High Mileage Heroes | Tom Law’s well-loved Chromag cockpit

Over the past seven years, I’ve bolted my beloved Chromag cockpit to numerous bikes and battered it up hill and down dale.

It sounds cringy, but I’ve also grown to treasure what it says about me as a person, rider and bike nerd.

The bar got scuffed up, I bought another one because the Orange details didn’t match my next bike and I even had another one on a hardtail. However, the same stem (minus the original bolts) is still going strong.

Other cockpits, such as OneUp’s excellent carbon bar and stem, are lighter, arguably better looking and possibly a better all-round setup, but I keep coming back to the Chromag.

Every time I wrap my hands around the bar, it feels like I’m shaking hands with an old friend.

Colour (and brand) coordinated

I have to be brutally honest, the main reason I ended up with this Ranger and Cutlass combo was the colour.

Back in 2016, I purchased a Whyte T130C RS through the shop I worked in at the time. It was only the second off-the-shelf bike I’d bought in over a decade.

Everything else (aside from the Mondraker Foxy that preceded it), I’d built from a bare frame.

I wasn’t getting on with the shape of the stock Whyte bar, so I threw on an Easton Havoc alloy bar I had lying around. Better, but not perfect.

At 750mm, I wanted to go a shade wider, but the shape was agreeable.

I came across a review of the Cutlass bar and saw it was available in a lovely bright orange to match the grey and orange of the T130.

The review in question also highlighted how flexible and comfortable the bar was.

I could have gone lighter, for sure, but colour coordination and comfort, in a rise and sweep I was comfortable with, was enough to sway me. Now I just needed a stem – and it had to match.

I am very much of the opinion that you must, at all costs, match the brand of your bar and stem. Similarly, I refuse to run different brands of tyre front and rear.

Heaven forbid running different suspension brands on the same bike.

Chromag’s Ranger stem was the obvious choice, but it came with a 'problem'. It’s a portly old thing.

Aesthetics > light weight

I am now the world’s worst weight weenie. And, it turns out, I love a good contradiction.

My trusty Chromag Ranger stem is not remotely light. It weighs close to 200g, which is pretty much double the weight of some mountain bike stems.

Usually, when I change a component on a bike, it’s to save weight, not add it. Swapping in the Ranger for the stock-weight stem added nearly 100g to my T130.

I saved some weight on the bar, but overall, the bike was heavier than when I started. So much for being a weight weenie.

However, it looked absolutely awesome on the front of the bike, and that was all I was bothered about.

When I sold the Whyte in 2020 to fund the purchase of a Transition Spur, I whacked on my trusty cockpit and got shredding.

But did the orange match well with the Spur’s luscious deep sea green paintwork? For a time, I thought it did.

I’d seen SRAM’s oil slick XX1 Eagle drivetrain and Ultimate brakes, but by the sheer chance of someone purchasing an oil-slick chain in the shop, I realised it might just look alright on the Spur.

But that would not remotely go with the orange on the bar. Handily, Chromag had revised the Cutlass and voila, there was a lovely all-black version, giving me a blank canvas to work with.

New bar purchased, I developed an oil-slick addiction that accelerated like a runaway train. Grips, chain, brakes, the lot.

It reached its peak point when I replaced the now very scuffed-up bolts in the Ranger stem with some oil-slick titanium ones from the folk at Better Bolts.

That obsession then extended to pretty much every bolt on the bike.

It is completely pointless saving a mere 4g on a near-200g stem. Sure, if you’re building one of the many super-light hill climb bikes we’ve featured over the years, go for it.

However, here, it's purely aesthetic, and I am not giving up my addiction any time soon.

The other purely aesthetic thing I love about this cockpit is Chromag’s snarling bear logo. It’s etched in various places on the stem and printed numerous times on the bar.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had a love of wildlife and woodland. The bear is the animal that exemplifies my love of the outdoors – brutish yet beautiful, serene but savage.

Thanks to this cockpit, I always have a bear in view to remind me why I love the outdoors.

Bulletproof, yet soft

Aesthetics aside, this cockpit has been a standout performer. It’s not light, or cheap, but my word is it strong. I have absolutely hammered it and it hasn’t flinched.

It’s been from one side of Scotland to the other and back again. It has covered thousands of miles and descended probably a million feet or more, but it's still going strong.

Not only has it stood the test of time, but few other combos have felt as comfortable yet reassuringly solid.

The bar has a wonderfully damped feel and while the stem is not the stiffest, together they go exactly where I point them.

Only OneUp’s cockpit has come close to offering the same level of comfort and precision.

So yes, this whole Chromag cockpit is one giant contradiction. It's heavy but trimmed down, brutally tough yet surprisingly soft and, in my eyes at least, a sight to behold and admire.

And that is why I’ll continue to use it for years to come.