Tech Tuesday: How to Set Up Your Mountain Bike's Cockpit
When does your new bike really become your bike? Is it the moment you buy it? The moment you get it dirty? The moment it gets its first scratch? Nope. It’s the moment that you’ve finally dialed each of its adjustable touchpoints (handlebars, brake levers, shifters and saddle) to feel like home.
We’re not going to launch into a fit tutorial here. Frame size, seat height, saddle width and even bar width are often based primarily on your personal measurements. We’re talking about dimensions that are based more on preference. For the most part, there are no wrong answers here, and that’s why it’s so frequently overlooked.
Off the shelf, hopefully your new bike will be set up with its touchpoints in completely reasonable positions. If they feel strange, it’s common to think that’s simply because it’s a new bike. But that’s not necessarily true. With some deliberate trial and error, and some knowledge of the pros and cons of each approach, you can find your happy place.
Handlebar backsweep and upsweep
This is a good place to start because your lever and shifter adjustments will depend on getting this right. Bars have four main dimensions. Height and width, which are simple enough, but also upsweep and backsweep. There are bars with more or less sweep, which is a matter of preference. Bars with more sweep tend to be more comfortable but not as well suited for aggressive riding. Most traditional bars have about five degrees of upsweep and about eight degrees of backsweep.
But you are able to shift the balance between the two slightly by rocking the bars forward and back. These are measured from the bar’s neutral position, which you can derive from the marks that are hopefully present (and visible) where the bar is clamped into the stem. To find the starting point, keep in mind these marks are meant to relate to the ground, not the stem because the stem is angled in line with the fork. This is an often overlooked adjustment because it can be hard to detect a bar that is rocked too far forward or back.
Looking lengthwise along the bar is a good way to get an exaggerated view of its sweep. Angled too far back, it will lead to poor weight distribution across the palms. Angled too far forward and it will cause wrist pain. Finding your sweet spot may be as simple as some trial and error. If the difference between right and wrong is subtle to the eye, it will not be subtle to the touch. Starting from the bar’s neutral position, try slight adjustments forward and backward. No particular style of riding is better suited for either. When it feels right, it will feel right.
Hand position
Now that disc brakes have evolved to be powerful enough to stop by using only our index fingers, brake levers have gotten shorter. For the most part, they are shaped to optimize one-finger braking, with room for two if the need arises. But that means there’s a narrow window for how inboard or outboard they ought to be in relation to our hands. We’re doing this immediately after bar position because, to contradict what I said about “no wrong answer,” it is not optimal to need to stretch your finger in to reach the lever, or for it to crowd the rest of your fingers when you brake.
Where this does become a matter of preference is where you want your hand to be on your grip. Some people like to have a few millimeters of grip outside of their palm. This maximizes the real estate of grip that you’re holding onto, and nestles your palm into a hammock in grips that taper out slightly at the tips. The other option, pictured above, is actually hanging your palm a few millimeters outside of your grip. This requires a uniformly shaped grip, but some riders claim it offers a more intimate relationship with the side-to-side forces between hand and bar. It also allows you to widen your stance without lengthening the bar. Whichever hand position feels more natural will determine where, side to side, your brake lever should sit.
Shifter and dropper lever position
With your hand and brake lever’s lateral location settled, a similar question is to be answered for the shifter and dropper lever. In some cases, they are bolted independently to the bar, and this process is relatively simple. Other times, they are each bolted to the brake lever, but can be adjusted independently, both in their angle and how far inboard or outboard they are. Exactly how this is done differs between brands. Sometimes there are individual threaded holes to relocate the shifter (SRAM) or it can be slid in small increments (Shimano).
There is a good chance that your bike’s initial setup will crowd your hand with the thumb lever. Just know that your knuckle should not be rubbing your shifter when your thumb is wrapped under the bar. Don’t necessarily assume that the thumb lever needs to rest 100% under your thumb. For some riders, it is preferred to slide the shifter or dropper lever inboard slightly to offer more clearance to get your thumb to and from the lever. If you don’t feel there’s a direct, unobstructed line to get quickly on it, then try sliding it a few millimeters from your hand.
