The Handlebar Conundrum

When I bought the pile of Guzzi bits that is slowly morphing into a real motorbike, the original handlebars weren't with the pile, but the seller gave me a choice of a couple of pairs of Renthal bars that he had.

The pile of parts has been moved twice since then and is now in my permanent house in Anglesey. I love my house but it has just one downside. Access to the back of the house is via a passageway between my house and the neighbours. The passageway itself is vey narrow, but there is a particular bottleneck at the front gate. This makes it very difficult to get bikes in and out, which is great from a security aspect, but a right pain in the arse in every other respect.

My Royal Enfield Classic 350 was way too wide in the handlebar region to get through and I ended up selling it, as I couldn't find any sensible way to adapt it by replacing handlebars etc. After much research about what to replace it with, I spotted that the Kawasaki GPZ 500 was about the narrowest middlesized bike that I could find and bought one of those. That will indeed go down - just - but only after I have folded in the mirrors and removed the bar ends!

When I bought the Enfield Crusader here, I only managed to get that through by 2 of us manhandling it, with the handlebars at a 45 degree angle and the front wheel on a platform with casters! I have been able to cut about 1.5" off each side of the handlebars on that and it will now go through - just, again - but that was only possible because it's an old bike, so doesn't need as much space at the end of the bars for things like brake master cylinders and big control/switch blocks.

So I've been agonising over what I'm going to do with the Guzzi, as the Renthal bars are way too wide, even after I've cut them down to the minimum amount of space I need to fit everything on, and any other bars I can find that are narrow enough don't have sufficient space for levers etc.

The nearest I got to a sensible idea was to make some sort of post that I could clamp into the handlebar clamp and which I could attach cafe racer style clip ons to, but I really didn't like the idea of the riding position that was likely to generate.

Then I had a sudden flash of inspiration! The GPZ 500 goes down the passage, so why don't I reproduce that on the Guzzi?! Looking at the two bikes:

The GPZ is very compact, but loses almost no distance in the "bend" to raise the height of the handlebars - that's all dealt with in the mounting plates.

So I've bought a scrap set of the bars, actually off a ZZR600, but they appear to be the same, and I'm planning to make a plate out of suitably thick aluminium to replace the area hatched yellow below...

... and mounting that to the Guzzi top yoke, in place of the upper clamp plate, using the 4 bolts below.

I can't see why that won't work, but I'm going to mock it up in plywood first. That way, I can also test it to see whether it fits past the gate as well, before I commit to making it in aluminium.

So these are the used bar ends that I bought.

I marked out a trapezium on a piece of scrap ply that was equivalent to the bit between the bars on the GPZ, although I bought the smaller end in slightly to make the angle between the bars less "sporty" and more "touring".

Then I held each bar in position and drew around it's baseplate.

I extended the bottom end a bit to give more surrounding space for the mounting bolts and then roughly cut the shape out with a jigsaw, before smoothing the edges back to the actual shape with sandpaper. 

Then I drilled each of the holes and used some spare bolts to mount the bars to the plate.

Trying it for size on the bike, I needed to give a little clearance to one of the mounting holes but also to cut a relief for the stem nut. When I looked more closely, the original bar clamp also had a relief, so I just copied the form of that.

All bolted back up, and it looks like it will work 😀

I fitted the controls to check whether that was going to create any conflicts (as there is a mix of Kawasaki switches, Royal Enfield brake and master cylinder and the original Guzzi clutch lever). 

There is just a possible conflict in the brake line union from the master cylinder to keep an eye on.

Happily, when I measured the distance between handlebar ends, it's just around 600mm; about 100mm less than the Renthal bars. I'm taking that as a result!

Now I just need to get hold of some aluminium and reproduce the plywood plate, but I'll tap threads for the bolts holding the bars to the plate and also rebate the socket heads of the hold down bolts into the plate. I'm going to use 16mm plate, so plenty of meat to recess into.