Drop Handlebars for Dummies (Bike Week)

The smaller lever, Harry?

We've thoroughly enjoyed Bike Week here at the Antisocial Network, although some of the stupider bicycle-related content the research department unearthed hurt our collective head. Here to close out the week is yet another of eHow.com's infamous stable of money-grubbing, ignorant freelancers, Harry Havemeyer. Harry picked up fifteen bucks to explain to someone "How to Change Gears With Drop Handlebars."¹ We're not sure who's dumber in this case: someone who had to ask, or Havemeyer for, as is usual at eHow, getting it wrong. We'll stick with Harry for now.

Now Harry's little description is somewhat limited, since he starts out by telling his multitude of readers,

"Place your hands on the hoods of the drop handlebar. The hood is the protruding segment of the drop handlebar..."

Not quite, Harry – the hoods aren't part of the bars, they're the top surface of the shifter assembly that's attached to the handlebar, covered by a rubber boot. Not all bikes with drop handlebars have such hoods, but we'll let that slide. Harry goes on to say,

"Use your left shifter to move your front derailleur; pushing in the large lever moves your chain to the large chain ring, while smaller lever pushes the chain down to the small front chain ring. Use the right shifter to maneuver your rear derailleur; push the rear lever to move the chain up the rear cogs, while the small lever moves the chain down the rear cogs." We immediately noticed that Harry's instructions are only valid for integrated shifters such as those made by Shimano and SRAM. There are other shifters on low-end bicycles like the ones sold at discount department stores. Whatever the case, he got the left and right conventions correct, we'll give him that much.

Where he goes wonky is in his ambiguous description of how shifting the rear derailleur works. What do "up the rear cogs" and "down the rear cogs" mean? Harry doesn't seem to know or he might have told us. In the real world, the front (left) lever on integrated shifters upshifts (moves the chain to a larger cog) and the rear (right) lever downshifts (moves the chain to a smaller cog). Harry's apparently confused because shifting to a larger chainring (front derailleur) is upshifting and shifting to a smaller chainring is downshifting. He also doesn't seem to be aware of triple chainrings -- another shortcoming...

Nope, Harry probably hasn't been on a bike since he completed Driver's Ed. Yet here he is, sharing his "expertise"... as our Dumbass of the Day.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_12021096_change-gears-drop-handlebars.html

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