A little love for Red.

So this past Saturday night was spent with my one and only, Red. Yeah, some might find that mildly depressing but heck, what are you going to do? She needed a bit of love. As some of you remember I decided to see how much damage a curb could do to a bike. Well, a broken frame and a thrashed front rim later I thought that was it. But after getting Red all up and running I soon realized that her old handlebars weren't just right. The impact tweaked the bars just enough that I was afraid of random failure occurring while on a ride. Seeing that it's a fixie I didn't want to risk it.

Here's a picture of the old bars. If you look closely you can see that the right side of the bars are in just a bit more than the left side. They are also a hair closer.
Careful kids, Red's showing her unmentionables... remember you were forewarned...
All was going well with the install until I tried to transfer over the brake. The bar comes out a bit longer than the old bar so I was unable to mount up the lever and was forced to do some thinking as to what my next move would be.
I toyed around with this idea, seeing that this was the only way I found to mount the lever... but then remembered some thing.

So what I'm left with now is this... Sure it's pretty and simple. But I don't know if I trust myself running brakeless, maybe I still have doubts about things since my crash [although having a brake wouldn't have changed anything in that case]. Another problem being that I am still unable to skid. I actually took Red out for a spin today and attempted to try. Getting up to speed all I was able to do was stop in my normal distance of a few feet, no skid.

I guess the 'what if's' are running through my head. Geoff has got a lever I'll try but I might modify it. We'll see.