This could be yours

This stem, custom made in the early 1990s for a guy who is about 6-foot-14 1/2 inches tall, has been abandoned by its owner as part of a weird mutant bike built at the family compound on an old Sterling frame. He scraped off a bunch of the family's old junk on us, most of it early '80s road bikes with enormous frames.

They're a tall bunch.

The whole bike isn't worth much, but it has a couple of parts that could be useful for a home mechanic who wants some solid components from before The Great Cheapening. For instance, it has a forged crank, 74-110 BCD. Probably 175mm crank arms, so it's too long for me. And the derailleurs  are made of actual metal. It has top-mount, indexed thumb shifters with friction option. Early production mountain bikes were practical. They had indexing for convenience, but could be switched to friction if the indexing went out for any of a number of very possible reasons. The earliest models didn't even have indexing, because the first crack of dawn of the mountain bike era arrived just as index shifting was starting to make its way onto road bikes.

Plenty of room to mount your electronics on that long stem. Hell, sling a hammock.

They had this first-generation Rock Shox hanging around. A full inch and a half of travel! Ooooooh! Pump it up to about 12 psi. The first shock pumps used plastic syringes. The air valve was a rubber plug like you'd find on a basketball. And shock forks had to have a stop for the bridge wire of cantilever brakes. Check those crown bolts before every ride! You don't want the fork legs falling off, or the fork suddenly shortening so the tire hits the fork crown.

This bike has to handle very weirdly. That stem is totally crazy. I had a 150 on one bike, during the long stem era. Lots of mountain bikes had short top tubes, long stems, and narrow bars. Frame design evolved in the mid '90s, to longer top tubes and shorter stems. As evolution continued, stems got even shorter as bars got wider. I just packed a Karate Monkey for a guy who had sold it to someone on the west coast. Its handlebars are 31 inches wide. That's just ridiculous.

Too bad they're 31.8s. They would make a great combination with the crazy long stem.

Red, ready to rock

The red Rockhopper presented no obstacles during its renovation.

I replaced the original substandard rear brake with a salvaged set. Now the pads actually line up with the rim.

I already mentioned what a pleasure these shifters are. A progressive shifter is much more intuitive than one where the lever or levers return to the same position after every shift.

The suspension fork messes up the handling a bit. The original fork crown would have been down about where the brake arch sits on this Rockshox Indy. Riders learned to live with it until manufacturers made frames ready to receive longer forks. The longer forks themselves made mountain bikes feel less nimble even with an adjusted head angle. That became the new normal. With properly set up suspension a bike rides down in the travel more than it sits on top of a specific geometric relationship to the ground.

If this was my bike I would find a rigid fork to match the main frame.

Another period feature is that 135mm stem. It was the age of the long stem. Because I liked dinky little frames, my 15.5-inch Stumpjumper had a 150mm stem. When I shifted to a 16.5-inch Gary Fisher in the mid 1990s it had a longer top tube and shorter stem, reflecting the improved geometry that had evolved. Better it may be, but it took some getting used to.

When we sold this bike our shop supported pretty full representation of at least three bike lines. Not only were there a lot of customers during the boom, there were fewer categories of bike. We could create a lot of variations starting with the basic mountain bike platform. It was a lot easier back then to maintain stock levels and put together bikes modified to individual customer specifications. The categories were mountain, road, hybrid and kids.

There are pluses and minuses to anything. You can get a lot of cool stuff now that you couldn't get then, even to customize a rider's personal setup. The vast array of models within category put a huge strain on a small shop. A small shop has to narrow its options, sometimes painfully, to maintain a niche.

An immaculately tailored tissue paper suit.

Based on my observation of the mechanical work that comes out of a shop in our region renowned for its bike fitting expertise, I'm starting to believe that the fit guys are like the body shop guys whose cars look stupendous, but run like crap.

Proper fit is important. Whether it is really the millimetric science that some of its practitioners would have us believe is debatable, but I certainly respect the technicians who have invested in equipment and training to be able to set up an athlete on a bicycle with enough precision and confidence to put that worry out of the athlete's mind. Make room for other concerns, like nutrition, training schedule and whether to start doping.

