Recycling
Last year when I needed to replace the (disintegrating after 2500 miles because I hadn’t applied any varnish or other sorts of preservatives) first batch of tape on the mclm, I bought some cork-alike tape from Rivendell, dropped it onto the bicycle, then twined and shellacked it into oblivion and left it there until I realized that the bars were bent and I had to replace them. And for some mysterious reason, I decided that carefully removing them and storing them away would be a good plan, so I did that.
Fast forward to this spring; after shuffling through a couple of other bar types (mustache bars were extremely comfortable, but didn’t give me a ramps position to put my hands and were thus quite exhausting once I got over about 30 miles on a loop, then origin-8 gary bars, which, annoyingly, are shaped so that if I leave the bars low enough so I can easily shuffle between the ramps and the drops I can’t actually get them comfortable in one or the other position, I reverted back to another set of Nitto B135s, but didn’t have any good handlebar tape to apply to them.
So I dug through my parts bin (a paper shopping bag that’s got all of my extra bicycle parts except for wheels) and dug this old tape out. Which was perfect; despite having many layers of shellac is was still flexable and it let me rewrap it without disintegrating on the spot, and even though it looked pretty grubby after rewrapping it cleaned up nicely with the application of a couple of new coats of shellac.
Hopefully it won’t outlive this set of handlebars!