Wildwood 

[QUOTE=big_heineken;10094464]I ride with a 60 mm stem on my 1994 Trek 1200. It came with a ridiculously long 120 mm stem. ... QUOTE]

All my bikes have a 12 or 13 cm stems and I don't think they are ridiculously long, although my bikes are larger than your Trek. I would hazard a guess that a very high percentage of road bikes are sold with stems varying from 10 - 12 cm.

big_heineken

I've started this discussion before:
https://www.bikeforums.net/showthread...per-long-stems

norwood

+1
I don't know how the theory of "short stem, twitchy steering" got started, but I've never found it to be true. My road bikes currently have stems of 100mm and 80mm ext. and handle very nice. I've had a stem as long as 130mm on my Bianchi however and found the steering to be horrible. Like steering with a long 2x4 or a backwards boat tiller. Twitchy has way more to do with geometry than stem length.

P.S. Good luck to the Longhorns Sat.

zzyzx_xyzzy

I believe that people have compared different length stems on the same bike and found that shorter stems feel twitchier. I think they are confusing the effect of a shorter stem which gets you to sit up higher, thus putting less weight on the bars, and thus having more propensity to pull back on them (which is less stable than pushing forward on the bars, as long as your handgrips are in front of the steer tube) with the effect of stem length itself. If they were to compare two different frames, one having longer stem AND a shorter top tube to match (so that riding position is the same) they would not find much difference.

For example, my "twitchiest" bike has a 140mm stem! That's because it's one of those old low end frames where they made every model with a 54cm top tube, and even with that stem it's not really enough reach.

That all means that people don't like to ride a setup that doesn't fit THEM with the right amount of reach for their body and they feel it reflected in the handling. So get the stem that makes YOU fit on the bike.

RFC

This is starting to look like a Bike Fit Anxiety Support Group, so I can't help myself. My apologies.

I ride bikes with stem lengths from 90 to 130 based on the size and configuration of the bike. I do not sense more or less twitchiness attributable to stem length. IMHO, what one might call twitchiness is more likely a result of headtube angle and/or tire width and pressure.

BTW, the 24" front wheel on my Schwinn Prologue TT is very twitchy.

Speed2XS

This was my thought. Hopefully it does the trick.