purge histories

With the acquisition of a cow-horn handlebar from The Bike Station yesterday (the journey to which was made only slightly somewhat stressful by the usual nerk in a Beemer along Gardiner's Crescent) I am ready to start testing my first major control-component-change ergonomic adjustment since fitting a stem raiser a few weeks after getting the bike. Whilst my current bike has seen numerous shuffling of brake and bar positions and many re-wrappings of the tape (to the extent where the replacement tape is being held on with insulation and duct tape) the handlebars from oldbike still bear the same tape which was wrapped around them in the shop, neatly covering the rear of the levers which have never ever been moved except to tweak them back into alignment whenever they were knocked slightly askew. I had been thinking of using one of them to test positions of levers on the cowhorns but it seems a shame to remove them when they can probably still be used as they are elsewhere, possibly after trying to find some replacement covers to replace the perished originals. I'll instead use currentbike' s STIs to test the horns (necessarily in semi-singlespeed mode, as I can't reach the thumbshifter unless resting on the hoods) and then source some new brake levers and bar-end shifters from somewhere else as I didn't like the look of what was available in the Bike Station's drop-bar brake lever drawer, though on the chainring board I managed to find something which ought to be able to replace my extrmely worn middle chainring, saving me from having to think about upgrading the chainset to something with more easily-sourced replacement chainrings for a while.