The thing about fitters is that they seem to care only about the position of the rider on the bike, not about the function of the bike itself. For instance, when one of them reconfigured a Surly Pacer I had set up for a customer who wanted a bad-weather version of her triathlon bike, he put a very steep-rise, short stem on it when converting it to the drop-bar road riding position from the aero-bar position I had set up to duplicate her tri bike exactly. I had even used the cast-off bar and stem from her tri bike. I'd made a finely-calculated effort to replicate her riding position and she had been pleased with the result. But then when she wanted to change the bike over to a different use she decided to use some shop credit at Fits R Us. I'm all about saving a buck, but damn. Fits R Us put on a stem that wrecks the handling of the bike. When I test rode it recently after some adjustments it was horribly squirrelly. It may put my friend in the perfect biomechanical position on a trainer, but it really stinks when actually riding.

I haven't told my friend because she doesn't mind it. But if I had been doing the fit I would have used a fork with a longer steerer so I could put the bars higher without using either a steep-rise stem or one of those ugly bolted-on stem risers.

At least the handling of this bike proves my theory about the effect of stem angle on bike handling. The connection points of rider to bike are not just points in space. The shape of the linkages matters.

The problem may not be fitters in general, it may be Fits R Us in particular. I have worked on bikes fitted by other practitioners, but in many cases the riders fall into a size range that requires no radical component choices.

A fitter will adapt a rider's bike to the human form without questioning the materials used in its construction, just as a tailor could fit you to an immaculately fitted tissue paper suit. It would be an ephemeral piece of rubbish, but you would look great in it while it lasted. When it comes to stupid design elements like 4 mm shift housing and head-tube cable stops, the fitters have nothing to say about it. Brifters that choke on a broken shift cable are fine with them, too. They'll make sure that the hard, narrow seat with carbon shell, titanium rails and a covering of endangered condor hide ($589.95 and free freight) is at the perfect height and angle. The carbon-fiber bar and stem, the 17-speed electronic shift controls and hydraulic brake levers will sit in the exact position for ultimate performance.

When faced with anyone who has developed Position Neurosis I send them to a professional fitter. I just don't have the showmanship to sound thoroughly convincing to a rider who needs the perfect combination of medical science and psychobabble to be able to put their fear of bad bike fit behind them. I'm glad someone is willing to exploit this population for profit help these poor people. It saves me a lot of time.

Remember long stems?

Back in the early days of mountain biking, or perhaps the Middle Ages, as frame geometry tightened, but designers were still working out optimum proportions, many riders chose the smallest frame they could justify, and put on stems 130, 135, even 150 millimeters long.

The owner of this stem is at least 6'8". He had it on a Specialized. When that frame broke he transferred the parts to an old Sterling frame, including this 220 millimeter monster.

One cm over the line sweet Jesus, one cm over the line

Most beginning cyclists and recreational riders who don't even think of themselves as cyclists consider standover height to be the most critical dimension. Don't want to imperil the tender parts. And insecure cyclists want to be sure they can put the landing gear down instantly in an emergency.

More experienced cyclists, especially riding hard and racing, realize that the length of the bike from seat to handlebars is more critical than the height of the top tube above the ground.

Workable cockpit length can vary over about two centimeters. Because humans are made of squishy and elastic materials, they will fidget and shift anyway, making the idea of some millimetrically precise perfect length laughable. However, go one centimeter beyond the range either way and you'll suddenly feel all the distance from the middle of it. The bike won't just feel a hair short or long.

Bike fit is made up of numerous factors. Ideal fit will be different depending on the use of the bike. This is obvious to most experienced riders, but not to casual cyclists, even if they feel its effects. A good fitter will figure out how to set up a bike without requiring the rider to know much about it. The more serious a rider plans to be, the more the fitter will need them to participate. It's not an exact science, but it is a developed art.

I just put a shorter stem back on my fixed gear. The cockpit had felt a little short, but when I went the extra centimeter it felt way too long except when I rode with my hands on the bar tops. I kept it that way because I commute a long distance on open roads by myself, so I spend a lot of time on the center of the bar tops compared to more urban commuting with traffic.

Only having one brake, I don't have the extended riding position on top of the lever hoods, as I do on the 'cross bike and the road bike. With the long stem, the turn of the bars on the fixed gear fell close to the hood position on my freewheel bikes. But the long stem made the drops too far away. When I went down and forward I lost power because I got pulled too far forward of the cranks. My back hurt because I kept trying to grow an extra vertebra to make up the difference.

I could put an aero lever on for the one brake and a dummy hood on the other side, but I like the clean look without it. My brake lever is a vintage Campy Record with the cable coming out the top. It's attached to a drilled out "Weinmagnolo" my machinist friend doctored up for me in 1975. The stiff Campy lever gives the modest old Weinmann center-pull a little more authority than it got from the Weinmann lever I had on there originally.

We just need to get this snow out of here. I'll start riding anyway, but it seems more abusive when it looks like February.