Ramp Room Patriot Bars were a continuation of a design that had already been made by Hoffman bikes from their earlier SE made parts. The design stayed pretty much the same when compared to the SE version, the knurling was different in the grip area, the end caps were removed from the grip tubes in line with all the ramp room bars and the sticker changed, but otherwise they were very similar.
There are basically two different ways that we categorise Patriot Bars. It’s mostly based around the stickers, width and another odd small manufacturing… mark? I guess you could call it that. So with that in mind, i’m going to call these bars v1 and v2. If your bars have been stripped or had the original stickers removed, it can be a bit tricky to tell the two apart, but from the samples that i have seen, it is possible.
V1 AVAILABLE COLOURS: Chrome, black, blue. (there may be more, but these colours were definitely available.)
V1 STICKER COLOURS: There’s a bunch of different sticker colour variants that I know of. I’ll list them below. There may have been more of these as well!
– Red cross with yellow writing
– Brown cross with green writing
– Brown cross with yellow writing
– Purple cross with green writing.
V1 WIDTH: 69.85cm / 27.5″
V1 WEIGHT: 1.015kg / 2.237lb
V1 RELEASE DATE: Approx 3rd quarter 1994.
v2 AVAILABLE COLOURS: Chrome (there may be more, but I’ve only ever seen chrome)
V2 STICKER COLOURS: Blue, green, purple and red (there are 2 variants of the sticker in each colour)
V2 WIDTH: 70.485cm / 27.75″ (v2 are wider than v1)
V2 WEIGHT: 0.975kg / 2.149lb (v2 are 40g lighter than v1)
V2 RELEASE DATE: Approx Mid 1995.
IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT FAKES: There are fakes out there of these bars… VERY well made fakes, that were made to be exact replicas of the originals. I know of at least 2 different batches of fakes that have been made, both were very small runs, less than 10, but they do exist. Now, that in itself is not such a big deal, but seeing as people generally ask a fairly decent amount of money for these bars, it needs to be mentioned, because if you come across a set of these for sale, you want to make sure you are paying for a real set, rather than a remade set. I don’t have either run of remakes, so i can’t show and details for you. Just be aware of it.
Another note, Hoffman Bikes has also remade these handlebars and offers them for sale. The bars that Hoffman Bikes have remade were not identical. I don’t have a set of the new Hoffman Bikes bars here to compare to, but i think the top tube is thicker, the bends are also much more mellow and the overall geometry is different. The new Hoffman Bikes bars are made in the USA, and if you want to purchase those, you can click THIS LINK to go to the HB official page for those.