The angle of the shifter relates to this as well. It also is independently adjustable of brake lever angle. Similar to the above options, tilting it down and away will give you quicker access but a less solid connection once you get there, and tilting it up towards you will give you more positive contact, but it’ll be harder to get there.
Brake lever angle
There are two competing schools of thought here. One is that the brake levers should be angled to rest just under your extended index fingers while you are standing up in the pedals and your arms, with elbows out, are making an otherwise straight line from your shoulders to your grips. This feels natural for most riders, and will result in your brake levers pointing down somewhere around 45 degrees or, for taller riders, even lower.
But the other school of thought teaches that our elbows should not just be bent, but dropped slightly. Part of this is, when abiding by the best-practices of keeping weight on the front wheel for better traction, allows you to lean forward without extreme lateral bend on your wrists. Also, especially on steep trails, it transfers the load from your thumbs to the palms of your hands. Both of these combine to lessen “arm-pump” (the painful forearm fatigue of long rough descents) but also to keep you more securely attached to your bars in an unexpected impact while descending. The answer for you is likely somewhere in between. Experiment with lower levers and a more relaxed riding position, and with higher levers and a more aggressive position, and try and combine both with a wide variety of trails to find what is right for you.
Brake lever reach
“Reach” is how far out your lever is from your bar when it is at rest. That’s different from what some call “free stroke,” which is how far from that point you have to pull it before the pads hit the rotor. Adjusting deadstroke is a whole other story. Some brakes, like top-level SRAM options, have a way to adjust this. Most do not, and if it feels too far, you may need pads, a bleed, or both. But if it feels just right, there still may be work to be done.
What matters most here is where the lever ends up when the pads bite. The ideal position is largely based on your hand size, but it is worth experimenting with. You just want to stay within an optimal range. Too close to the bar, the lever might bottom out on the grip. Even if isn’t happening in the parking lot, it may happen on the mountain. But too far from the bar, and you don’t hit the optimal powerband in your finger. If it’s extended too far, you are literally using fewer of your forearm muscles to pull it. As it gets further in, you activate more muscles and it takes less effort to get more force, to a certain extent.
Where the personal preference enters into it is where you want that power to peak. If you find yourself doing a lot of forceful braking, you’ll be flexing the levers further and further in, and for that peak mechanical advantage to meet peek bio-mechanical advantage, the reach will need to be further out. But if you don’t often find yourself at the edge of your brakes’ capability, a little shorter reach will allow you to have better wrap between finger and grip.
Stem height
Different sizes of bikes will have different-length head tubes (the frame tube that the fork passes through). And different types of bikes will have different stack heights (the net vertical difference between the center of your cranks and the top of your head tube). Longer-travel bikes tend to have higher stack and shorter-travel bikes have lower stack. Assuming that you are on the right size and right travel of bike for your body and your trails, there still are choices to be made. Adjustments are done by swapping spacers back and forth between above and below the stem. This requires the knowledge of how to adjust a threadless headset. And ideally, it requires various sizes of spacers. Some bikes will come out of the box with only 10mm spacers, but 10mm is often too big of a change. When experimenting with bar height, make sure there are one or two 5mm spacers in there.
This is one of the more intuitive adjustments you’ll have to make. If, on the descents, you find yourself with too much weight over the front end, you may need to raise your bars. If you feel like you’re not getting power to the pedals on the climbs, you may need to lower them. But a factor here, as mentioned above in brake-lever angle, is where you position your body over the front wheel. How far you are leaning over the front wheel should be based on choice, not where you’ve set your bars. Before you drop your bars, try leaning over more in sections that are not too steep. It may be worth the compromise on the climbs.
Saddle position
We’re finally done with the front half of the cockpit. Thankfully, this part should be quicker. Our saddle clamps offer the ability to slide our bodies forward or backward in relation to the rest of the bike. Most saddles have markings on their rails which will indicate the neutral position, which is always a good place to start. While finding your optimal setting, an important metric is your bike’s effective seat tube angle. That dimension is technically what you are adjusting when moving your saddle. Seat tube angles have been trending steeper lately because it puts your body weight further over the pedals, giving you a greater mechanical advantage when climbing. And on full-suspension bikes (more severely so on longer-travel bikes), it lessens the force your body weight has on the rear shock.
