Soma Handlebar Extenders Review: Almost Perfect but Damn Good Enough – John Watson | The Radavist | A group of individuals who share a love of cycling and the outdoors.

As John worked through his Rivendell Bombadil 2.0 build, he needed a bit more width on his new Sim Works Getaround CrMo bars, so first, he tried some pretty sketchy eBay extenders. This prompted Luke from Soma to send over the Handlebar Extenders. Read on for a look at what 100 mm of extension looks like and the one compromise…

Soma Handlebar Extender Quick Hits

$23.95
For city/MTB bars with 22.2mm OD.
Aluminum construction
50 mm of extension per unit
Comes in black or silver
The resulting fit is not perfectly seamless, but it is good enough that it should feel normal after the grips are installed.
DO NOT use on bars that have been partially machined out at the ends (to fit bar end shifters or reverse levers)
This includes Soma Oxford, Sparrow, and 3-speed II bars.
ID not sized to accept reverse levers or bar end shifters.
Requires a 6mm hex key (2 inches long) to install

Widening Handlebars

You have a few options to widen handlebars. The first and most thorough is silver soldering an extension into the bars. Now, to do this, the bars have to be steel and raw. You can’t braze or solder over chrome plating. You’ve also got to know a metal worker who wants to do this job. And it should be noted that this is an expensive practice.

Other Options

Option two is to use a bar extender, like Chatty Matty’s inserts he made for Travis, or even the Control Tech Terminator extenders, which offer 20 mm per side. These are good and secure alternatives. The Chatty Matty option compresses rubber to keep the bar extenders in place, and the Control Tech Terminators use knurled metal and an expanding wedge. Both are great options, but I wanted more… more… MORE! Width!

I got greedy and wanted 50 mm per side, so I tried a freak experimentation version of the Control Tech extenders I got off eBay. One of the things I’ve found with the expanding knurled metal bar ends on an MTB is that they can rattle loose and require removing the grips, which isn’t a big deal. But these 50 mm extenders put too much leverage on the system, and they almost immediately loosened up.

Soma Handlebar Extenders

Luke from Soma saw me fiddling and faffing with those dodgy extenders and offered to send out the Handlebar Extenders they make in Taiwan. These use a wedge system, like a quill stem, with three wedges to bite onto the inside of the handlebar. This system is very secure, but it has a slight caveat.

As you tighten them down, the bar end won’t be flush to the handlebar since the middle wedge pushes against the inner wall of the bar and the other two wedges, which are in line with the extender, push out about 1 mm proud. I wonder if offsetting the bolt center 1 mm would alleviate this? The extenders always offset at this machine screw, so why not push the threaded bolt inboard from that?

The result looks bad in the photo above, but you can’t feel it while riding. If you use a lock-on grip like Ergon or Wolf Tooth, you also can’t feel it. These WTB grips have been on the Bombadil for a while now and are very flexible and soft from all their use.

However, regardless of the apparent bulge, I was able to achieve an 800 mm width on the Sim Works Getaround CrMo bars. Which, for my wide shoulders, brings the Bombadil’s cockpit to a span I feel comfortable on. Now, I should note, Soma doesn’t rate these for “extreme off-road riding” so don’t go hucking a loading dock to flat or anything with them, but for a bike I’ll jam around town on and hit some mild singletrack from time to time, they’ll be fine.

For $23.95, I’d say they’re well worth their cost and they’ve yet to loosen on me and feel very secure but yeah, mind the gap.

Pros