Originally Posted by
Ti473
I was looking in my small parts bin and noticed that a lot of headset top caps have that conical shape on the bottom side.
I find it kind of annoying as you have to leave extra gap between the top of the steerer and the last spacer, otherwise the cap ends up bottoming out on the steerer plug and doesn't actually put any preload on the headset. Sometimes that gap is as much as 5 mm, so you have to use a 10mm spacer (unless you have a 7.5 laying around) as your last spacer.
Can't they just make them flat?
Rant over
The taper on a stem cap shouldn’t even come close to causing the top cap to hitting the steer tube. The edges of the cap might come in contact with the steer tube but the taper isn’t the problem. The taper is actually a clever bit of engineering. It puts more meat at the center of the part so that the soft aluminum can stand up to the force put on it without having a bunch of extra metal you don’t need.
As for spacers, they come in tons of different sizes and are relatively cheap. Just get some extra thin ones to have on hand.