Lately, seat tube angles have been getting steeper. A couple years ago, 72 degrees was acceptable. Today, there are bikes with 79-degree seat tube angles. If that doesn’t sound like much, consider that, at an average saddle height, a change of two degrees will move the saddle position by over an inch, which is more adjustment than we have to work with here. So, knowing that we’ll only be able to change your effective seat tube angle by about a degree and a half, consider what your topography is like.
If you spend the overwhelming majority of your in-saddle time climbing, and if you have a full-suspension bike, you will have an easier time on those climbs with your saddle nudged forward. Just know that you may need to raise your seatpost by a fraction of the distance you have just slid it forward to keep the distance to the pedals optimal. If you are on undulating or flatter terrain, you may be better off in the saddle’s neutral position. If you find yourself wanting the saddle to be further rearward than the neutral position, there is a chance you are on too small of a bike.
Before you get too comfortable with your saddle slid all the way back, consider whether, when out of the sadde, if you feel cramped between pedals and bars. Keep in mind that saddle rails are not designed to be clamped right against their bend, as it can compromise the strength. Stay within the “max” and “min” marks on the rails.
Saddle angle
This decision, like saddle position, should be based partly on the topography of your local trails. If you are rarely in the saddle on flat ground, it may be worth abandoning the conventional wisdom that your saddle should be flat. And that is the conventional wisdom. Saddles are designed to be flat. But if you take a long-travel full-suspension bike, point it uphill and put a human on it, their weight is now biased heavily towards the rear, and that saddle will no longer be flat.
Angling your saddle nose down slightly will fix that, but it will have some consequences. On flat ground, it puts excess weight on your hands and can lead to numbness and pain in the fingers and fatigue in the arms. If you do pedal a fair amount on flat ground, you should probably have a flat saddle. But saddles are tricky. In either of the scenarios, it may not feel perfect. Part of that can be helped with high quality shorts and simply more saddle time, but there is a reason there are thousands of different saddle options out there. Just like everything else we’ve covered, it may require some trial and error.
And that is the most important takeaway from this. Be conscious of how your bike is fitting you. If something doesn’t feel right, try something different. It may take some time at first, but the more experimenting you do, the more you’ll learn about what you like. It will make you more informed when upgrading parts and analyzing new trends. And when it comes time to get your next new bike, you’ll have a head start at knowing what you want.
We’re not going to launch into a fit tutorial here. Frame size, seat height, saddle width and even bar width are often based primarily on your personal measurements. We’re talking about dimensions that are based more on preference. For the most part, there are no wrong answers here, and that’s why it’s so frequently overlooked.
Off the shelf, hopefully your new bike will be set up with its touchpoints in completely reasonable positions. If they feel strange, it’s common to think that’s simply because it’s a new bike. But that’s not necessarily true. With some deliberate trial and error, and some knowledge of the pros and cons of each approach, you can find your happy place.
Handlebar backsweep and upsweep
This is a good place to start because your lever and shifter adjustments will depend on getting this right. Bars have four main dimensions. Height and width, which are simple enough, but also upsweep and backsweep. There are bars with more or less sweep, which is a matter of preference. Bars with more sweep tend to be more comfortable but not as well suited for aggressive riding. Most traditional bars have about five degrees of upsweep and about eight degrees of backsweep.
But you are able to shift the balance between the two slightly by rocking the bars forward and back. These are measured from the bar’s neutral position, which you can derive from the marks that are hopefully present (and visible) where the bar is clamped into the stem. To find the starting point, keep in mind these marks are meant to relate to the ground, not the stem because the stem is angled in line with the fork. This is an often overlooked adjustment because it can be hard to detect a bar that is rocked too far forward or back.
Looking lengthwise along the bar is a good way to get an exaggerated view of its sweep. Angled too far back, it will lead to poor weight distribution across the palms. Angled too far forward and it will cause wrist pain. Finding your sweet spot may be as simple as some trial and error. If the difference between right and wrong is subtle to the eye, it will not be subtle to the touch. Starting from the bar’s neutral position, try slight adjustments forward and backward. No particular style of riding is better suited for either. When it feels right, it will feel right.
