Wool Felt Grips

Sold per pair

100% wool with an adhesive backing

Water test video here. Follow up 60 seconds later here.

We still have some plastic-foamy grips, and we’ll sheepishly sell them until we’re out. If you want them on a bike build bad enough and we don’t have them, you can buy them from your LBS or Alibaba and send them to us to install on your bike.

Otherwise, come join Team Slightly Greener, and get felted wool grips. I’ve been riding them for more than a year on two bicycles, and they’ve become my favorite, but what would you expect? That doesn’t mean they’ll be yours, too. Most people associate the synthetic feel of synthetic, foamy material with slick, high-tech grip and cush and nev-R-wearing out. This last attribute is the problem. Even when you’re dead and your bike is in somebody else’s hands undergoing a grip-swap, those tech-grips won’t be re-used, and probably can’t be recycled, and that is a problem that we can address to our small-minded satisfaction and as a matter of self-respect. Riding a bicycle instead of driving a car counts for something, but not everything.

Besides, the wool grips feel better. You can pad them with Newbaum’s padded tape underneath, but it’s not necessary as long as your bars are reasonably high. You shouldn’t rely on cushy grips to protect your hands—that’s the job of higher handlebars.

On hot days when plastic grips can get clammy. Wool grips don’t. They never lose their grippiness, either; and they work well in a wider range of temperatures. On cold days, to quote my oldest daughter, it’s like a reversed mitten. In the rain, they don’t get as wet as you’d think. During a ride your hands cover them. Parked outside in the rain for a long time, sure they’ll get wet, but they won’t feel weird for it. They won’t feel like a wet sponge, not even close.

Options for you creatives (scroll thru the images to see a cork/wool combo)

Add rubber bands, the fattish flat ones, for extra grip or in case you don’t trust the stickum (don't want adhesive at all? Get the Wool Felt Coasters).

Twine, not for extra grip, but to add something interesting and also in case you don’t trust the stickum.

Wrap them over with cotton bar tape, twined or not, shellacked or not. This sadly neutralizes the wool, but gives you more cosmetic options.

If you have shellacked cork grips and you find them slippery, either put a whole square of felt over them or just cut about a 1- to 1 1/4-inch wide strip and lay it on top, then hold it there with rubber bands or twine or two zip ties or a couple of wraps of bar tape with a rubber band in the middle. Then you have cork-n-wool!

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Cut-to-size How-to:

The 4 x 5 gives you the option of 4-inch or 5-inch long grips, but you still have to cut the width proper for the diameter of your handlebar.

Don’t Trust Math; Trust String

The formula for circumference of a handlebar is Diameter x Pi (3.14)

Since the diameter of the grip area of a non-drop handlebar is 22.2mm (7/8-inch), the circumference should be 22.2mm x 3.14 = 68.82mm. You can wrap a string around the bar, then measure that to verify. But hold on—if you cut the wool square to that width, you’ll be a sad sack when you go to wrap it. That’s the voice of experience talking. For inexplicable reasons, the winning cut-width is about 83cm. That’s on a bare bar. If you add some diameter-increasing tape or anything else underneath, do the string-around rigmarole and cut to that width. A little short is no big deal. If it bugs you, you can cut a skinny strip from the leftover felt and plug the gap.

A Nitto DROP bar grip area is 23.8mm. The diameter is 23.8 x 3.14 = 74.72mm. But you’ll actually need 89mm to wrap around it. Again, nobody knows why. A 4-to-5-inch wide rectangle of wool fits nicely over a bar drop bar, say, on the flats. And you can lay down a strip on the inside of the curve all the way to the end. The counter-culture options abound, limited only by the size of your brain!