Originally Posted by
Peterpan1
All I know about stability and height is that I once read a learned article on it, and it was all counter intuitive...
"Looks to me like in a touring bike with long wheelbase for heel and toe clearance and for good front load handling, the low BB may be an attempt to restore some handling response, with these more-stable bikes."
Another thing about touting bikes is that often the style is for a high and sometimes level top tube. So particularly with 700c or bigger wheels and towering bags of gear, you can find yourself in an embarrassing dilemma when you choose to get off...
Drop is a more elegant way of describing the geometry of frames, but on bikes one has to take wheel, even tire, size heavily into account so the 80 mm of drop on a 700c turns out to be around 10.7" from the ground, and is nothing all that out of the current ordinary.
Yes, I should have been talking about BB height rather than drop, especially since the only way I know to measure drop is to derive it from measurements of the wheel radius and BB height.
You're right about SOH and tourers. I'm leaving that strictly up to the individual, as to how friendly they can stand to get with their frames. I like my fits French, but not too French.
But my main point was that a low BB in a touring bike can help restore the controllability to the bike that a sport bike might have. It won't be fully effective, you can't totally negate the effect of 50 added pounds of non-personal ballast.
Can you recall what that paper was?