HOODS, EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
Although NOS hoods look good on a showbike, a regularly ridden bike needs usable hoods for comfort. When looks are secondary I like to squeeze the maximum miles out of the cracked ones. My solution: glue the hoods directly to the brake lever body with construction adhesive. I did this on my 1984 DeRosa, and it works like a voodoo charm!
HOODS, THE LONG TEDIOUS VERSION:
Ive had 2 kinds of problems with torn hoods.
One problem is when relatively new Campy shield-logo hoods crack at both sides of the lever-blade opening. The shield-logo hoods seem inherently easier to tear than the stretchier world-logo versions, but post-77 "short reach" Campy levers exacerbate the problem because the hood is essentially being pried open even when the lever is not actuated. (The pre-77 levers fit flush with the underside of the lever body when closed and present a more slender waist that puts less tension on the hood and the hand.)
Once torn, hand pressure on the hoods while riding tends to push them forward into the lever hinge, where they tear more. After enough tearing, the hoods tend to shinny up the lever body away from the handlebar connection the brake-lever equivalent of high-water pants.
I have had difficulty gluing such hoods back together with super glue (or anything else) because they are under tension, and the torn edges must be held together in good tear-alignment while the glue grabs or else they immediately split again. It seems futile to remove the hoods to effect the repair, because removal and replacement of hoods produces considerably more stress than anything else in a hoods life.
Another problem case is 10-year-old Modolo hoods that stretch and become loose in their old age. Then when I grip the levers while accelerating, the hoods shift back and forth over the brake levers, like big socks on small feet. At the lower inside corner where there is a gap between my thumb and fingers the hood is subject to maximum stretch and it tears there. Because theyre loose I have no trouble gluing these back together but since they dont fit snugly around the lever they soon tear again elsewhere.
In these cases I don't so much care about the tears themselves, but rather the fact that the hood doesn't sit properly on the lever, doesn't provide a reliable grip, and is no longer comfortable.
So my new solution is: rather than trying to repair the tears, I simply glue the torn hood directly to the lever body using an adhesive called Sikka-Flex.
Gluing the hoods directly to the lever body has some advantages. One is that it virtually elliminates what one might call the "hoop stress" in the hood. The hood has now become a coating on the lever which cannot tear all it can due is slowly abrade away. Another advantage is that the hood stays put no more riding up.
Sikka-Flex is available at ordinary hardware stores in the bin where you get the Silicone bathtub calk, and you need one of those $3 caulk guns to squirt it. But this stuff sticks to anything, and it comes in a grey color to match the lever bodies, or a sand color to kinda match the hoods. I went with the grey. I unscrew the lever body from the bar clamp, arrange the hood where I want it (I push it towards the base of the lever body so there will be decent handlebar-junction coverage) and then stick the adhesive in between the lever-body and hood with a small artists pallet knife. (Small knife, not small artist.) I let the adhesive dry overnight, then re-installed the levers.
The hoods are still torn, but you can't tell from 3 feet away because they sit on the lever body correctly.
I havent arrived at the end-of-life scenario for this protocol yet, its only been a year since my DeRosa got the treatment. Based on my experience with other adhesives I expect that it can be pealed relatively easily off of the metal lever body when the hoods are finally with the eternal. But I also suspect that those torn hoods may now last for the rest of my life.
Brad Stockwell
Palo Alto
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