Page last modified: 08/24/08

This article started in my head after a 600 mile day… in fact the day after, when I was unable to move about normally. No, I hadn't dropped the bike, I was suffering from a pain in the lower neck from riding.  The feeling had been there before, and I had attributed it to the rather straight, forward black Superbike-type bars on the GS(X)1100EZ that I recently acquired. That particular Thursday, however, it had become untolerable – I am not usually glad to get off the bike, but then I was. So I thought, let's have this over with. Come Saturday, I visited my favourite bike salvage yard cum parts supplier, selected a decent sample, fitted it on the bike in his front garden, and voilá: I sustained the 150 mile ride back without any problem at all! 

How can that be?
There are a few factors that we have to consider when selecting the proper set of bars for our specific purpose, bike, posture, riding style, speed… you name it.

Let's start off with my example and work from that. I am about 6 ft something (not much…). I ride a GSX1100EZ (scrap the X when you're on the American continent), which started out fairly stock as far as ergonomics were concerned, but the engine dept wasn't left quite untouched. I decided that any 120bhp bike is not ridable without a fairing, and apart from that I wanted the machine for its long distance capacity as well. So I fitted a sporty looking touring fairing to keep me dry and out of the wind.

I noticed that, whereas previously I was pulling the wide bars to keep me on the bike, I was now sitting upright and leaning with my hands on the bars. When you have to "hold on" to the bike, you tend to keep your arms a bit bent (much like on a surf board for you Californians) and sticking out your elbows, which changes the angle at which your hands grip the bar ends. When you sit up and just reach out for the bar ends, the standard bars make you twist your hands a bit inwards to hold the ends. But when you ride against the wind and hang on in there, that's not a problem, since then the angle is not in the wrist, but in the elbow.

But with the fairing, the wind is gone, and as you lean on your hands and lower arms, the angle at which the wrist turns towards the bar end, feels downright awkward. See fig. 1 to see what I mean. By the way: please take into account that I am not an artist (as if you hadn't noticed...). The picture is rather silly, but I hope it helps to grasp what I'm trying to get across.

Which Bars To Pick?

So I decided that, to have things my way, I had to have bar ends closer together and bent backwards and a little downwards. Then I could sit in a natural position and reach out for the bar ends and just drop my hands there without having to rotate the wrist inwards. Again, a silly figure tries to explain this: see fig. 2.

So, swapping bars cured my problem. Now what would you have to take into
account when you would pick another bar to hold on to?

First of all: don't try to make a chopper out of a café racer - or the other way 'round -- just by swapping them bars. The rules of balance apply here. Rearset footrests don't accommodate an upright posture, and footrests just behind (or worse: under or in front of) the knee joints don't allow for clip-ons. So you would not want to go about making really big changes to your stance on the bike.

Harley and manufacturers of other chopped iron demonstrate this successfully -- as silly fig. 3 successfully demonstrates, it would be an ergonomic disaster to try to combine the cafe racer upper body position without adapting footrest position -- and would you start to do that as well, without upsetting the geometry of the whole bike!

The morale is probably that you can't turn a Sportster into something
even remotely resembling a sports bike, but that's another story.

Sensible bike ergonomics

This leads to more observations on ergonomics in general... your
physician will probably tell you that, if you absolutely, positively have to ride a motorcycle at all, the way to go in terms of ergonomics is probably the Euro-style, slightly sportive, riding stance as depicted in silly fig. 4. The upper body leaning forward causes some of the upper body weight to be transferred from the lower spine to the arms, which your lower spine generally considers a good idea. Your lower arm muscles may not like this in the beginning, but they'll get used to this.

The rearset footrests will enable the rider to catch bumps in the legs instead of having them transferred straight to the lower spine (which the lower spine isn't designed for!). In fig. 4 you can see that the footrests are set back enough for the rider to be able to place his foot under the center of gravity of his upper body mass.

The whole idea behind this is to prevent the rider from resting on the lower spine, and to stretch the spinal chord, or at least to prevent it from being compressed. When crossing a bump, a rider in this position has the best stance to catch the impact in his legs (which we, subconsciously, all do).

Bars and a bike's handling 

It applies as a general rule that the wider the bars, the higher up they get, and the more they sweep backwards, the lighter the handling will be. Basic physics apply here: the longer the spanner, the easier it is to apply a given force.

Consequently, if you have wider bars, a few mm's of movement of the bar's end won't have the same effect on steering as the same amount of movement at the end of very narrow racing bars. Which is why learners and newcomers usually benefit from wide bars.

Narrow, low bars that force you to clench the filler cap with your teeth will look racy, but on a GS1100GK or anything similar (why, the Starship Enterprise also falls into that category!) you'll have to wrestle to make the thing turn at lower speeds.

On a bike cut out for lightning handling they may, however, be just right, whereas wider, upright bars might make for a bike which feels nervous and twitchy.

Old-style would-be clip-ons (the kind that mount on top of the upper fork crown, and then sweep forward and down) will make any bike, especially a GS, into a nervous wreck, since then you'll be steering the bike at a point BEFORE the fork. That's not good.

Make sure you're comfortable. Any set of bars which make you feel uncomfortable or uneasy will screw up the handling, since when you're not comfortable, your unrest may be transported into the bike.

One last tip: experiment carefully before you spend your bucks. Try before you buy: small changes will make a BIG difference. Don't just hold a new set on top of the old one, but mount it, complete with grips, so that you can grab them and hold onto them instead of holding them up.

When you mount another sample, sit on the bike with your eyes closed, and then grab the bars to check whether it feels natural.

A sidebar (pun not intended, but not avoided as well!):
Some bikes vibrate. This is not a Harley site, mind you, so it can't be that bad, but the larger capacity GS's can sometimes generate a buzz that can be slightly unsettling in the long run, especially when they're a little ratty in the engine department. There are special foam grips that approach the vibration problem. They are usually quite soft and thick and may feel fine when you hold them for a few minutes. However: people with hands smaller than medium may find them too fat -- having to outstretch your thumb will become tiring in the long run, especially on the right hand, which has to keep the throttle open To sort out vibrations, you might also try to fit dampers at the bar ends: largish weights which clamp into the bar ends with a rubber strut, and seek to sort out the vibes by lowering the resonance frequency to a point where only Milwaukee iron might be upsetting. Be sure to select the heavy ones… there are samples that are only of cosmetic value.