Hand position
Now that disc brakes have evolved to be powerful enough to stop by using only our index fingers, brake levers have gotten shorter. For the most part, they are shaped to optimize one-finger braking, with room for two if the need arises. But that means there’s a narrow window for how inboard or outboard they ought to be in relation to our hands. We’re doing this immediately after bar position because, to contradict what I said about “no wrong answer,” it is not optimal to need to stretch your finger in to reach the lever, or for it to crowd the rest of your fingers when you brake.
Where this does become a matter of preference is where you want your hand to be on your grip. Some people like to have a few millimeters of grip outside of their palm. This maximizes the real estate of grip that you’re holding onto, and nestles your palm into a hammock in grips that taper out slightly at the tips. The other option, pictured above, is actually hanging your palm a few millimeters outside of your grip. This requires a uniformly shaped grip, but some riders claim it offers a more intimate relationship with the side-to-side forces between hand and bar. It also allows you to widen your stance without lengthening the bar. Whichever hand position feels more natural will determine where, side to side, your brake lever should sit.
Shifter and dropper lever position
With your hand and brake lever’s lateral location settled, a similar question is to be answered for the shifter and dropper lever. In some cases, they are bolted independently to the bar, and this process is relatively simple. Other times, they are each bolted to the brake lever, but can be adjusted independently, both in their angle and how far inboard or outboard they are. Exactly how this is done differs between brands. Sometimes there are individual threaded holes to relocate the shifter (SRAM) or it can be slid in small increments (Shimano).
There is a good chance that your bike’s initial setup will crowd your hand with the thumb lever. Just know that your knuckle should not be rubbing your shifter when your thumb is wrapped under the bar. Don’t necessarily assume that the thumb lever needs to rest 100% under your thumb. For some riders, it is preferred to slide the shifter or dropper lever inboard slightly to offer more clearance to get your thumb to and from the lever. If you don’t feel there’s a direct, unobstructed line to get quickly on it, then try sliding it a few millimeters from your hand.
The angle of the shifter relates to this as well. It also is independently adjustable of brake lever angle. Similar to the above options, tilting it down and away will give you quicker access but a less solid connection once you get there, and tilting it up towards you will give you more positive contact, but it’ll be harder to get there.
Brake lever angle
There are two competing schools of thought here. One is that the brake levers should be angled to rest just under your extended index fingers while you are standing up in the pedals and your arms, with elbows out, are making an otherwise straight line from your shoulders to your grips. This feels natural for most riders, and will result in your brake levers pointing down somewhere around 45 degrees or, for taller riders, even lower.
But the other school of thought teaches that our elbows should not just be bent, but dropped slightly. Part of this is, when abiding by the best-practices of keeping weight on the front wheel for better traction, allows you to lean forward without extreme lateral bend on your wrists. Also, especially on steep trails, it transfers the load from your thumbs to the palms of your hands. Both of these combine to lessen “arm-pump” (the painful forearm fatigue of long rough descents) but also to keep you more securely attached to your bars in an unexpected impact while descending. The answer for you is likely somewhere in between. Experiment with lower levers and a more relaxed riding position, and with higher levers and a more aggressive position, and try and combine both with a wide variety of trails to find what is right for you.
Brake lever reach
“Reach” is how far out your lever is from your bar when it is at rest. That’s different from what some call “free stroke,” which is how far from that point you have to pull it before the pads hit the rotor. Adjusting deadstroke is a whole other story. Some brakes, like top-level SRAM options, have a way to adjust this. Most do not, and if it feels too far, you may need pads, a bleed, or both. But if it feels just right, there still may be work to be done.
What matters most here is where the lever ends up when the pads bite. The ideal position is largely based on your hand size, but it is worth experimenting with. You just want to stay within an optimal range. Too close to the bar, the lever might bottom out on the grip. Even if isn’t happening in the parking lot, it may happen on the mountain. But too far from the bar, and you don’t hit the optimal powerband in your finger. If it’s extended too far, you are literally using fewer of your forearm muscles to pull it. As it gets further in, you activate more muscles and it takes less effort to get more force, to a certain extent.
