Adjustable Handlebars
ADJUSTABLE HANDLEBARS
EVALUATIONS
Motorcycles, like clothes, have to fit your size and your style to be comfortable. Unlike clothes, motorcycles don’t come in sizes. When you buy a Road Rasher 900 or a Stump Jumper 250, you get a machine that comes close to fitting a lot of riders of any age, sex or size, but which probably doesn’t fit most of them exactly right. The rider who isn’t average enough to fit production handlebars, has the choice of twisting the bars in their mounts (which usually gets the right position, but not the right handgrip angle) or trying different bars to find one that fits (at $10 to $25 apiece, an inconvenient and expensive procedure). So most riders learn to accept kinks in the back and cramps in the wrist as part of the natural order of things, along with rain, speed limits and expensive gasoline.
Here’s a good try at changing that: Adjustable bars. The trade name is Dynabar and they are intended to make motorcycling more comfortable by allowing the rider to tailor his bars to his proportions and his style of riding. Pavement scratehers can simulate any style of clip-ons, street riders can adjust the bars to their needs and tourers can dial in some pull-back for use with a fairing or some crouch, to lean into the wind without a fairing.
To achieve this range of adjustability, Dynabars are made of seven main parts. The center section is a tube which fits in the stock handlebar mounts. An L-shaped piece slides into the center section on each side. These two L pieces can be moved in and out to vary the width of the handlebars. The handgrips mount on the vertical halves of the L pieces. The handgrip bracket is designed so the handgrips can be moved up and down the vertical section. In addition, the handgrips can be rotated around both the horizontal and the vertical axis. The vertical section and the brackets are splined to eliminate movement once tightened. To increase the range of adjustability, there are two extensions which fit into the L-pieces to allow the handgrips to move further up or down. All of these parts are held in place with a supply of Allen-head set screws and socket-head cap screws. Mounting is simple enough if you just snug each set screw down so everything stays in place, but can still be moved as needed. Once mounted, their appearance is all angles and joints, unlike the flowing curves of most other handlebars, but who looks at handlebars?
The first few hours of riding with the Dynabars are best spent with a hex key in a handy pocket so adjustments can be made immediately. It’s easy to spend weeks investigating different riding positions and getting every adjustment spot-on.
The idea works; almost any rider can find a comfortable, custom-fitted riding position. But there are a couple of potential problem areas. Some arrangements of the Dynabars place all the sharp angles and joints directly in the path of a rider unfortunate enough to go over the handlebars. If the bars are used near the outer limits of their adjustment, or if the extensions are used, the leverage applied to the setscrews holding everything together will almost certainly cause them to loosen. There are any number of riding situations where this could cause quite a thrill. Checking the setscrews’ tightness regularly should eliminate any problem.
Despite their odd looks, Dynabars do the job they’re supposed to. At $79.95, they’re not cheap, but many riders will find the comfort worth the price. You can get them from National Dynatronics, 88 University Place, New York, N.Y. 10003 £9
