Ti Cycles can make a post of any setback you want using that excellent Thomson clamp. A few hundred dollars. Their posts are joys to own. I've got two because I had my two Ti Cycles frames built with steep seat tubes to get rear tire clearance with short chainstays and fenders. (I pull my weight forward when the going gets interesting. Bikes with long chainstays get bouncy and skiddy in back on mountain downhill corners where the ride is as interesting as it gets. My short chainstay bikes I absolutely love! Needing 60mm setback posts? $$$ yes. And the ride? Yes! Now if I were doing it again, I'd have the builder bend the seattube. Duh!)

Coincidently, I just got off the phone with Dave. I'm taking his frame building seminar in April. That custom bike will be a perfect fit. I asked him about bending one of his Ti seatposts and he doesn't have a die for his bending machine in 27.2mm. Would cost about $1K for him to make one.........

My approach to bike fit is to establish my "triangle" - BB, seat and handlebars, then rotate that triangle forward or back around the BB depending on how I plan to ride that bike. My cruiser-ish geared bikes get rotated back the farthest. (And may have CX-style interrupter brake levers on the bar tops.) My fix gears get rotated the farthest forward because I may be spending long stretches of road going upwind in that gear that is now too big. Getting really low is the only way to give my legs a break.

This approach means my KOP varies a lot. So does seat-bar drop. And seat setback. The faster bikes have me putting real weight on my hands. (And I lost the ability to ride hard enough for long periods years ago. Age does that. So using pedaling torque to relieve my hands is now a distant dream.) I take handlebar shape and position, brake hood shapes and positions very seriously. And I completely ignore what people might think of what I come up with.

I get to do the "triangle rotation" very easily because I have CAD skills and a CAD program. I have all my bikes, including a lot of my past bikes, drawn up. I can easily open up that drawing, pull up the bike I want to modify, draw the triangle, rotate it say a degree and see what that does to seat setback, stem requirements, etc. Fun!

To me, the goal is to find the "triangle". Different for all or us. I lucked out. (Or perhaps had a mechanic with good eyes.) The mechanic at the bike shop I worked at my racing days and one of the salesmen talked me into buying the last year's race bike in the basement. A high BB, steep, tight criterium bike. I was a long distance and major hill/mountain climber. That bike fit like a dream! The stem was too short and I compensated by slamming it. Worked. (I was 24 years old and strong, Riding all day with my weight on bent arms was something I could. Now I need my arms straighter or I simply wear out. I need longer stems than the old 130mm standard on most non-custom bikes. Those stems aren't slammed any more. I have a pile of old shorter stems with dents in their throats!

That's very cool and a great idea! The two skills I need to learn are CAD and welding. I don't really have the temperament for learning CAD (I need a step by step course for a CAD program on a Mac), but I am doing pretty well for a noob with welding. Not sure I'll ever get to the point where I'll be comfortable riding a bike I welded.......

If a rider needs a shorter top tube, then it will give it to them. There are lots of bikes out there with the rider's hands behind the steerer, they don't seem to be crashing because of it. Stem length doesn't play in handling, regardless of what people's intuition and the industry's marketing puffery tells them. Except the industry has recently gone through a phase of pushing zero length stems.

The rider triangle is a good way to think about fit, but if you rotate the triangle forward, the rider still has to hold their head and torso up. So depending why it's done, it may not increase comfort at all.

This discussion of bike fit is a good illustration that general guidelines can get overruled by individual needs. I had an older student who hangs our here too and his saddle angle would not work for 99% of us but was comfortable for him. In the past, most bike fit studies and subsequent recommendations have come from racers seeking greater performance. Eventually these recommendations get repeated and become more like rules that should be obeyed. But of course not everyone is seeking maximum speed when they are riding. Of the 3 variables that determine position, mechanical efficiency, aerodynamics and comfort (3 factors often in tension with each other), many of my students or custom frame customers prefer a greater emphasis on comfort. We get fatter and less flexible and ride slower anyway. Most commonly this results in a higher bar with less reach to the saddle. This more relaxed position also results in more saddle setback. This is more obvious when setting up a comfort position on a fitting bike.

Working against this comfort position is industry regulations. Lawyers of bike companies want toe clearance with 700C or on occasion 650B wheels. That almost automatically requires a seat tube angle/top tube length that is less than ideal for the shorter rider. This is where a custom frame can be a real advantage. Often on this and other bike forums used bikes are bought and a typical question is "how did it ride?" The problem is that that bicycle may handle right but not be comfortablfe for less than perfect bodies. There is no reason smaller wheels can't be chosen and a relaxed fit might not handle as well as an Italian race bike but will still handle well enough to be more comfortable on a longer ride. This can be a matter of smaller tweaks that actually result in a superior result. For example lowering the BB height, extending the head tube, sloping the top tube using lighter steel tubes. It all adds up.