Where the personal preference enters into it is where you want that power to peak. If you find yourself doing a lot of forceful braking, you’ll be flexing the levers further and further in, and for that peak mechanical advantage to meet peek bio-mechanical advantage, the reach will need to be further out. But if you don’t often find yourself at the edge of your brakes’ capability, a little shorter reach will allow you to have better wrap between finger and grip.
Stem height
Different sizes of bikes will have different-length head tubes (the frame tube that the fork passes through). And different types of bikes will have different stack heights (the net vertical difference between the center of your cranks and the top of your head tube). Longer-travel bikes tend to have higher stack and shorter-travel bikes have lower stack. Assuming that you are on the right size and right travel of bike for your body and your trails, there still are choices to be made. Adjustments are done by swapping spacers back and forth between above and below the stem. This requires the knowledge of how to adjust a threadless headset. And ideally, it requires various sizes of spacers. Some bikes will come out of the box with only 10mm spacers, but 10mm is often too big of a change. When experimenting with bar height, make sure there are one or two 5mm spacers in there.
This is one of the more intuitive adjustments you’ll have to make. If, on the descents, you find yourself with too much weight over the front end, you may need to raise your bars. If you feel like you’re not getting power to the pedals on the climbs, you may need to lower them. But a factor here, as mentioned above in brake-lever angle, is where you position your body over the front wheel. How far you are leaning over the front wheel should be based on choice, not where you’ve set your bars. Before you drop your bars, try leaning over more in sections that are not too steep. It may be worth the compromise on the climbs.
Saddle position
We’re finally done with the front half of the cockpit. Thankfully, this part should be quicker. Our saddle clamps offer the ability to slide our bodies forward or backward in relation to the rest of the bike. Most saddles have markings on their rails which will indicate the neutral position, which is always a good place to start. While finding your optimal setting, an important metric is your bike’s effective seat tube angle. That dimension is technically what you are adjusting when moving your saddle. Seat tube angles have been trending steeper lately because it puts your body weight further over the pedals, giving you a greater mechanical advantage when climbing. And on full-suspension bikes (more severely so on longer-travel bikes), it lessens the force your body weight has on the rear shock.
Lately, seat tube angles have been getting steeper. A couple years ago, 72 degrees was acceptable. Today, there are bikes with 79-degree seat tube angles. If that doesn’t sound like much, consider that, at an average saddle height, a change of two degrees will move the saddle position by over an inch, which is more adjustment than we have to work with here. So, knowing that we’ll only be able to change your effective seat tube angle by about a degree and a half, consider what your topography is like.
If you spend the overwhelming majority of your in-saddle time climbing, and if you have a full-suspension bike, you will have an easier time on those climbs with your saddle nudged forward. Just know that you may need to raise your seatpost by a fraction of the distance you have just slid it forward to keep the distance to the pedals optimal. If you are on undulating or flatter terrain, you may be better off in the saddle’s neutral position. If you find yourself wanting the saddle to be further rearward than the neutral position, there is a chance you are on too small of a bike.
Before you get too comfortable with your saddle slid all the way back, consider whether, when out of the sadde, if you feel cramped between pedals and bars. Keep in mind that saddle rails are not designed to be clamped right against their bend, as it can compromise the strength. Stay within the “max” and “min” marks on the rails.
Saddle angle
This decision, like saddle position, should be based partly on the topography of your local trails. If you are rarely in the saddle on flat ground, it may be worth abandoning the conventional wisdom that your saddle should be flat. And that is the conventional wisdom. Saddles are designed to be flat. But if you take a long-travel full-suspension bike, point it uphill and put a human on it, their weight is now biased heavily towards the rear, and that saddle will no longer be flat.
Angling your saddle nose down slightly will fix that, but it will have some consequences. On flat ground, it puts excess weight on your hands and can lead to numbness and pain in the fingers and fatigue in the arms. If you do pedal a fair amount on flat ground, you should probably have a flat saddle. But saddles are tricky. In either of the scenarios, it may not feel perfect. Part of that can be helped with high quality shorts and simply more saddle time, but there is a reason there are thousands of different saddle options out there. Just like everything else we’ve covered, it may require some trial and error.
