I wanted so bad to take my newly acquired bike for a ride. Unfortunately the front derailleur wouldn't work. So today I was messing around to see if I could adjust the bike to fit me and the bars slipped. This is why.....

300 people are now in their garages, checking over their 3TTT stems.

Oh wow man.
Emphasizes the 'full inspection' before riding a newly acquired bike. How guilty am I for not checking out a bike fully before riding? Only takes once, eh?

Wow !

What did It,metal fatigue , improper sized bars or bad design ?

You were must be living right, sloar.

Been down this road with a couple of different Cinellis as well.

Always, always, always check for these things when you buy any bike.

Heh Sloar, glad you're ok my friend.

Glad nothing happened dude! Very glad! Had a Tommasini with this issue...and the dude I bought it from was riding it that way!

Thanks, yeah it could've been ugly. I'm glad the derailleur didn't fit right.

Exactly!

I'm glad you had to mess around with it so you did find out what was going on.

Best!

Lesson learned fellas, checked those stems. I can't count how many times I've brought a bike home and immediately took off for a ride.

Me too. I once bought a used PH10LE and on the first ride, the drive side pedal spun off when I was about 7 miles from home.

Wow, could have been nasty for you and the bike.

And that is the redesigned part. Here's its predecessor:

VeloBase.com - Component: Modolo Equipe (two piece clamp)

Could we have another death stem on our hands? This happened about 5-6 years ago, on my newly acquired Tesch S-22. After seeing a second one do this, I will be wary of using a 3TTT stem again. I heard this one go. I was standing about ten feet away from the bike, and heard a loud metallic CLICK! I ordered a Nitto and didn't look back.,,,,BD

There but for the grace of God...

I had a 14cm TTT stem and handlebars that got swapped out from bike to bike for maybe 6-7 years...

counting my blessings right now.

Checking and double-checking.

I don't want to hurt the bike.

In a pre-release version of The Graduate, the original version of this interchange wound up being edited slightly:

The director, an avid cyclist, felt the original reference would have been too obscure for most viewers and changed it to the version we remember from the movie.

Urgh, that one has a high pucker factor, just looking at the pics, and knowing what could have happened. Best part is that you did catch it before it caught you, Sloar.

Smontanaro, perhaps the "Plastics" line, we saw in the release version, was foresight about the Carbon Fiber that now is everywhere, except the C&V world.

Bill

I dimly remember that Cinelli bars and stems used a larger diameter than, e.g., TTT, Fiamme, etc. Perhaps some of the cracked Cinelli stems had been used with an undersized bar at some point.

That might explain the cracks on these Modolo stems as well. Putting a 25.4 bar in a 26.0 stem would certainly require the user to crank down on the clamp bolt with less or no bar there to support the extra tension.

An Italian death stem! Gee and the way folklore goes around here and Sheldon Brown, you'd think only French stems cracked.

Extremely glad to hear you are fine Shawn.

Not me! Been there, done that.


[MENTION=139746]sloar[/MENTION], you should probably ask a moderator to change the title of this thread to include "3ttt quill stem" and perhaps "dangerous" or something. I just googled "3ttt quill stem" and though it came up with a lot of images of stems like these, none of them were broken. If we put the right words in the posts, and the title in particular, the images will show up on Google. And in this case, it's not our vanity; these things really are (potentially) dangerous.

Mine broke three or four years ago. I had recently put together a new bike. Most of my handlebar stash is 25.4 mm bars but I had bought a 26.0 handlebar specifically for this stem. Assembled it all, brifters in place, bars wrapped, adjusted brakes and gears, took it for a ten mile shakedown cruise. Put the bike in the shed. A few days later I took the bike out of the shed intending to go ride a century, and the handlebar was loose. I tightened it, but it wouldn't tighten. I looked closer and you know what I saw

My first thought was that this might be due to someone prying the stem open a bit too far when installing a new bar.

The alternate, where someone might initiate a small crack by using a bar that has a slightly small O.D., seems like a good candidate too.

I've got two bikes with 3TTT bars, but also have 3TTT stems. One of these sets was purchased new by me. The other is on a bike where it seems to be original equipment. Probably hasn't been man-handled in the past.

Has anyone closely inspected the broken stems? Is there a dark area of the crack and a light area, indicating that the crack took a long time to propagate? If not, there's likely no chance of catching it by visual inspection.

Steve

That's it. I'm never using a stem again. Too risky.

Wow, that's amazing and a good bit of sleuthing to find it. Whenever I'm riding a used bike, even if I've checked it over I always have in the back of my mind that there could be a crack or something somewhere that I don't know about. It's sort of scary.

Thank goodness you caught it! So, what ever happens to the derailleur? Get it sorted out?