Bar wrap porn

Not a fan of too much matching myself: a yellow tape of some variety would pick-up the decals nicely, but I'd (personally) think twice about a yellow saddle and coloured tyres ALWAYS look shit, like something out of Max Power.

^^^
That spotted spray paint effect - yellow on top fading to black in the drops.
Siiiiiick.

I'd be tempted to get some gum walls where the walls are on the yellowy side of gum, but the actual TREAD should always be black, IMO. Same with the saddle on that bike - either black or maybe black with yellow trim. But yellow bar tape all the way.

^ & ^^ Good calls on the tape and saddle. Is it the Turbo 2 and/or Turbomatic that have yellow trim?

There's a yellow Rolls for sale in classifieds.
Speckle black spray paint that.
Would be way OTT but if it worked could be class.
Though bike would become a bit novelty - then again not the frame you're fucking with.

^^^
Agree, coloured tyres a big no no.
I would avoid gumwall x

My attempt...

This Fizik Performance stuff is really nice.

(yellow tyres are going to go on there one day).

...Bargain!
http://www.planet-x-bikes.co.uk/i/q/TYVIOPCOEVKS/vittoria_open_corsa_evo_ks_folding_tyre

any good for skids?

Those look quite nice actually

Here goes a big long post about my latest bar wrap adventure....

So double harlequin with aero levers on moustache bars with no interruptions and a perfect start. We'll start with unwrapped bars with taped cables (sorry about shitness of photos this was done late with no real photo skill).

Now to get a seamless start there needs to be some clever tape folding going on. I've seen it done by simply folding the tape but I failed at this. I used an extra bit of tape and some considered snipping. Step one find the diameter of the bars with a bit of paper

fold this length in half (as two bits of tape per wrap, don't fold in half for single harlequin) and use the half length as the hypotenuse of a slanty snip on the end of a bit of tape
.
Do this in one direction for two rolls of tape, the other direction for another two (or one each for single harlequin).

Now for some taping. First work out which colours you want to be little triangles at the start of the wrap, and which to be the first full squares. I wanted blue as the first squares soooooo, blue first with the other 'apearing' colour

with the slanty cut parallel to the extra bit of tape (gaffa in my case). Now the next layer.

Here you need the next layer to cross the previous at the edge of the gaffa tape and the slanty cuts to be on the same parallel for both layers. If you don't understand you're probably not geeky enough to ever bother doing this, so meh.

Now onto the bars. I want the first blue square to be at the top of the bars so I made sure it was there, and also on top as that made sense when it came to the next step. I had to start this a few times and do some head scratching and hand waving.

Now to fold the grip tape over and start the weave. This weave is complicated and the grip tape WILL stick to something it's not meant to (usually itself) before you get it in the right place. Here is a bad photo of the first fold:

So now I took the levers off after taping the clamps

and then screwing them secure in the right place (slight wiggle was possible later but not a lot) from the front

After some fun tape weaving (the underside was a right arse) I got to here

where I encountered

I just stuck it out of one of the joins in the weave and hope it would be ok. It actually was when I got the hoods back on, the cable pulled on the tape making a bit of a hole but it was all covered by the lever. The clamp was a bit more tricky, this messed the weave right up

A snip about 3/4 across the the tape allowed a detour, though it meant you couldn't put any strain on the tape. A careful hand are needed to restart the weave.

The back is a little ruffled but ok.

Most importantly I DIDN'T BREAK THE WEAVE!!!
So keep going, tuck in the end and we have

I haven't done the other side yet as it was late and took fucking ages. The quality of the wrap is ok, probably could have been better if I didn't do it far too late in the evening and took the bars off to get better access to the bottom of the bar which was a right arse.

Looks like you wrapped your bars with paisley socks.

Do you live in World Of Cushions?

how did I miss this thread? just went through about 10 pages in one sitting. very good, will look again.

Ergo bars wrapped in snow camo? I'm still not sure if its rad as fuck or the most hideous thing I've ever touched.

Between this and bright red fizik microtex I've come to the conclusion that I have TERRIBLE taste in bar tape.

Do you live in World Of Cushions?

lol

Excellent writeup harold, have rep.

Ergo bars wrapped in snow camo? I'm still not sure if its rad as fuck or the most hideous thing I've ever touched.

Snow camo tape - where

yes.

Snow camo tape - where

ebay, not the best quality but not terrible!

Also http://www.wiggle.co.uk/bike-ribbon-cork-patterned-bar-tape/

neither is proper snow camo.

they're both splash cork tape.