Handlebar failure how long should a pair of bars last

[Jezrant]

Some claim that the sleeves on bars are themselves potential stress-risers...

I have heard the same thing too. I don't buy it; the broken handlebars I have seen have been overwhelmingly those without a centre sleeve.

cheers

Yeah, I don't buy it either. The breaks are almost always on unsleeved bars and right by the clamp. How often do you change your bars in normal usage, skipping crashes, etc?

cheers

[Brucey]

Unsleeved bars I inspect once every few thousand miles. Basically whenever the bar tape or the cables need fiddling with seems like a good time. I take the view that clamps with sharp edges are to be avoided at all costs. I also worry about the texturing that is applied to the clamping region of many bars; I think in many cases it is exactly the kind of thing that helps fatigue cracks to start.

Sleeved bars cannot be inspected in the same way. I will tend to scrap a set of bars where there is obvious deformation of the clamped region; it is sure that the bars themselves are deformed (and potentially damaged) beneath a deformed sleeve. I don't especially like Cinelli 1R stems, because I've seen too many mangled handlebars come out of them. I don't minds a few scuffs on the sleeve (that is what it is there for) but I am cognisant of the possibility that they may hide cracks. If the sleeve is uncracked, and the bars are otherwise not deformed, don't flex unduly, don't creak, and are not corroded then I will assume that they are probably still OK.

If the sleeve is a good fit on the bars, then, in the absence of abnormal stress-raisers beneath the sleeve, I would say it is very unlikely that the handlebar would fatigue beneath a typical (marked up, with built in stress raisers) sleeve, without the sleeve istelf cracking first; if the two share the load, then the sleeve should see higher strains than the bars beneath.

However if they are just very old, I won't carry on using them on a bike that regularly sees rough surfaces, hard sprints and/or hard braking.

I'm not right keen on bars with abrupt steps in them, or bars in high strength materials which have grooves etc in them (and holes....? No way.).

I don't think I'm very hard on handlebars; some folk appear to be permanently wrestling with them as they go down the road, but my hands rest lightly on them except when honking etc, and I avoid that where possible these days. Possibly that is why I've been lucky myself; I've scrapped a few handlebars that I didn't like the look of, were pranged, corroded or that were definitely cracked, but I have (touch wood) yet in use to break a set of my favoured handlebars which are older Cinelli, GB and ITM models, all sleeved, no grooves.

I have crashed heavily through losing my grip on the bars, and I'd imagine that the same thing could happen if they broke.

In case anyone is wondering if handlebars can corrode, if you work hard on your bike, sweat gets under the bar tape and all kinds of horrors ensue. Check this link;

http://www.pardo.net/bike/pic/fail-001/FAIL-160.html

my hands sweat too and I have scrapped bars that looked (a lot less) corroded than this. Since I realised this was an issue I have taken to adding a waterproof base layer to the handlebars when taping them up.

BTW you can test any normal handlebar for the presence of a through-wall crack by seeing if it leaks air or not. Since a crack will go through-wall in short order, but then might take a considerable length of time to cause failure, regularly checking for cracks in this way provides a reasonable assurance that the bars are not about to break.

cheers

[Jezrant]

Some good advice/info there, cheers. I hadn't heard of the sweat corrosion issue until a few years ago. I suppose if you change your tape regularly, giving the bars a good clean before wrapping the new tape, it's pretty unlikely the bars will break that way. I also suspect this sort of risk is more of an issue for racers, who climb out of saddle a lot more and drip a lot more sweat on their bars, than merry cycle tourists.

[Vorpal]

I replaced the flat handlebars on my hybrid this year. I don't know how many miles they had on them, but the bike is 20 years old, and the handlebars were rusting.

[Brucey]

. I hadn't heard of the sweat corrosion issue until a few years ago. I suppose if you change your tape regularly, giving the bars a good clean before wrapping the new tape, it's pretty unlikely the bars will break that way. I also suspect this sort of risk is more of an issue for racers, who climb out of saddle a lot more and drip a lot more sweat on their bars, than merry cycle tourists.

