“NEW” 3 piece bar B824 by NITTO

2024 was a helluva year for handlebar projects.

The JAM bars by Kaneyan,

ALL ROAD BAR＋ by Tani

And BAR NONE by Black Mountain Cycles

We had so many opportunities to design and helped many handlebar projects last year.

I of course bought all of these for my collection. My house is already filled with handlebars, but no one can stop me from getting more.

Yes, I do think I am a hoarder, but handlebars are great parts to change the feel or mood for a bike build, so I think it’s natural for a mechanic to have so much handlebars.

I had the dream to design my own handlebar, ever since I started working at Blue Lug.

I consider these two as bike mechanics that represents Japan. I would always see their unique bike builds before joining the Blue Lug crew.

Seeing the handlebars that the two people who I respect the most designed from scratch, which is super difficult and seeing the bar designed by a living legend in the bike industry, makes me super anxious to write about my own, but here it goes…I hope you enjoy.

The RB001 and the For Shred Bars are two of the best sellers of Nitto x Blue Lug bars. But there are many products that unfortunately got discontinued, as time went by.

One specific handlebar from those discontinued bar was stuck in my head for a long time.

The B814 “3 Piece Bar” that was produced more than a decade a go, is one of the handlebars I still think about. A handlebar made of three straight chromoly pieces.

I had this handlebar before I was a Blue Lug employee. I loved how it looked, but I also thought I would even love it more if I could put some tweaks to it.

The width and the sweep was the main things I wanted to tweak. The back sweep was too much and the grip area was too short, making the handlebars impossible to trim down. I’ve seen people who are smaller than myself use these handlebars without a trim, which looked a little bit awkward to ride.

I felt mildly frustrated about the shape of the handlebars. Which lead to this project I’m writing about.

To be completely honest, My dream was to design a handlebar from scratch and actually make “my own handlebar”, but I noticed I wasn’t the type of person to make 0 to 1, so I decided to brush up one of my favorite looking handlebar.

It’s already been a month since this video, but did y’all watch it>

The handlebar project wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Kato-san from Nitto. (the person to the right on the thumbnail)

Thank you so much Nitto. We truly appreciate working with you.

The 3 Piece bars were reborn as “B824”, with a new back sweep and bar width.

As you can tell by the image above, the width of the bar is now wider than the original. I have stretched 50mm from the original bar, making the new one, 720mm.

①Shortened the center bar

②Less aggressive back sweep

③Longer grip are

Now you can trim the bars down to 640mm for a single speed bike. (no shifter levers)

1-3 were redesigns for making the bars able to trim. The back sweep is totally based on my personal preference, but I think many riders would like it.

If you look at the numbers, the bars are very different from the original, but I think they look pretty accurate to the original.

Zero rise. I wanted to keep the concept of “A bar made of three straight bars welded together”.

New flat bars that drops in the industry nowadays, have a big rise. It is a “trend” to say the least.

I was getting pretty tired of the current trends in the industry, which some of you might be able to relate. I thought these simple zero rise flat bars would look refreshing in the market filled with riser bars.

My favorite part about this handlebar is that you can see the weldings even more since they now have less back sweep, making the weldings become wider. The tig welding marks make the bars look like their handmade!

You can get a nice angle when tilting the bar to where the NITTO LOGO faces straight.

I am very happy how the handlebars turned out. I hope you enjoy them too.