Next Level: Folding Levers

Some inventions, tools, and techniques have advanced the sport of motocross significantly since their inception. The Racer X staff explains some of those advancements in this feature, “Next Level,” and this month, we’re taking a look at ARC Levers, the ingenious folding lever design that has not only changed the top-shelf lever market but has also made untimely broken levers a thing of the past.

We all know what it’s like to break a clutch or brake lever. Whether it’s a crash, or a simple mishap in unloading your machine, it’s just something that happens, and it if you don’t have a spare, you might as well load your bike back up make the lonely drive home while your friends are still moto’ing down. It’s especially disastrous if you break a lever mid-moto! But thanks to Bob Barnett, you never again have to deal with a $20 part making your $10K machine about as useful as a paperweight. Barnett, an accomplished machinist and inventor of ARC Levers, is the kind of guy who, if something he wants or needs doesn’t exist, he just creates it from a block of aluminum in his shop in Santa Ana, California. Decades ago, his chain kept coming off his mountain bike, so he built a better chain guide. When he needed a better fork, he simply invented one. His involvement in the mountain bike world eventually led to a relationship with John Tomac (yeah, that John Tomac), and he went on to work with a few pro women mountain bikers. Also being a big fan of moto, Barnett would take some of them riding.

“The girls had smaller fingers and they couldn’t reach the levers so I was always bending the lever out for me and in for them,” Barnett told us when we interviewed him for a magazine story several years ago. “After a while I said, ‘I’m a machinist, I’ll just make something that’s adjustable.’”

In the process of creating that product, the idea of a folding lever that pivots backward in the event of a crash, instead of breaking, dawned on Barnett, and the folding, “unbreakable,” lever was born.