It's interesting looking at the geo chart of the 1989 Cannondale catalog. Small sizes had short top tubes, 73 degree seat tubes, relaxed head tube angles and large fork rakes to normalize the handling by getting trail back to neutral. Why did that work? Metal forks.

Carbon forks have really screwed that paradigm up because they come out of molds with only 1 or 2 rakes. But Seven makes carbon forks with a range of rakes because of different dropout options, and Colin at Cronometro used that to design a small bike for a lady that had no toe overlap problem, an actually short top tube and great handling. I ride a 50cm, and the bike was way too short in reach for me. But I could still ride it and tell that it handled like any good racing bike should.

Steel bikes of great repute have used the same fork across the size range, so metal doesn't equate with best design. Sometimes it's about cost to manufacture. Which is also why small road bikes are made with wheels that are too large to accommodate the short reach that small riders often like (without toe overlap). Relaxing the head angle and increasing the rake is a classic method to reduce top tube length, just to the point before toe overlap. Many small riders feel that these designs tend to steer "chopper like" with a lot of flop.

Carbon forks can (and you say so) be made in a number of rakes for a given A-C but are not because of cost VS benefit. Steering response is not really a measurable dimension that can be marketed (as weight or stiffness is) but a vague description at best (much like describing color). IMO most buyers don't understand most of what we talk about here and instead are herded to a bike with all the buzz words, in a color they like and at a price they can pay. That the fork is carbon is the deal breaker and not which rake it has. Andy

I'm not anti carbon, just making the point that Cannondale used steel and aluminum forks with a different rake for every size to produce good handling and no downsides to having short top tubes. My personal 50cm had a 71.5 (70.5?) hta and did not feel chopper like.

One thing being short has afforded me is riding a lot of different solutions to the steering problem - moreso than what a 6 foot rider is going to be able to sample from production road bikes. And the overwhelming impression I've gotten after swapping forks with different rakes is that trail is the biggest handling predictor of all.

Many brands do get by with one rake, but frankly the industry does not care about what short riders think. They don't write bike reviews and struggle to fit anything, much less get to critique the bike's handling.

This thread is borne from a well known (to me) problem. It started with a custom stem that is well outside of 'normal' stem dimensions (thread elsewhere on this forum) and has progressed to doing unnatural things with the seatpost.

As many of us know, our bodies adapt to life, we become less flexible and weaker; we get injured, we age. At some point, we don't need adjustment, we need dramatic change. I think the OP is at that point. A gallant effort has been made to adapt the existing tandem frame to the riders needs but, a line has been crossed and it's not an adjustment that is needed, it's a new configuration.

PromptCritical It is time to pay our debts that we have incurred to this point and find (or order) a frame that fits our current needs.

I thought the weird stem was for a tandem?

A couple weeks ago, you mentioned in email you were going to send me an invoice. Please do.

This bike is not a tandem.

The stem Duane is referring to is a custom handlebar stem I asked him to make for our tandem.

This thread pertains to a seatpost for one of my Colnagos.

unterhausen From our discussions, my impression is there are a few bikes in the collection that need their fit adjusted or to be reconfigured.

Invoice has been sent. I think this thread is a good reference for why some won't take on non-standard projects like this. I love the fabrication part. The setting of expectations and outcomes and back and forth and changing of minds (both minds!) are the troubling part. I say that referring to both sides of the equation - I'm sure the delays were frustrating as well. I don't ever want an unhappy customer and with the online communications, sometimes intonation doesn't come across well. I only meant that it's time to resign ourselves to the fact that sometimes fit requires more than the adjustment a stem or seatpost can provide. I might have used the term "know when to fold 'em". PromptCritical has been great to work with and very patient. I'm not 100% happy with the solution (cold blued steel will rust eventually) but I hope he gets many miles of enjoyment out of his bikes and I'm jealous he gets to spend time learning about framebuilding from Dave.

Duane was great to work with and things didn't work out quite as planned but that's okay!! I would highly recommend him!

The stem will rust if not powder coated, but from my readings, it is something I can do in the kitchen oven while the better half is away for the weekend. (Oh, wait, I did that with a dishwasher once, and it didn't work out.....)