And that is the most important takeaway from this. Be conscious of how your bike is fitting you. If something doesn’t feel right, try something different. It may take some time at first, but the more experimenting you do, the more you’ll learn about what you like. It will make you more informed when upgrading parts and analyzing new trends. And when it comes time to get your next new bike, you’ll have a head start at knowing what you want.
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160 Comments
-"All practically aside, don't you think it looks kinda cool?"
-"Do you routinely remove your stem for trailside repairs?"
-"Would you rather have cables routed straight up in the air like an 80's road bike?"
-"Do you wash your cycling socks?"
-"Do you hate progress?"
"Then, super, you love having your cables run though your stem!"
I carry a baseball glove with me everywhere as a tester.
I was convinced that I needed a new frame because the reach numbers of my 2018 bike made it unrideable. I had a 50mm riser, 50mm stem and a bunch of spacers to make it feel bigger. Every ride home from the trails I would be looking down imagining more reach and how much more comfortable I would feel.
So I test ride a few new bikes in the "correct" size; can't manual, can't bunny hop, something isn't right. I get back on my old bike and I feel so much better, so I put it down to all the hours I've spent getting the setup exactly right; something you can't do on a demo.
In the meantime whilst browsing geo numbers, I learn about the "RAD" measurement and decide to see how stupidly tiny my current bike is so I can totally justify that new frame. Oddly, according to the RAD scale it's 70mm too big? I check and check and re-measure and for a laugh, I drop back to a 30mm stem, flat bar and remove all the spacers to get it close to this (clearly stupid and wrong) RAD measurement.
Riding along the paths to the trails I felt like a roadie, but as soon as I started climbing on the trails I was blown away by the difference it had made. I could do everything better and all my back pain had gone away, totally contradicting what I thought I needed.
Same experience with me, I dropped down into the RAD sizing a year or so ago and really fell in love with it and kinda made me like bikes again like I remembered, being able to throw them around and jump vs plow....
Both aluminum and carbon can be manufactured to a wide range of stiffness.
Need a 18% ABV 8,000 IBU quintuple-hopped Sour Mash Fruity IPA aged in pine needles? You got it.
Need a mullet triple-pivot, 18-bar Horst-Ellsworth Hybrid link with hydraulic bottom bracket? Coming right up.
18% IPA....Whoa. Not a fan of IPA (just too sour/bitter for me), but definitely would try that one. Lol. I'm a German Dunkel Lager guy and like the easy drinking lagers are good too.
1) Brake levers are usually too far out, and usually setup like this from the bike shop. Move the brake levers inboard, even to the point of being on the other side of the shifter, in order to get your index finger in the crook of the lever. I find its the #1 reason why people use two fingers on their brakes.
2) Brake lever adjustment up/down starting point should be drawing a straight line between your wrist and the middle of the grip. Too many people run the "conventional" way of drawing a straight line between your wrist and your knuckles, which makes the brake lever too far down. If the top of your forearm is getting sore, they are too low. If the bottom of your forearm gets sore, they are too high. Find the happy medium to avoid arm fatigue.
3) Brake reach is usually wayyyyyy too far out, almost maxxed out in most cases. The closer you run your reach to the bars, the more the brake lever will act as a grip which in turn also reduces arm pump. I tend to run my reach all the way in, then back off 1/4 to 1/2 a turn... just enough not to hit my knuckles when fully engaged.
Basti from German SQlab HQs here.
Sorry to hear your experience. Feel free to drop us a PM & we can go into details, would be gerat to get more insights, because we never heard of a case like this, before.
As the other comments point out, the majority of the feedback for our bars is very positive.
Still, based on our experience, for agressive riding, lot of technical & rough, alpine stuff, we do recommend the 12° backsweep bars, not the 16° ones.
But ist is always a combination of personal preferences and if you have bigger issues with your hands/wrist/numb fingers & co.
In general: more backsweep helps more, especially the bigger the existing issues.
If you want to balance out reach / grips position to innital setting, when switching to a "more backsweep" bar, you normally need to add 10mm stem length for 12° and 20mm for the 16° .
