Shorten Your Lock-On Bicycle Grips

If you tend to tinker your bicycle a lot like me, having a pair of lock-on grips is a blessing. No more struggling to get them off when you want to swap your handlebar, shifters, or brakelevers, while the locking mechanism prevents the grips from twisting off when you're mashing your pedals real hard.

But if you're using twist-style shifters, these grips will be too long to use. So how do you shorten them? I'll show you how.

Step 1: Choose Your Grips

Lock-on grips came in so many models and price levels, including the very exclusive and expensive models from Brooks England. Well, if I had the money I'll just slap them into my wife's folding bike... but putting a pair of grips that costs a quarter of the whole bike's price is not a good idea. So I'm going for a cheap, generic model that set me back just under US$ 7 a pair instead.

To perform this grip-shortening surgery, make sure that you choose a model almost similar as the one pictured on this step: a hollow plastic cylinder wrapped with synthetic bar tape with two aluminium clamps on each ends.

Step 2: Disassemble the Clamp

Choose one end of your soon-to-be-shortened grip, basically the one where the bar tape wrap ends. Undo the set screw on the aluminium clamp to release it from the hollow plastic cylinder.

Step 3: Unwrap the Grip and Mark the Cut

To make room for my wife's SRAM T3 shifter I have to shorten the grip by 40mm. I also found out that the plastic cylinder was somehow layered with thin and soft, rubber like material.

After marking the line where I cut the bar tape, the next step is to recreate the area where the grip clamp should sit. Match the length where the plastic cylinder was originally exposed from the bar tape wrap, and cut the cylinder accordingly.

4. Recreate the Clamp Area

Pardon the Blur-O-Vision filter, but the point of this step is to recreate the shape of the area where the aluminium grip clamp should sit. Since the hollow cylinder is only made of plastic, I use X-Acto knife and Dremel to bring the shape back.

Step 5: Done!

The last step is to reassemble the clamp back. Put that thin metal thingy under the aluminium clamp, and the clamp itself. Voila!

If you want to, you can also replace the bar tape wrap with another bar tape that will suit your needs, be it in colour or texture. The possibility is endless.