Continuing from yesterday's article
This is a follow-up to my post about a certain company's bar tape bar end caps being cheap.
I've collected several chromed plastic end caps.
The top left in the image says "３ｔｔｔ", which is 3T from when the company was headquartered in Turin, Italy.
3T stands for Tecnо Tubo Turinbut
the current 3T stands for Techno Tube Taiwan.
Bottom left is the familiar Cinelli.
Cinelli is famous not only as a handlebar maker but also as a bar tape manufacturer,
so if you're a bar tape maker, you'd naturally add a logo to the cap without skimping on it.
Top center is Orbea.
Most complete bike manufacturers, rather than using three-dimensional logos like this,
tend to either apply stickers or print their own company logo on the caps.
The two on the right are both Pinarello, but the top right shows the logo from the previous president's era,
which is a design representing Giovanni Pinarello's "GP".
So today when I showed the cap in the bottom center to a customer who's new to cycling,
they said they'd never seen it before. Yeah, that makes sense.
After all, they switched over at least 8 years ago.
By the way, the current ultra-thin bar tape BT-06 is
thin, but not necessarily light in weight.
Some cork-type bar tapes from other companies are lighter than it.
People wrap it because they prefer something thin, but you shouldn't wrap it for weight reduction purposes.
The current product number is BT, but before that it was CBT.
(The CBT end caps had logos on them).
It started as cork bar tape with the CBT designation,
but when later models came out that weren't cork-based, they may have switched to BT.
The last digit numbering system is the same—01 is cork, 02 is cotton, 06 is ultra-thin, etc.—but
the previous model CBT-06 before the BT-06
was thinner than BT-06 and could actually be called a lightweight bar tape.
However, it was difficult to handle, and I think many people remember
how like adhesive sides of duct tape sticking together,
when the inner surfaces of the bar tape stuck to each other,
it was extremely difficult to peel apart cleanly, making it a very difficult bar tape to wrap.
This is a follow-up to my post about a certain company's bar tape bar end caps being cheap.
I've collected several chromed plastic end caps.
The top left in the image says "３ｔｔｔ", which is 3T from when the company was headquartered in Turin, Italy.
3T stands for Tecnо Tubo Turin
the current 3T stands for Techno Tube Taiwan
Bottom left is the familiar Cinelli.
Cinelli is famous not only as a handlebar maker but also as a bar tape manufacturer,
so if you're a bar tape maker, you'd naturally add a logo to the cap without skimping on it.
Top center is Orbea.
Most complete bike manufacturers, rather than using three-dimensional logos like this,
tend to either apply stickers or print their own company logo on the caps.
The two on the right are both Pinarello, but the top right shows the logo from the previous president's era,
which is a design representing Giovanni Pinarello's "GP".
So today when I showed the cap in the bottom center to a customer who's new to cycling,
they said they'd never seen it before. Yeah, that makes sense.
After all, they switched over at least 8 years ago.
By the way, the current ultra-thin bar tape BT-06 is
thin, but not necessarily light in weight.
Some cork-type bar tapes from other companies are lighter than it.
People wrap it because they prefer something thin, but you shouldn't wrap it for weight reduction purposes.
The current product number is BT, but before that it was CBT.
(The CBT end caps had logos on them).
It started as cork bar tape with the CBT designation,
but when later models came out that weren't cork-based, they may have switched to BT.
The last digit numbering system is the same—01 is cork, 02 is cotton, 06 is ultra-thin, etc.—but
the previous model CBT-06 before the BT-06
was thinner than BT-06 and could actually be called a lightweight bar tape.
However, it was difficult to handle, and I think many people remember
how like adhesive sides of duct tape sticking together,
when the inner surfaces of the bar tape stuck to each other,
it was extremely difficult to peel apart cleanly, making it a very difficult bar tape to wrap.