Good question :-) I went pretty mental for wide drops over the last couple of years. My habit started with a set of Funn G-Wides a couple of years ago. 500mm wide, 620mm at the drops. That's as wide as the bars on some of my older mtbs. I have them on an old 26er MTB.
Based on those, I also put wider bars on my cyclocross bike (Ergotec Randonneurs). Not as wide as the Funn G Wide, but still give a bit more control. I also bought a set of Crust Towel Racks, 615mm at the drops, but they only arrived recently and I haven't ridden them much. The certainly feel big - quite a deep drop. Finally, I have recently bought a set of Curve Walmer bars for a 27,5+ MTB. I bought the widest Walmer bars, 750mm at the drops. I set them really high so the drops are the main position. Can't even really ride the flats at all. I like them a lot, although it took a bit of tweaking to get the wrist position right. I found that for me, angling the drop up a bit helps. They give a lot of leverage in technical and muddy terrain and when climbing. I like descending in the drops more than on flat MTB bars anyway, and being able to do s with extra wide bars feels even better. Main problem is that there aren't many bikes actually designed for these bars. I have a LD stem plus 80mm of spacers which looks a bit wacky TBH. The LD is also very short - 40mm extension. But it all works so far based on about 1000km riding. I don't have any back problems at all with these bars so far. Even the Funn bars feel a bit wimpy and narrow after riding the Walmers for a while. However, the Walmers have a much smaller drop and reach. I think Curve realised that just widening a normal bar is not a good idea. You need to shrink the drop and reach to balance the extra width. Main benefit of wide bars is more control and leverage, plus being able to carry a bigger bar bag, and room for accessories on the bars. Disadvantage is that the drops position is not comfortable for long periods unless you can get the bars up high enough. So you need a bike with a really high stack. Some claim that wide bars make it easier to breathe but I can't say I've noticed this. The other issue is that this whole trend is based on some rather esoteric ideas about ergonomics that haven't been tested properly AFAIK. So it might be that these bars cause some unforeseen problems in the long run. I've not read anything on ultra wide drops by anyone who really knows about ergonomics. I think eventually we will find a sweet spot where drops become wide enough to be useful to people riding off road or for loaded touring, but not so wide that they might cause back or wrist problems. But I don't think we're there yet. If you do have back or wrist problems, be especially aware when setting up wide drops. Finally, I previously tried some Nitto Dirt Drops and some One One Midges and couldn't get on with them at all. The Nittos caused instant and quite severe upper back pain, no matter how high I set them, and I did try to set them very high. The Midges caused lower back pain. Maybe something to do with the extreme flare and/or the way the drops are angled on those bars. Cheers, Johnny in Belgium On Wednesday, 6 January 2021 at 13:34:50 UTC+1 eric...@gmail.com wrote: > Big, wide drops seem to be everywhere these days, even here in the group! > I've noticed some for sale and others used in builds. Rather than read > through another dull review in some unfamiliar corner of the internet I > wanted to see if anyone in the group could share some firsthand experience. > How does it feel running those > 50cm drop bars? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/7dde24a0-1f52-4c89-b2e6-8fe8b399cfe9n%40googlegroups.com.
