jeanluc

I bought a Ritchey Pro stem for my wife's bike so she doesn't lean that much forward (this was the topic of another thread on a different forum here). I got the Pro 60mm version simply because the non-Pro 60mm version was not available online where I checked and I wanted the shortest and highest model. The 30-degree model is also higher than the Specialized stem she had.

The unpleasant surprise was that the machining of the stem had a problem. As in picture below, the angled side on the black part was about 1.5mm higher on one end. This was enough so that faceplate's hole was not aligned with the hole in the stem's body and the screw only got half way in. In the picture is the stock image, I put an arrow to the area I'm talking about. The stock picture is perfect, of course :-) I filed the extra height away as I needed to have the new stem for this weekend for some long rides.

Also, talking about the stock picture, the two components (body and faceplate) are not that flushed either. I expected better quality given the price.

Ah, the final bummer: I wanted to use the faceplate from her Specialized stem which is a full plate, not just two arcs so there is more contact with the handlebar. Turns out the horizontal distance between faceplate holes on the Ritchey is about 26mm while on Specialized is 29mm. Sheesh, you'd expect for the same tube and handlebar diameters to have compatible faceplates as well. This is not a problem per se with either stem, just an unexpected finding.

I'm posting this in case it will be helpful to others.

Metzinger

It's hard to tell if you're joking here as you didn't use a 'wink' emoticon.
Why didn't you just return the stem? Do you plan to leave it installed in its modified state?

jeanluc

I wasn't joking. I got the stem from eBay and returning it would have been too much hassle. A little bit of work with a file and it's fixed.
And just to be clear, the incompatibility I talked about was between Ritchey's stem and the Specialized faceplate. That is not a product problem, just my naive expectation.

well biked

I've got a Ritchey Pro stem, I like it. I see tons of these Pro and Ritchey Comp stems,have never seen a problem with one of them (they're OEM on a lot of new bikes). Sounds like you just happened to have gotten a defective one, which can happen with anything. Any LBS can order that stem from any number of sources, and returning it as defective would have been no biggie. That's what you do with defective products, you return them. You bought yours on ebay, and say it's too much trouble to return it.

I think starting a thread about this is silly. But then again, there are a lot of silly threads that get started here, so I guess it shouldn't be surprising.

cyclist2000

Isn't this more an ebay problem? If is had been a LBS or online store it would be easier to exchange.