Rohloff Shifter on Thorn Accessory Bar Update

Rohloff Shifter mounted on a Thorn Accessory Bar

As I mentioned in my previous post I like the Titec H-bar a lot.  I have one on my Surly Big Dummy with a Rohloff shifter mounted next to a cut down Ergon Grip on the right side of the bar.  This works well, but I thought I would try something a bit different when mounting the Rohloff shifter on my Thorn Nomad S&S touring bike.  Thorn sells a small Accessory Bar that can be used to mount Rohloff shifters and/or other components that you don’t want on your main set of bars.  In fact on my Nomad I have two Accessory Bars mounted one above the other.  The lower one holds my Ortlieb handle bar bag and the upper one holds my Rohloff shifter.  By angling the Accessory Bar back and to the left the Rohloff shifter is relatively easy to get your hand to.  The result is a very clean Titec H-bar with loads of room for a variety of hand positions.

Top View

I’ve been trying the Rohloff shifter setup this way since spring.  My conclusion is that this setup works fine, but I don’t love it.  I don’t shift particularly frequently when I ride, but I still find taking my hand off the bars and shifting to be more effort than I like.  I also think in tough conditions [really bad road, downhill with full touring load] I’d have to just give up on shifting until things calmed down or risk a crash….not a great situation for an expedition touring bike!

Since I’m not embarking on a tour imminently there is no rush to sort this out, but eventually I’m going to setup this bike the same as the Big Dummy – with Ergon Grips and the Rohloff shifter mounted on the right side of the bars.

Rohloff Shifter + Titec H-bar + Ortlieb Bar Bag

A creative cockpit solution...

I like Titec H-bars, but two problems I’ve encountered are:

1. how to mount a handlebar bag and get easy access?
2. the Rohloff shifter doesn’t fit on the bar very well.

I’ve been trying come up with a solution for a while and finally put something together that looks like it may work.  Basically I’m using two Thorn Accessory Bars – one to move the Ortlieb bar bag out far enough to clear the front of the H-bar and the other to mount the Rohloff shifter.  I haven’t tried this setup out yet as I am waiting to get my lazy butt down to Bow Cycle and pick up some MTB brake levers.  I was going to use Ergon grips on this H-bar like on my Big Dummy, but instead I’ll try Jeff Jones’ suggestion and use a double wrap of cork bar tape all over the bar.  The benefit to using bar tape is that there is no single position to place you hands so you use the entire H-bar without being locked into one or two positions.  It’s a cheap experiment so I’ll give it a go.

Top View

By angling the accessory bar the Rohloff shifter is mounted on I was able to get lots of clearance between the H-bar and the accessory bar the Ortlieb bar bag is attached to.  As a bonus the angled shifter falls into my hand very easily – better than the previous perpendicular setup. I’m using the shifter on the left as another experiment.  I use my right hand lots to grab water bottles, eat and take pictures, but my left hand stays on the bars much more which is one of the reasons I suffered a nerve injury in the left hand last summer.  The idea is to give my left hand the job of shifting to get it off the bars regularly.

Side View

This configuration required that the Ortlieb bar bag be mounted to a long-ish accessory bar.  Having the bag levered out this far may cause some handling issues.  OTOH the H-bar is very wide giving me a lot of leverage so that extra control may counter act the bag’s position – hard to say at this point. I’ll just have to give it a try and see what I think.

Top-Side View

Thorn Nomad Mk1 Cockpit Mods

Rohloff shifter and modified Ergon Grip

I’ve been trying out my Rohloff shifter mounted to a Thorn Accessory Bar and didn’t love it – details here.  It’s taken me a while, but I’ve gotten around to moving the shifter to my Titec H-bars.  Since the Titec H-bar is a little short on space I’ve had to cut down the right Ergon Grip to fit.  This is the same setup as I use on my Surly Big Dummy.  I’m going to really enjoy having much easier access to this shifter.  I don’t shift a lot compared to some people, but having to take my hand off the bars and hunt down the Rohloff shifter was not much fun at all.

Dual Thorn Accessory Bars

I no longer need the second smaller Thorn Accessory Bar so I’ll be getting rid of it at some point when the mood strikes me to tinker.  For now I’m not using my Ortlieb handle bar bag so I’ll put my headlight on it out of the way.

Bird's eye view of cockpit...