My Private Surly Research. Torsion Bar
Y’all had a chance to read this post yet?
The excitement has been slowly sinking in. If anything, I’ve been feeling it even more since returning from Minneapolis.
And the more I think about it, the more grateful I feel toward SURLY for putting so much into making this special frame happen.
Here’s a quick reminder of the release schedule.
＝＝ SURLY × BLUE LUG 20th Steamroller ＝＝
In-store release: November 2nd (Mon) 12PM
Online release: November 8th (Sun) 7 PM JST
And then, out of nowhere, another baton was dropped into my hands.
It was stiff and lightweight. But somehow, it felt pretty heavy.
While things were quietly moving forward behind the scenes with the FRANK & BEAN-colored STEAMROLLER, another company was hard at work in Kawaguchi, Saitama, Japan, bringing a certain handlebar back to life.
SURLY Torsion handle bar
Yep. THAT handlebar is coming back.
The legendary TORSION BAR.
If I remember correctly, both we and the folks at NITTO started talking about bringing it back around the same time.
I still remember when Kato-san unexpectedly showed up with an original Torsion Bar. We ended up getting pretty excited over that one handlebar. Ah, good times.
Why does such a simple, almost ordinary-looking handlebar fascinate us so much? I’d never really thought too deeply about it.
The first time I encountered one, the day I was reunited with one, and every time in between, it just felt right. The shape, the comfort, the way it naturally fits your hands. It was always exactly what I wanted from a handlebar.
So, with this revival happening, I figured it’d be a good opportunity for all of us to dig a little deeper into its history.
SURLY’s story began in Minneapolis in 1998.
The 1×1 appeared almost as a counterculture response to the mountain bike and sporting bicycle scene of the late ’90s.
And alongside it came a whole range of components. One of them was this handlebar.
Reading through that old product description again brought back memories of all the trails and roads the SURLY crew showed us during our recent visit.
Everyone lives and plays in different places.
The roads we ride in our daily lives and the trails we explore for fun are just as varied.
Relatively flat terrain. Towns connected by abandoned railroad lines. Beautiful stretches of nature in between.
Maybe this handlebar was born specifically for the kind of mountain biking people enjoyed in that environment.
Let’s look back at the era from that perspective.
This was what mountain biking in America looked like in 1998.
I’m sure plenty of people were fascinated by all the technological advancements happening at the time.
I was ten years old back then.
I remember catching glimpses of mountain biking on TV and seeing full-suspension bikes in magazines, dreaming about the day I’d be old enough to ride something like that myself.
(I just remembered begging my grandparents to buy me a yellow GIANT mountain bike when I was about to start junior high school…)
Back then, handlebars were generally short, cut down, and designed to save as much weight as possible. Cross-country riders often used narrow flat bars with bar ends.
Meanwhile, downhill bikes were evolving rapidly, and riser bars were beginning to take over.
Looking through old catalogs, you can really see how handlebars were being treated primarily as performance-oriented sporting equipment.
There’s a section on SURLY’s website called “Spews.”
It’s a place where they share their thoughts, observations, and occasional rants about the things they make.
Among those old posts was one titled “BARZ.”
(I won’t link it. Go dig it up yourself.)
It contains a whole bunch of thoughts about handlebars at the time.
“Riser bars are great.”
“But maybe we shouldn’t forget the subtle adjustments and just-right feeling that flat bars can offer.”
“Sometimes riser bars are too expensive, too high, too strong, or too wide.”
“They might be the fashionable choice right now, but do they actually suit the way YOU ride?”
That’s roughly the message, delivered in SURLY’s wonderfully roundabout way.
And I don’t think they were trying to put down riser bars at all.
Quite the opposite.
There’s a genuine appreciation for both types of handlebars and the cultures surrounding them.
That willingness to understand different perspectives, while questioning things at the same time, is something I’ve felt from every SURLY employee I’ve met.
WAKEMAN, who is one of the OG members of Surly, was kind enough to share some stories after I reached out and asked him about those days.
WAKEMAN’s story
In 1998 or so, underground cycling culture in Minneapolis was ripe and thick. I found myself a part of a vibrant coalition of dirty BMXers, deadbeat MTB racers, scraggly messengers, hardened commuters and other two-wheeled misfits. Nowhere was this coming-together more celebrated than on the unofficial weekly Wednesday night rides: Just show up and rage.
We rode dirt, train tracks, swamps and alleys, all seasons, to places you definitely wouldn’t tell your Mom about, and doing the very dumbest of shit. We were young and wild and still actually somewhat able to work on Thursday… These weekly meetups are where most of the best ideas started. Ideas that became Surly Bikes.
But BEFORE Surly congealed as a brand, we made a bunch of singlespeed MTB stuff under the name “1×1”. The stuff was decent, cheap, tough, and most of all – about having fun as a primary directive. Not elevated performance, going fast, looking cool, or being exclusive. Most were things few else offered at the time, at prices bike people could afford, and we had lots of fun doing it.
DERBY.
One of these ideas was more-or-less born from a fascination with the derby. Every Wednesday night ride had one or two of them. Sometimes violent, other times tame, the thing where you go round&round in a circle, trying to inflict damage while staying on two wheels, and trying to avoid Boosty. Flat trackin’ and bangin’ bars. Bangin’ heads!
Flat MTB bars of the day were a joke, like much of the 90’s equipment out there, with zero chance of surviving a derby much less a 40-bike pile at the bar. 18″ wide, paper-thin, with a wrist-wincing 3 degree sweep. Garbage! Free from the constraints of what, ahem, “real” MTB riders wanted, we made the Torsion Bar extra-wide for torque, extra-swept for comfort, and tough enough to never have to think about.
As unique as it was at the time, I don’t remember the Torsion Bar being super popular, but the people that liked it LOVED it. I loved that the mighty Nitto agreed to make it for us, and that any originals still out there are certainly holding up today.
Gearhead fun fact: It’s named for the clever twisty-spring that holds the front-end of a vintage MoPar up…
Reading all that almost made me feel like I’d traveled back to Minneapolis in 1998.
But strangely enough, it didn’t feel nostalgic. Because everything Wakeman described is still reflected in the philosophy of the SURLY crew I met during this trip.
They’ve been thinking this way since the very beginning.
Drawing inspiration from the way people actually ride and have fun in their hometown.
Taking a step back and looking at contemporary bicycle culture.
Mixing things together, breaking them apart, connecting ideas, and thinking them through until something new takes shape.
That’s what SURLY is all about.
By the way, I also heard that NITTO’s president actually visited Minneapolis when they were developing this handlebar.
He got to ride the 1×1.
Apparently, SURLY told him they were going to ride the hell out of these bars, so they wanted them chrome-plated and built as tough as possible.
A very SURLY kind of request.
I also heard that some bike shops were absolutely obsessed with the handlebar because its logo looked so unlike anything NITTO would normally put on a product.
All these stories really show that the Torsion Bar has had a strange, irresistible charm from the very beginning.
As always, this turned into a pretty long blog post.
But the important thing is that the Torsion Bar will be released alongside the Steamroller frameset.
If there’s one thing I want you to take away from today’s post, it’s simply this:
It’s freaking awesome that this handlebar is coming back.
The Torsion Bar will be available exclusively through Blue Lug.
For our friends overseas, you’ll be able to order through the Blue Lug online store.
Here’s the release schedule.
＝＝ SURLY × BLUE LUG torsion-bar bl20th ＝＝
TORSION BAR (Dull Plating / Black)
In-store release: November 2nd (Mon) 12PM
Online release: November 8th (Sun) at 7:00 PM JST
See you around!
