Originally Posted by
TonyS
Ok, I'm going to sound stupid here... but my trek is a threaded headset, so I'm not real sure how the whole thing works...
The fork was shipped to me with the steering tube uncut. And unpainted. So it's a fugly aluminum oxide matte silver sorta thing.
And I don't know how the headset and steer tube go together on a threadless headset... am I going to have to have that steer tube painted to match, or... how does that all work?
The Steerer tube usually gets covered by the headset, cable stop, spacers, and stem. Instead of a large nut threaded on to the steerer tube, a threadless headset is held together by clamps on the stem (sometimes cable stop) and a star nut that is inserted into the top of the tube.
If you leave it uncut you can do some artistic things with different colored spacers. I left my first build uncut, as I like to have the bars higher.
I've seen some people who use the cable stop clamp to hold the headset tight and just leave the tube bare except for the stem clamp.
I like the spacers, though.