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.

V1 bars i’ve confirmed came in black, blue and chrome. There may have been other colours, but I can 100% confirm that Hoffman Bikes made all 3 of those colours at one stage, in the v1 bars.  The v1 bars also came with what collectors generally call the cross sticker. The cross sticker had a bunch of colour variations. It’s an easy way to date the v1 bars if they still have the original sticker on them, especially if you don’t have close up pics.

Chrome with purple/green sticker.
(the wide purple Hoffman sticker on the cross bar is not factory to the bars, it’s just on this set of bars)

Chrome with red+yellow sticker.

Black with brown+yellow sticker.

Black with brown+green sticker.

Here’s a picture of Mat riding a 94 Condor with a set of blue patriots They matched the frame colour. I’ve never seen a set of the blue bars surface, they were made though. There’s a picture from the ramp room itself where there is a whole row of blue patriot bars that have been made. There’s probably at least 40 bars in that pic. (i’ll find it and post it here sometime)

Some of these v1 bars come with small holes drilled in the ends of the grip tubes. From the samples that i’ve been able to confirm, all of the original chrome ones, have the holes, and all of the original black painted ones don’t. So it pretty much stands, that the holes would have been used to hold the bars whilst they were being chromed. This is why these holes aren’t on the black ones. Some bars have holes on both sides, some bars have a hold on only one side. Some pics of what i’m talking about below, just for future reference if you ever come across a set that has the holes. You can see in the picture, there is chrome missing where the hole is, this fits perfectly that that was something there holding the bars whilst they were being chromed.

Here’s another example of the hole on a chrome set which had the original stickers.

I’ll post up more pics of these bars in the gallery at the bottom of the page. But here’s a picture of the knurling on these, it’s also another difference between the v1 and v2 bars. It’s similar but there are differences, so use this pic for reference.

V2 bars i’ve only ever seen in chrome. I’m 99% sure they didn’t make then in any other colours. The main difference between V1 bars are as follows.

• V2 bars are around 1/4″ wider than V1
• The knurling on V2 bars is slightly different
• The stickers on V2 bars are completely different to V1 cross stickers
• V2 bars no longer have the little chroming holes on the ends of the grip tubes
• V2 bars are 40g lighter than V1 bars. This is comparing 2 examples that aren’t cut down width.

The V2 bars got a new sticker style, there were 4 colours, and 2 variants of the new sticker. The colours were purple, red, blue and green. The stickers are very similar for both variants, but they have different phrases on them. The two phrases are
– CHROME MOLLY MONSTERS OF ROCK
– FRIZZY POOFY HAIRED ANOREXIC HEAVY METAL SEX SYMBOLS
They made both variants in all 4 colours.

Chrome bars with the purple sticker.

Here’s the knurling on the V2 bars, when you compare it to the V1 bars, you can clearly see it’s a different style. This is consistent across all V2 bars I have seen.

Here’s some pictures of the sticker variants from V2 bars.

PURPLE

GREEN

RED

BLUE (same colour blue on both stickers, just different lighting in the pics)