enthusiast would fit to his road bike if he were planning on doing some clubman racing. And most of us fitted these as a matter of course. They had the advantage to altering your riding position so that it was the top of your head that copped the wind first, not your chest and the slightly “leaning forward” riding position was altogether much more comfortable. Fitting them also immediately gave your bike a more “sporting” look rather than the upright, “touring” look the stock bars indicated.

The slippery slope towards quasi-race bikes had already begun in England with the rise of the cafe racer craze so it wasn’t long before an even more exaggerated “racing” position was required. The answer was, Ace Bars.

Ace Bars mimicked the full racing riding position that came with fitting clip-ons, see below, but without the expense. They attached to the same clamps on the top triple clamp as normal bars did but their extremities pointed well down and promoted the racing “crouch”. By the time the rider got to the stage of fitting these, his thoughts were already turning to a set of rear-set footpegs as well, as using Ace Bars with normal footpegs put the rider in an extremely awkward and uncomfortable riding position. Most riders “solved” this problem by putting their feet on the pillion footpegs when riding for any distance. There was also a variant of the Ace Bars which had another loop of the bar that encircled the instrument panel and did provide a considerably degree of protection to the “clocks”.

Now, if one wanted to totally mimic the racers who were the riders’ heroes, then you needed a set of clip-ons. As the name implies, they did away with a one-piece handlebar entirely, replacing it with a pair of small bars that clipped on to the top of the fork leg, either above the triple clamp or below it as the rider desired.

Now, of course the bars-to-footpeg position was so extreme with clip-ons that it was almost mandatory to have rear-set footpegs as well but not everyone saw it as necessary and the sights of a rider folded in half while trying to keep his feet on the footpegs while holding onto the clip-ons at the same time was unfortunately quite common. The problem with clip-ons also was that they were much more expensive than a simple handlebar but they were certainly a status symbol. You went right to the top if you had a set of Maguras!

So far my discussion of handlebars has focussed exclusively on handlebars for sporting motorcycles. There is another type of bars that belong to another genre of motorcycles, cruisers and choppers. These are known as Ape Hangers. It’s pretty easy to see why they were dubbed that and it’s pretty easy to see that they don’t really belong in this discussion. But, if I don’t include them, someone is going to point it out so, there, I have.

From there it was only logical that manufacturers would start to produce bikes with two-piece handlebars and it’s rare to find a new bike these days that doesn’t (not sure about the current crop of naked bikes, though, I think they may have gone back to one-piece handlebars). My VFRs have all had two piece bars and my current bike has had a slight modification to this with the previous owner having replaced the original bars with ones from a 1985 VF1000R which are about an inch taller than the stock ones. Very comfy, thank you very much. There is a degree of adjustability built into the two piece bar setup that does enable the rider to tailor the bike to his individual liking much more than what used to be available.

and….speaking of customising the bars to suit, I can’t leave the subject without recounting a pretty funny story from back in the day when I first started making my bike suit me rather than the other way around.

When I bought the 350/4 in 1974 it had hi-rise bars, so the very first thing that I did with it was to replace them with clubman bars. Should be easy, yeah, take off all the hardware on the bars, undo the bolts on the triple clamp and install the new bar and then put the handgrips and the switchgear back on, right?

Wrong. The lovely people at Honda, with their passion for neatness, decided that the front end would be much neater if the necessary wires from the switchgear was routed, wait for it, INSIDE the handlebars. A hole in the appropriate place in the underside of the bar took all the electrical cables from the horn and the light switches and all the other gubbins, THROUGH the bars to the middle of the bars where they exited through a larger, oval-shaped hole in the underside of the bars at the triple clamp. From there the wires made their way into the back of the headlamp housing where they joined up with all the other cables that ran the system.

Now I later found out that Honda was the only manufacturer that did this; all the others routed the cables ALONG the handlebars and secured them with cable ties. This made changing handlebars in the event of an accident (where the bars where usually damaged) or in the event of the owner wishing to change them, ridiculously easy. But not Mr Honda, oh, no. So, in order to change bars one had to remove the headlight from its housing and match up the colour of the wires inside with the colour of the wires coming from the switchgear on the bars. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy because there were multiple instances of wire colours being duplicated a number of times. So, you pulled the wires at the switchgear end and noted which one “jiggled” at the headlamp end then disconnected the bullet connectors accordingly.

My solution to this duplication was to wrap a small tag of copper wire around each cable and a matching one on the end that was going to be disconnected. The first one had one loop, the second wire had two and so on. It was incredibly tedious but it did work and,once the bars were replaced and all the wires were reconnected, everything worked first time. Of course, the replacement clubman bars didn’t have holes in it so I routed the cables OUTSIDE the bars and secured them with cable ties, I mean, it’s simple innit?

There were several other instances where I had to do the same thing and I always cursed Mr Honda’s passion for neatness when doing so. No doubt if I had paid more attention to science lessons in school and learned more about electronics I could have used a multimeter and saved a lot of angst. But I didn’t and I didn’t.

So, that’s my life behind bars. Thanks for reading.