Beringer Bars

Being a little taller than your average BMXer, I was getting fed up with my old bars which I felt were too low. There aren’t that many tall bars on the market but luckily for me, Mat Beringer is alive and well and designing nice bars.

Beringer Bars have an 8in rise with 10° of sweep and a width of 25in. At 1.9lbs, they’re also nice and light. I like to run my bars a little narrower, so I cut an inch off each end and they feel great. I’ve been running them for about a year now and after a few crashes and bike throwing rages they’re still straight as an arrow (an arrow that’s bent into a BMX handlebar shape).

The bars sport a dual radius design and are mandrel bent, which Mr Grant Smith will now explain:

‘Dual radius simply means 2 different radii: if you look at the bend on most handlebars, the radius is the same at the bottom bend (beside the stem) as it is at the top bend (beside the lever). If you want to have narrower bars at the bottom (to create more room for tricks such as turndowns) then you need to use a small radius bend. However, the small radius bend does not lend itself very well to mounting the brake lever especially if you have long grips. So what S&M have done is used 2 different radii.

‘What's so special about that?’ you may ask. Well, when bending the tubing they use a mandrel, which is basically a cylinder that they bend the tubing around to create a uniform bend. If you have to use two different mandrels this makes the bars more expensive to produce, because you have more cost associated with the tooling (mandrels) plus it will take longer to make them due to the tooling change part-way through the bending process. S&M have made something unique here and like most of their products they always have that little extra bit of thought put into them.’

Thank you Mr Smith.

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