I'm sure it drives manufacturers nuts when I use their products in ways different than their designers had in mind. But it could be worse. At least in the case of the $1200 Blackwell Concord I didn't take pieces of this bar and marry it to sub-assemblies of bars made by two or three other companies to create my idea of the perfect synthesis.

No, I did not do that. Well, not exactly. I took nothing off the Blackwell Concord. But I did add something... small... which I'll describe later on.

This is the aerobar John Cobb designed entirely. In his previous interation, the HED 1-piece, Cobb was a co-designer. The Concord is what happens when Cobb builds something without any concern or input coming from the brand's owner.

The result is a product that both benefits and suffers from having a design team of one. But let's talk about the bar's elements before tackling its functionality.

Cobb commits the Concord to his recurring theme of two thinner structures through which air passes. Both the R900 fork and the Blackwell Time Bandit fork share this feature. These are all design progeny of what we'll call Cobb's split personality.

The other design element Cobb likes is length. Surface area. You see this in the Giro helmets he designed for Lance Armstrong back in his earlier Tour winning days; the Time Bandit fork which thumbs its nose at UCI's rules and has a trailing edge from here to Sunday; and look at the length of the platform on this Blackwell bar (under which Bobby is napping).

I have little doubt that if you just take this aerobar, stick it into the wind tunnel, and blow air past it, this Concord will generate drag in the ballpark with anything else. What other outcome would you expect from a Cobb product? But there's more to this bar, according to Cobb, and we must digress to analyze his theory.

Specifically, let's examine the motives underlying Cobb's split personality, and then we'll understand a little about this and other of Cobb's split- or cloven-element designs. The forks, though bearing a resemblance to the aerobars, have only this resemblence, not function, in common with them. The idea behind the twin fork blades per side is for the gap to vent air away from the wheel. In the case of the Concord, it's to make the bar exceptionally stiff while still preserving a small frontal profile. And stiff it certainly is.

The aerodynamic idea behind the bar is less provable by a rider or, like me, a workshop tinkerer. Cobb's thinking is also difficult to intuit. According to Cobb the bar is not more aerodynamic than certain others, but the air is flows around the rider better with this bar in front him. This is one of those occasions where you buy your wind tunnel time and prove it to yourself, or you take the word of the designer, who's certainly logged more time in the tunnel than anybody else in the bike biz.

But for Cobb's bar to work correctly, according to him, the orientation of the bar must be flat, or within 10 degrees of flat in either direction.

But I found two issues with a horizontal orientation. The first concerns the contact point with the extensions. Look, I can see clearly why the extensions are made the way they are. They're wind cheaters. There is no upturn at the end, and if there was an upturn it would not only block wind, it would angle the lever's blade downward, creating more drag. At the same time, a guy has to brace himself against something when braking, doesn't he? Especially if he's pitched over the front of the bike as a result of riding steep, like I am, right?

So I pitch the bars up a bit, taking care to keep them as level as I can in order to get the aero advantage. But tilting it upward creates a second problem for me. See, I like to brace myself against the pursuit bar when braking. But I like to point my forearms flat when I'm riding. Fortunately, the Concord uses Blackwell's Wrist Relief bend, clearly the best extension bend in the market today. It allows me to adopt this flat forearm position, but... wait. Since I've angled the bar up, the armrests are angled up in the same manner. I'm riding with flat forearms, so I need to flatten out the armrests -- they need to be planar, parallel to the ground.

This is where I had to be a bit creative. There is a front and rear bolt that attaches the armrest to the platform, and I had to dig into my cache of hardware and come up with some shims, and longer bolts, to flatten out the armrest. This I successfully did. You can see, if you look at them, that the rear of the armrests are elevated.

So, to recap, I had the Concord slightly pitched up. I then pitched up the rear of the armrests to match (using parts made by other aerobar companies), granting them an orientation parallel to the ground. Everything was groovy. The Concord was quite comfortable, quite ergonomic, nothing to complain about. All my contacts points were acceptable for aero riding, descending, cornering, the lot.

But I did have this one additional issue pop up. This upturning and shimming, whatnot, elevated the armrests a couple of centimeters over their original height which, itself, was not entirely low profile. See, with the HED or Bontrager bars, or Visiontech's bars, you don't have a structure that looks like a biplane -- these designers didn't share Cobb's split personality. You have one "wing" and it's quite low in elevation -- precisely the height of the stem clamp -- and the armrest sits right on it. The Concord has a little bit of extra elevation to the armrests, and this is before I started shimming anything.

The result is, I can't ride this bar on any bike where I've got a problem getting my aerobar low enough. In my garage right now are a QR Tequilo, an Elite Carbon Razor, a Scott Plasma Team, and a QR Tiphoon. Those are the tri bikes in my size. The Tiphoon is a 61cm, with a tall head tube, and the Plasmas are made with tall head tubes. I cannot ride the Blackwell Concord on those bikes. No stem drop known to man will get me there. The 59cm Tequilo, and the Elite Razor, no problem. My point? This might be a challenging bar for those who already have a hard time getting low enough on their tri bikes.

It should be noted that this bar is true to one theme I find comforting, that extensions, brake levers, stems, are portable. You can use whatever you want. Blackwell's levers and extensions are industry-standard 19mm and 22mm respectively, so sub-in alternates if you so choose. But no one would, since Blackwellss brake levers are just fine, and you don't put other extensions on Blackwell bars, you put Blackwell's extensions on other bars.

The Blackwell Concord is like an aero helmet. It's very aero, but only if you ride it as it's designed to be ridden. You've got to decide whether you're prepared to ride these bars oriented flat, even if that means a less than ideal contact point for braking.

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