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- Price: $29.99, £24.99, €31.99
- Sizes: 30-32mm ‘Thin’, 32-34mm ‘Thick’
- Grip options: Knurled or Mushroom
- Weight: 100-126g per pair
Owned by downhill legend Steve Peat, Peaty’s Products has an excellent mountain bike equipment range, which includes its Monarch grips. The two grip designs share smart details, come in two sizes, and a bunch of colors. They’re packaged to be as planet-friendly as possible too, and are some of the best MTB grips I’ve ever tested.
Design and build
The Monarch grips come in two designs, knurled file pattern or mushroom ribbed. That only applies to the topside though as the underside of both grips has a siped bar design for finger grip and then a chevron ribbed thumb panel on the inboard section. There’s a half flange on the inboard edge, a bulged outside edge and the grips taper slightly from inside to outside.
They’re molded onto an 80 percent recycled ocean plastic core that taps securely onto the bar, locking in place with 3mm stainless steel bolted lock-rings with a slim rounded profile. The 20a durometer grip rubber is also molded onto the core asymmetrically so that it’s thicker on the rider-facing side.
Both grip designs are available in ‘Thin’ (30-32mm) or ‘Thick’ (32-34mm) and black, red, mango, turquoise and slate grey colour options. You can accessorize them with coloured lock rings anodized in black, bourbon, emerald, gold, mango, navy, punch, red, silver, slate, turquoise and violet.
Peaty’s also uses recycled and recyclable cardboard packaging (including the grip plugs which are normally plastic) with wire and paper ties on the lock ring cards rather than zip-ties.
Performance
Grips are very much a personal thing but Peaty’s consulted over a 1,000 riders (including me) about their preferred designs before testing the most popular options. They then built their own 3D printing and molding setup to prototype various designs before settling on the final two designs.
Unsurprisingly, they feel like a ‘best of’ compilation of popular designs such as DMR’s…
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