See this @russ, this is why you put your bars forward if there’s too much weight on your hands.
Yeah fuckin ban. Christ.
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Do you have a blog post link or MS paint sketch for this? I don’t quite understand but want to know more.
I’m not Fred, but here are a couple of paper constructions I made up to show that reach isn’t enough.
(I cut a piece of cardboard showing a hypothetical hip angle, then placed it on top of a couple of printouts of machines with the same stack & reach, but different STAs)
73.5° fits just right:
But 71° pulls my hands up and back from the handlebar nub:
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Your arms don’t come out of your hips like in your compass example though!
Try standing upright facing a wall with your fingertips barely touching. If you bend at the waist your shoulders drop increasing your reach, and the more you stick your butt out the more your arms must bend. By the time I’m in a tuck I can comfortably rest my elbows on the wall.
Backing up further: everything about the two frames is positioned identically except for the clocking of the seattube, wheels in the same place — so why would you keep the same seatpost clamp configuration? like just put your butt where it wants to go?
the STA is a problem if you run out of adjustment room, but “too slack” usually just means using a lighter/stronger/cheaper zero-offset post
Your arms don’t come out of your hips like in your compass example though!
Yes, that’s correct. But if my hands are going to settle in the same place compared to the rest of my body this is a useful measuring shortcut. If you want, you can sketch out a stick-figure body extending at a less insane angle from the hips and then draw arms extending down to the handlebar nub, but the end result is the same.
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Holding hip angle constant while varying setback doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t happen unless you are going from road to TT bike and have elbow rests to dump the excess weight on.
Try the other wall exercise – plant your heels against the wall and see how far forward you can reach, with your butt against the wall Then try with your heels 2 inches away from the wall, then 4, and so on. You’ll find that hip angle naturally decreases and the back naturally flattens with more setback, while reach is constant or even increases. Or in other words, you need to place your butt right to get to the right hip angle.
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There’s a RANS crankforward bicycle or two that might want a word or two with you about your fitting advice.
or a giant spoony chair to press the pedaling reaction force into.
Have any west coasters run into this guy in the wild yet? He moved uh out there about a year ago. In spite of the klampers, he and his partner are A+ premium folks who you should all be friends with.
Take it from me, scott dourque
get Micah b to join nü tarck?
Ok. Where’d that photo come from? Ain’t from his insta, or is it?
I stand corrected
You can use hip angle to determine reach, but not in isolation. Weight on the pedals will determine how you rotate your body over the BB maintaining the same hip angle. If you rotate too far forward you have more weight on the pedals and have to pedal harder to keep the weight off your hands. This is why pros can get away with the current trend of more forward saddles and super low front ends. They are putting out lots of power so they don’t have much weight to hold up on their hands (plus they are usually super skinny)
If you rotate everything back behind the BB you can keep the same hip angle, but you end up with a position that that makes it harder to dig in on hard efforts. In order to get more weight on the pedals for power you end up closing that hip angle. Touring setups are typically rotated back, but efforts are longer and typically not in the upper range of your abilities (threshold and above) so that’s fine.
Sweet Volvo
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hard nope from me on this one. the affectation / utility balance is so wildly off. I mean tell me about how the bike wound up looking like that because the owner circled the globe with it a few times and I’ll cheerfully agree that it’s badass.
As is, though, I’ll be a shiny new nickel that it’s owned by a 35 year old software developer who overcurated it into ridiculousness while riding it… not enough to make it look like that.
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So which is worse, retro-shift or stem shifters?
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