Shellacked!

I didn't like the color of my bar tape. I thought it would be closer to Ramby's color, but it was just far enough off it really didn't match well. Unfortunately, my LBS didn't have any natural cork tape on hand, only the blue color. My Quickbeam has natural cork tape shellacked amber, matching the Brooks B-17 Honey Champion saddle almost perfectly.

So what the heck. Let's shellac the blue tape and see what happens. Start with some Zinnser Bulls Eye Amber shellac, using a disposable foam brush for minimal cleanup. You can see the small sample of bar tape I used as a test. It looked fine, but I really wouldn't know the results until I saw it on the bike.

I started to apply the shellac to the twine and tape on one side...see the difference? I think it looks much better.

After applying shellac to both sides, the bars look like this:

After the shellac dried, the bars took on kind of a greenish antique patina. I'm thinking they would really match the dark green B-17 saddle well...not that I'm going to run out and buy one but that's just an observation. It would certainly be much cheaper to find and buy some natural cork if I wanted to match my saddle perfectly, but this looks just fine to me and is a unique look amongst all my other bikes. So I'll go with it for a while.

More pics on the way...

-Dwight