Singlespeed & Fixed Gear - hand pain, ugly stem.

I went on a quick paced ride tonight, and found the great late night loop; no traffic, no lights.

The thing is, my hands were killing me. I have this problem intermittently, and I just moved my seat up like a half inch-ish about 5 days ago. so, I have this kalloy riser stem laying about. I put it on, hoping to move my bars up a little, now they're a little too high, and the damn stem won't go any lower. My hands don't hurt now, but my ass sure does. and the thing is ugly. not that I should care, but I do.

Alternately, I have a nitto technomic that I think that I can adjust to the right height, and put my moustache bars on my kalloy stem which would help with the moustache length-anyone who rides them know that they're so far away sometimes.

any thoughts on this stupid situation?

play with seat angle too.

You could get one of those Profile adapters that lets you use a threadless stem with a threaded fork. I have one, and it works pretty good. It looks OK. Not as nice as a traditional road threadless, but not nearly as ugly as riser mtb stem. What's cool is that you have a lot more options as far as length with threadless stems.

Your ass may hurt because you raised the saddle a bit too much. Hands may hurt because the nose is angled down too much. I've had my bars set up too low in the past and it only made my neck sore. The saddle angle is more likely to affect your hands than your saddle-to-bar drop. Just screw around with your saddle positioning.

you could try gloves if you dont wear them already

It sounds like a weight distribution issue if your ass hurt when it was too high, and hands hurt other times. Play with fore-aft too. Otherwise you could drop you saddle down a 1/4" and see if that helps. For glove, Louis Garneau ergo gloves are great.

Just to clarify, I raised my seat a few days ago, but kept my original stem. I think that it put me in a position where I was putting too much weight on my hands. I rode like this for a few days, but it didn't go away. In order to solve this, I put on the other stem, but now much more weight is on my seat.