i’m helping one of my brothers build a single speed conversion from a 10 sp racer naturestrip bike. it’s a Centurion frame (awesome name) thats pretty heavy.
anyway, the drop levers on it are diacompe pressed alloy, and i was changing it to flat bars, but they’re kind of nice with the patterns on the levers, and it seemed to be pretty easy to keep them. there’s a lot of bikes on FGG that use them on flop and chops and other weird bar configurations, and they look awful. i figured with a little fettling they could be made serviceable…
so here’s the original lever on the flat bar. there’s not enough room to really clamp the brake on hard before it hits the bar, so what i did is file the inner edge that touches the bar, with a round file, so that the angle of the lever is increased. i also removed and filed the clamp bolt inside the lever down about 2 mm so that it can be tightened more.
the end result looks like this, it’s ok, nothing beautiful, but it doesn’t make me gag
maybe someone will find this helpful. i figure my bro will buy levers in a month or so, but until then, these will stop him from running into cars.