The Story Behind the S2 Grip

We’ve made grips for a long time, our File push on grip has been a stalwart in our product line up for over 15 years. We also updated our old File lock on grip to the Single File grip, with a 30mm diameter and single clamp design.

The S2 grip comes in as part of our next generation S2 (Series 2) product line up and we wanna shout about it! We spent 2 years designing and perfecting it for your hands, from ours.

We started with a flat two dimensional drawing of the design on a scrap of paper after a ride led to us wanting features we couldn’t get elsewhere. Hours, days, months and years were poured into the design and ergonomics of the design, feel and comfort of the S2 grip. A large comfortable diamond knurling sits in the palm of your hand, and smaller sharper knurling that sits under your fingers on the underside.

We decided at the very beginning that having long ribs for your fingers underneath made a huge difference to all weather performance and these were the starting point of the design. Another key feature we felt we had to have were ribs on the outside/top to help you identify the end of your bar when riding and also to keep your hands in place over rough ground.

One of the guys here has what we can only describe as an ‘abrasive thumb’ and tends to wear his grips out (and skin) where the thumb sits against the bar. So we added a horizontal waffle style pattern underneath, parallel to the bars just for thumbs to give extra material for comfort and grip when pulling back.

Whilst using the same tapered core for secure fit and same alloy clamp as the Single File grip, we put the core eccentric in our design to increase padding under your palm, and decrease grip squirm under your fingers.

Sadly we lost the scrap of paper we used for the initial sketch, but after some time arguing over features, we worked the design into Solidworks as you can see here. The design is then wrapped around a cylinder to make a grip, there’s a lot more to it than that, but we’ll cut out the waffle (pun intended); it’s complicated.

After we were truly happy with the two dimensional drawing, we had some 3D prints made.

This 3d print allowed us to analyse the design in hand and change the orientation of the waffle to have a great impact on performance and increase grip.

After lots of tweaking to the design, we signed it off for production and we’re super stoked with the final result as we’re sure you will be too!