Originally Posted by
79pmooney
I love the old quill stems because raising and lowering them is so easy. (Well greased and done often.) Also ride (roughly in descending order) the hoods, right behind the hoods, the tops and the curves….
…I plan to keep on doing this as long as I can; just raising the bars, maybe a new stem or three. Figure I can go to a full upright position when they figure out this wind thing but as long as I have to deal with it, I'll stick to drop bars.
It is easier to adapt a quill stem bike to a variety of stems and bars and change the bar height and reach. Perhaps almost to a fault, as I have tinkered a fair bit over the years trying different bars and stems.
With a Technomic stem, for example, there is about a four inch range of height adjustment available with a 6 mm hex wrench and all of five seconds.
Threadless fork road bikes tend to be more limited because they don’t usually make head tubes as tall as they might to compensate for modern, higher BBs.
The good news is that there are now a lot of new handlebar options that are still a drop bar but have considerable rise from the stem clamp (and typically a shallow drop), if you find you want higher bars.
Also, if you eventually decide you don’t really want or need drops, there are ways to set up touring bars that allow a good forward to back range of positions (more even than drop bars) so that you aren’t stuck in a full upright position all the time.
Otto