Flat brake hood / handlebar interface

It's a bit of everything.
Look around at the next bunch ride and you'll see theres myriad ways of arranging bars/hoods to suit the riding style... and different bars will suit differet arrangements.

It looks to me that you need to move the hoods down around the drop and then roll the bars up to bring the level back. But then you'll have a drop with a lot more reach and not much purchase for getting low.

Perhaps a different style/brand of bar will help. There are a heap to choose from. Almost every manufacturer has their own style(s) (even round drop bars aren't standardised).

tafi said:

It's a bit of everything.
Look around at the next bunch ride and you'll see theres myriad ways of arranging bars/hoods to suit the riding style... and different bars will suit differet arrangements.

It looks to me that you need to move the hoods down around the drop and then roll the bars up to bring the level back. But then you'll have a drop with a lot more reach and not much purchase for getting low.

Perhaps a different style/brand of bar will help. There are a heap to choose from. Almost every manufacturer has their own style(s) (even round drop bars aren't standardised).

I think I'll move the levers down a bit and roll the bar back a bit. I'll be ok with the reach and position. Am I correct to say that the levers are now designed slightly differently to create the flat spot? Seems like they are. SRAM and Campy really seem to create a flatter top compared to Shimano on the same bar and Shimano seem to be flatter than in years past with the same bar. I don't have actual design facts to back it up.

Bike4Him said:

I think I'll move the levers down a bit and roll the bar back a bit. I'll be ok with the reach and position. Am I correct to say that the levers are now designed slightly differently to create the flat spot? Seems like they are. SRAM and Campy really seem to create a flatter top compared to Shimano on the same bar and Shimano seem to be flatter than in years past with the same bar. I don't have actual design facts to back it up.

It wasn't the levers which were/are designed differently as much as it's the bars ...

DEDA was the first (and, perhaps the only) to design a bar where the levers (Campagnolo, in particular) would appear to create a seamlessly FLAT contact surface between the handlebar & the brake lever hood ...

This is more of a cosmetic issue, IMO ... and, the rider actually loses an alternate hand position by having that portion of the handlebar flat ...

Worse (in my case), I didn't like the angle of the forward portion of the drop on the Deda MAGIC bars that I bought because I (also/initially) thought that the "flat top" looked good (see attachment of an earlier iteration of one of my bikes before I switched back to a "regular" bend handlebar ... as you can see, because I did NOT want the lower portion of the bar to be angled anymore downward than it is in the picture, I did NOT feel it was necessary to have a perfectly flat-and-horizontal approach as it was to have the slight upward angle on the hoods when I set up the bike, but I could have made it so without much effort ...).

The preferred bend on the drop portion of the bars is more of a personal thing than not ... so if you think the bend on a DEDA (or, other?) bar works for you then there is a new handlebar in your future.

Like pretty much anything else, the choice of bars is matter of personal preference. Some bars are explicitly advertised to work best with Campy, likewise for Shimano.

Drops being parallel with the ground really means nothing. The driving factor for how you position the bars is hand position, be you someone who rides in the drops most of the time or someone who rides the tops or the hoods most of the time, IOW whatever twirls your tassels.

Why the changes over the years? I think when Shimano brought integrated shifting/braking levers to the market, that drove more people to ride on the hoods. Bars eventually followed suit with bends to give a flatter transition and then progressively curved bends to provide less reach to the control levers from the drops. Bar makes were getting input from someone on these points. Who? I dunno.