Idle Speculation: Forge+Bond is Making Handlebars?

How Bike Reviews Usually Work

For the uninitiated, there’s a pretty typical process to bike reviewing: brands hand off a product to journalists, along with a wad of information, give us an embargo date and a little pat on the head, and send us on our merry way. We ride the gizmo, write about it, triple check that we’ve scheduled the article to go live after the embargo, not before, and then spit our thoughts out into the world.

There’s some variability, sure. Some brands do a better job than others at communicating what their product is and why it does what it does. Every press release features a slightly different mix of marketing speak and engineering data. Sometimes we get the info, without ever getting to see the bike or component, in which case, we have to decide if it’s newsworthy or not (for Bike Mag, it usually isn’t). But mostly, the game is played within that set of rules.

Why This One is Different

There are plenty of reasons to follow that traditional format, the primary one being practicality. That’s the framework that best allows me to do my job, and brand people to do their jobs, while communicating useful info to readers. But sometimes a brand wants to do something a little differently. In this case, that brand is Forge+Bond. So this article will also be a little different. I don’t have access to a tidy little doc full of graphs and testimonials and stats. I don’t have price sheets or a launch date. All I have is a handlebar, and a couple of cryptic texts.

Here’s what I do know: This handlebar weighs 263 g, it’s made out of Forge+Bond’s FusionFiber thermoplastic carbon. It has 25 mm of rise, and I’ve heard vague rumblings that it’s unsurprisingly not going to be a budget-minded bar and that F+B has some big-time performance claims to make around it.

So I put it on my Trek Top Fuel and rode it back to back with some other leaders in the “carbon bars that feel nice” space. They feel really nice, which we’ll get to later, but first, some impressions:

These bars don’t have the center marked. I didn’t realize how much I rely on center markings until I tried to center bars that don’t have them. Turns out, some kind of mark to help line up the bar in your stem is really nice. That will probably change for the production version.

They don’t seem to feature a symmetrical layup. We Are One touts their “Package” bars as having a symmetrical layup for equal flex at both hands. F+B’s bars seem to spiral left to right with the carbon shell.

The Problem with Handlebar Flex

“Compliance” has long been a big buzzword in the handlebar space. 31.8 mm bars aren’t stiff enough, so we upgrade to 35 mm bars. But those are too stiff, so now we tune the shape, or the carbon layup, or fill them with Great Stuff Expanding Foam to make them mute the trail’s vibrations and impacts better, without suffering a loss in precision.

The problem with all of that is that handlebars aren’t individually tuneable. I can’t just add air pressure to my bar to adapt it to my higher-than-average weight. So when brands release bars that they claim are tuned to be more compliant, my first question is always “for who?” 200 lb dudes like me are buying the same bars that 100 lb groms are using. There’s no way that one bar has the “right” amount of flex for both of us.

Add to that the fact that we all roll our bars slightly differently, thus loading those “flex zones” in slightly different ways, and I think I’m justified in a little eyebrow raising at claims of bars universally improving the ride experience for everyone and increasing comfort.

An obvious solution to this is FAAST’s FLEXX Bars with their tunable travel, but those are expensive, look weird, and in my experience at least, take some getting used to.

All that to say, I hope that F+B isn’t planning on telling a “flex” story around these because A) that’s not a very compelling angle, and B) I’m not noticing anything that different in the flex of these.

The Ride

I bolted these mystery bars onto the front of the Trek Top Fuel I’ve been riding a bunch recently. I chose the Top Fuel because, if these bars are doing anything special, it’ll be a lot easier to notice on a stiff, taut bike like the Top Fuel, not on a 170 mm meat monster with plenty of tire and fork between the ground and my hands. I’m running the 120 mm Manitou R8 on the Top Fuel, along with Specialized’s Ground Control tires at 22 PSI in the front, and 25 in the rear. I ran this bar back to back with a 20 mm rise OneUp carbon bar, on the only trail that matters to the world, Bob’s on Galbraith.

And dammit, I noticed the ride felt different right out the gate. It’s not huge, it’s not in your face, but it’s there. The bar doesn’t feel “softer” or like it’s really flexing more, instead I noticed less tingy input coming into my hands. Said hands are exceptionally sensitive right now given that I just beat them into submission on the braking bumps of the Whistler Bike Park for a week.

I’d compare it to the difference between a chain slapping on a firm plastic guard, or on a good, soft chainstay guard. It’s like a layer of VDS tape between my hands and the trail, without any vagueness. It feels like running good push-on grips , instead of hard lock-ons. It feels very similar to F+B’s wheels: precise, but subtly less punishing. It doesn't feel vague, or soft, or wallowy, or scary in any way. It just feels like less of the bad sensations, and the same amount of the helpful ones.

It’s a good experience. Not insane, not ground-breaking or ride-changing, but good. And for folks dealing with hand pain or fatigue issues, it might help make a more significant difference.

A Tangent About Skis

I used to write a lot about skis. And something I hammered on in those reviews is that a ski’s flex is more than just how far it deforms under a certain amount of force. Skiers get stuck in this binary of stiff vs soft skis that doesn’t adequately describe the factors at play. It’s similar to talking about bike forks but only thinking about air pressure or spring rate. Luckily, mountain biking gives us the vocabulary and adjustments for high and low speed compression and rebound, all factors which affect how an object reacts to forces, whether it be flexing like a handlebar or ski, or compressing and extending like a fork.

But for some reason, most of the conversation around bar flex loses that nuance. We talk about handlebars like they’re skis - either stiff or soft, with no consideration for how they flex and rebound.

My very unscientific guess is that the ride quality of this F+B bar is coming not from the amount that it flexes, but how the thermoplastic material it’s made out of deals with vibrations and inputs. And I would love to see more nuance in our conversations about bar flex and ride quality, beyond “flex=good.”

For Now

Handlebars are really subjective and hard to write about. They’re nearly impossible to blind test, and more importantly, we’re all looking for something different out of them. That’s why I was intrigued by this not-so-traditional review format. I still don’t know exactly what claims Forge+Bond is going to make about this bar, or how much it will cost, or even if it’s going to come to market for sure. But it was a great opportunity to really hone in on what my handlebars are doing, and I’m excited to keep riding this bar, and compare it to a few other options.