Originally Posted by
bulgie
I blame Gitane. Even a stem lowered to hide the Min Insert line will still cause this damage if there are too many threads, like on this fork., It's criminal negligence IMHO. I'm not being hyperbolic, I mean literally criminal. A company should pay a heavy fine for letting this go out, it has caused a lot of pain and suffering over the years. Ensuring each fork has the right number of threads would have increased their costs by what, 50 centimes?
I'm still a fan of threaded steerers when they aren't done by morons, but given there are morons like Gitane in the world, I guess that means we can't have threaded steerers anymore.
The take-away is, you cannot know if your stem is inserted enough until you take the fork out of the frame and see where the streading stops. The Min Insert line, when present (older stems didn't have one) gives a false security if you blindly trust that your fork was not made by morons.
Mark B.
Yes, but without any measuring, it sure looks to me like a stem at the minimum insertion line would have its expander below the threads.
[MENTION=380471]FBOATSB[/MENTION] The former user used his bars and stem to lever the headset. I asked about the steerer threads in a former post. That (Stronglight looking) headset is a pretty solid unit when wrenched tight. If the locknot was forced and damaged the top of the steerer, some damage would also occur at the top of the headtube. Not as much. There would be less movement there, but the forces would be higher.
If this were my purchase, I'd assemble the bike with fork as is, do a ride and see if, headset and steering excluded, the bike was a keeper. If so, I'd take it to a framebuilder for a patch. Re-threading. General prettying. Then simply use stems with lots of quill inserted.