Well simply changing the bar tape regularly just makes the bars (on average) half as salty. They may still corrode like billy-oh, because it doesn't take much salt to cause corrosion.

When touring, I've ridden at <10mph with my hands on the tops for hours at a time; the sweat runs down your arms, off your hands etc and soaks your mitts, the bar tape, everything. If anything my touring bike bars have often been more corroded than my race bike bars; maybe this is as much because of where I've raced rather than how hard I race, but when racing I'm usually going quicker so more of the sweat evaporates whilst it is still on me.

cheers

[NUKe]

as requested

[Mick F]

I've been using the same Cinelli 64 'bars since 1986 - and the same Cinelli 1R stem.
I see no reason to change them.

Same Campag seatpost too. I see no reason to change that either.

[jezer]

I've been cycling since 1958 and I've lost count of the number of bikes I've owned. I have never had a bar fail in all that time. Are they less durable now Perhaps they are designed so that we must constantly upgrade

[Brucey]

I can't find any of the manufacturer's blurb but that tube looks internally ovalised (i.e. variable wall thickness, like some seat pins) to me. It also looks like they put the oval in the wrong direction; I'd expect the shock loads and honking loads to be more vertically oriented than that.

Bars are a bit lighter and a lot cheaper these days. It doesn't take a genius to work out what might happen.....?

cheers

[Jezrant]

. I hadn't heard of the sweat corrosion issue until a few years ago. I suppose if you change your tape regularly, giving the bars a good clean before wrapping the new tape, it's pretty unlikely the bars will break that way. I also suspect this sort of risk is more of an issue for racers, who climb out of saddle a lot more and drip a lot more sweat on their bars, than merry cycle tourists.

Well simply changing the bar tape regularly just makes the bars (on average) half as salty. They may still corrode like billy-oh, because it doesn't take much salt to cause corrosion.

cheers

Ah, yes, but I didn't say just changing the tape regularly. I don't know about you, but when I change the tape, which is at least once a year, I remove all the residue of the old glue and give the bars a good clean before wrapping new tape on them.

I never thought much about changing bars until I read about someone who broke a Deda 215 (as in 215g ), which were the bars I'd been using for a few years.

[Brucey]

even assuming that the bars/tape start clean and then get saltier with time and use, they will still (on average) only be about half as salty as they would be otherwise if you double the intervals at which you replace the bar tape.

In fact it is more likely that the bars and tape quite quickly get salty (if they are going to at all), and then stay that way. New bar tape may provide only very temporary relief. As long as there is salt there, the bars will be corroding, if they are liable to be affected.

cheers

[Jezrant]

I see what you're getting at, but I would have thought you'd need to do some fancy calculations about salt corrosion first to determine what effect cleaning the bars at regular intervals has. I mean, how much sweat needs to get in there and how long does it have to stay there before serious damage is done? Wouldn't cleaning the bars, say twice a year, when I'm changing my tape be a safe/sufficient deterrent? Are you not being maybe just a tad alarmist?

[Brucey]

not everybody will sweat into their bar tape and not every handlebar will suffer similarly either.

IIRC a lot of handlebars used to be made from 5083 material. This can be drenched in sea water for years and it won't corrode very badly.

Now, however 6000 series materials are commonly used for handlebars and even 7000 series ones are seen. These materials are decreasingly corrosion resistant; I can guarantee that the handlebar in the pardo link was not a 5000 series bar....

BTW once the corrosion process starts, it needs very little salt present to keep it going, and as someone once said 'rust never sleeps'....

cheers

[Jezrant]

Ok, but let's put things into perspective. What % of broken drop bars on touring bikes are due to salt corrosion that got in under the bar tape? Go on, make an educated guess. And how many touring bikes would you guess that translates into for the UK in, let's say, the last twenty years? I'm all for safety, but let's not get too carried away.

[Brucey]

if you applied that kind of logic you might assume that there is no benefit in wearing seatbelts in cars, either.

My point is that it can and does happen. It is as well to know that it can, and if taking suitable precautions is dead easy, you may as well do it as not.

Like carrying a puncture repair outfit or w.h.y. is an easy precaution etc etc etc

cheers