If you have never tried it Competitive Cyclist has a fit calculator. You fill in your measurements and it spits out frame sizes for you, three to be precise.

The Eddy fit
The French fit
The Competitive fit

Taken with a grain of salt it's fun to play around with, here is the link if you want to try it...

https://www.competitivecyclist.com/S...ulatorBike.jsp

That calculator works surprisingly well. At least it did for me. I tried it and it spat out nearly exactly what I've found works best for me over several decades of riding.

The big caveat is that choosing the preferred type of fit makes a huge difference, and it can't do that for you.

I agree, it gets you close.

I don't know about "hand trail" as you describe it. My experience concerns how much of one's arm mass, especially mass toward the hand end of the arm, is effectively in front of the steering axis. This a function of how far forward the hands and shoulders are.

Balance is maintained nominally by steering the bike to stay under you. If you start drifting to one side you intuitively steer to that side to pull the bike back underneath you. (It took Mark Twain some time to realize that if you started to fall one way you shouldn't steer to the other!) If you start leaning to the left you steer to the left. With a drop bar you move your hands left. This dynamic movement of mass to the left pushes your body to the right in the direction you need to move your center of mass to get it back over the bike. The more your hands are in front of the steering axis the more they must move to accomplish the same steering change.

When your hands or at least most of your arm's mass are behind the steering axis you effectively shove that mass away from the direction you are leaning. The dynamic effect pushes you further over to the side you don't want to go. Steering the bike still works to maintain balance but the dynamic effect of swinging your arms hurts rather than helps. And steering the bike doesn't correct the lean as fast. This is the effect I experience whenever I ride upright bars.

FWIW, my Masi is the smallest frame I own and has the longest stem and I believe the greatest saddle-to-bar drop too. It is incredibly easy to steer and wonderfully intuitive while cornering. I just think about a turn and the bike knows exactly how much I want and how to do it. Of course you could argue that some of this is due to the bike's geometry. Nevertheless, its dynamic response is as awesome as its more static behavior in a turn.


Thank you!