Brompton Grip Upgrade: Installing Ergon GS2 Grips for Long Rides
Gear · Published 7/27/2023 ·
The Brompton’s stock grips are pretty unremarkable — plain rubber. They fit the hand well enough, and for a typical ride of about an hour they’re honestly no problem at all. Past the one-hour mark, though, the heel of your palm starts to feel the fatigue, and once you’re over two hours the ache gets steadily worse and your wrists begin to bend backward. After three hours you find yourself constantly shifting your grip, but there’s only so much surface to hold onto, so the design just doesn’t allow for much variety in hand position.
If something doesn’t work for you, you change it…
So I bought a pair of Ergon GS2 grips, complete with German engineering.
Take a look at the shape… they’ve got a wide surface to support the palm, and on the right there’s a small “bunny ear” that handles the vertical hand position. You get at least three positions out of them: the normal grip where your palm wraps around, a position where you just rest your palm on top, and a vertical grip where you hold the right-side horn.
The shape is simple, but according to the manual there’s a lot of technology packed in there.
It’s all rubber. And rubber, in the end, hardens. Still, these look good for 2–3 years. Consider that the rubber bushings in a car’s suspension last about five years even while protected by oil and grease — these grips have no such protection, but they’re not a part that takes heavy vibration or impact, so getting three years out of them would be just fine.
The color is the usual black. You just remove the old grips, slide these on, and lock them down. They’re meant to be torqued to 5Nm, but I don’t have a torque wrench, so I’m just going to snug them up firmly enough and call it good.
This is the normal position. Most of the time I’ll start a ride in this posture.
Look at the right side — there’s a pretty generous surface to rest the palm on, which should help cut down on fatigue.
This is the vertical position. Turning the wrist from horizontal to vertical should help spread out the fatigue of holding any one posture too long.
Gripping it like you’re grabbing hold, that is…
Add the position in between horizontal and vertical, where you spread your palm out flat and drape it over the grip, and that makes three positions in all. Some folks even rest their forearms in that space and ride like they’re on a TT bike — but if you’re that fatigued, you really ought to take a quick break. Don’t ride dangerously, folks ^^
Way back when I first bought my Brompton, I just assumed you had to use the stock parts as they came. Kind of like that old saying in the car world — the ultimate tune is back to stock…
There’s a saying that the ultimate Brompton tune is the secondhand market. Maybe that’ll be me one day too…? But stock isn’t always the right answer. Sometimes parts do carry complex, decades-developed technology like in a car, but swapping in a higher-grade component genuinely improves the experience. And as it happens, these were the stock grips on the Brompton City version anyway.
I’m in the middle of tuning my Brompton for slow, long-distance riding. I’ll keep posting on similar topics.
Thanks for reading all the way through.
#ErgonGrips #BromptonGripSwap #BromptonTuning #ErgonGS2 #BoughtItMyself
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