Originally Posted by
Chr0m0ly
I believe I’m between sizes on the 80’s Trek line up.
I’m 5’10” with an 88.25cm sit bone hight. The 22.5” Treks have me showing quite a bit of seat post, and I’d like the bars a touch higher than they’ll go on a standard (stock) stem.
The saddle to bar reach is very good though, and for faster riding it all works out.
The next size up is a jump the 24” size. This puts the bars nice and high, and gives me the classic “fist full of seatpost” showing, but the bars on the stock stem are too far away. My hands are to far out to allow me to hold my body up.
So so my question is, is it more desirable to have a taller technomic type stem on a slightly smallish bike, or a shorter reach stem on a larger bike?
I have found myself going to the latter method of short stem on a big frame.
Here are a couple of examples of the extremes I've gone to in order to make things work.
First is a 58cm Passage that I needed a 80mm Technomic for in order to get the bars up high enough. If I remember correctly all Passages have 57cm top tubes. One day I suddenly realized that this looked really strange, and in figuring out why it looked so bizarre I eventually came to the conclusion that I should be riding 62-64cm frames. The stem extension definitely shouldn't be longer than the headtube!
And now at the other end of the spectrum, is a 60cm Velo Orange Polyvalent with a 61cm top tube and 50mm stem. It still looks a little silly, but I don't think it's nearly as bad as the Passage:
