Newbaum's

Somewhat recently, I've become a huge fan of cotton bar tape.  The look, the feel, the smell, the price.  There's nothing not to like.  It's been used for years on vintage bike's and French brand's have long since been available, but in limited colors.  It's also on the thin side and is often way to short to wrap a full size set of bars without going to extremes to minimize overlap.  It's good stuff and I've used it for several projects. 

Sometime early this year I stumbled across Newbaum's on Riv's site.  Newbaum's is a newish company that produces high quality cotton handlebar tape, of all things!  Made right here in the USA to boot, you can check them out here.  This stuff is thick, super nice cotton, it comes in a staggering variety of colors, and it's long enough to handle wide bars or if you like to wrap the cotton over cork tape or something like that.  it's nice and cheap so you can change colors often, or wear out one color nicely.  I decided to order a few rolls to re-wrap the Nitto Noodles on my Trek.  Classy stuff, I wish there were more uses for cotton tape, because this stuff is that nice.  Broom handles, steering wheels?  Hockey sticks definitely.

So rather than tear off the old stuff (also Newbaum's), I decided to wrap right over it.  I liked the idea of thickening the diameter of the bars a little bit, especially with the beefy Tektro/Cane Creek brake levers.  After much deliberation, I decided to go with medium blue.

I finished it off on the ends with twine, which I think looks swell.  It's a classy touch, much more appealing to my eye than the standard electrical tape.  I also decided not to shellac the tape, which is common practice.  I had done so to the layer of tape under this one, and while the look, feel and weather-proofness was nice, the bare cotton just feels so nice.  We'll have to see if I regret this decision down the road.  I suppose I could always shellac them later on.

Cotton bar tape, good stuff.