But TBH, only a few riders do so, bikes getting "longer & longer", most try the original stem, first, before adding spends for a new stem.
Yes, our carbon bars are bloody expensive, we can't deny that, but we have solid Alu versions around 100bucks (e.G. the 3OX, in Llow, mid & high rise, for each 12 & 16° versions, each), as well.
BTW our carbon bars are known to be super solid,
In a lab test by german BIKE magazine, 21 bars were tested for "end of life" forces, and only 2 bars survided, ours and a Synatce one. Sorry, didn't find it online, only a video teaser: www.youtube.com/watch?v=URcTBmB0RFA
Thanks for the input, always very welcome (doesn’t matter if positive or negative, always appreciated).
Forwarded to the product team, but whenever SQlab is mentioned at pb, I am sharing the link & they are following the threads.
And they are all avid pb readers, anyway, so in case I miss anything, they share it in our group
Ergotec do a 50mm and 70mm rise 12 degree bar which are a lot cheaper than SQ.
While the Ergotec are good they not as supple as the SQ Labs bars (which are my preference).
When I first got on a mountain bike, I got 11 degree backsweep bar and the bar align from front of my thumb to the outside of my hand in the middle (where there are intersections of many hand muscles) and it doesn't feel good.
Then I thought I need more backsweep. I bought bar with 16 degree backsweep. Now the bar span from front of my thumb to the outside of my hand at the base, near the wrist (palmaris brevis muscle). This feels much better as there's no more pinching sensation on my hands. But then when I look at how most other people hold their bar. My grip seems different. Everyone else seems to like their bar to span from front of the thumb to outside of the hand near the base of pinky finger (abductor digiti minimi muscle?). To achieve that position I may need something like 7 degree sweep bar. Less sweep instead of more...
So... how to hold the bar?
That's the first time I've ever moved it away from the shortest throw setting.
Pad wear adjustment is in the caliper though I can understand that if you indeed use new pads in combination with a rotor that's thicker than what the brake is designed for, the pads will touch the rotor well before the slave pistons start to slide and adjust for pad and rotor wear. From there onwards, the bite point will gradually shift until indeed operation is to normal. You're aware of this so accept that you have to learn to cope with this shifting bite point. That's ok, but it is good for other readers (of this thread) to be aware of too.
I see a lot of attempts here and there of people trying to (temporarily) get an earlier bite point than stock. I wonder whether more people should opt for a closed system like BFO (Brake Force One). They're becoming rare (and undesirable) for mtb use if used with DOT as the oil tends to expand as it heats up, locking up your brake. But the water used in BFO doesn't quite have this property as severly, from what I understand. You'll only need to adjust for pad wear yourself but I can only see this being an issue on very long descends (and/or maybe very a very abrasive environment).
Personally I don't need to have both levers to feel exactly the same. As you could read, I'm already using different brake masters front and rear. I do like them to have an equal amount of sponginess though, hence the stiffer rear brake hose. Not sure whether getting a stiffer front brake hose too would put me off again, haven't tried that.
It may be another TL;DR again but if you made it through, I hope you got a better understanding of how the automatic pad wear adjustment works and why the bite point is where it is.
Many of us (especially gravity riders) get relief from arm pump by running levers almost flat.
However having suffered badly from arm pump in the past I would say that there is more benefit from focusing on body position and riding to alleviate the need to brake so much thus reducing arm pump.
Palm and wrist pain are hard to detect? So many contradictions right in the first few paragraphs.
What's the real danger? Any horror stories?
It's a preference, but if your preference is for more sweep then your preference is not suited for aggressive riding... STFU.
Can you explain how a steeper seat tube angle gives a rider greater mechanical advantage?
Agree with your second point 100%. Honestly marketing must have written in the geo charts on some of these bikes.
Our riding group did a seat angle comparison, it was crazy. Between two riders with identical seat heights, one with a "73.5°" seat angle was steeper than a "77°" degree bike.
Every review uses that number as gospel. Though I've seen Bike Radar occasionally publish measurements.
We often don't even look at geometry numbers while testing a bike until we need to write or record the review, so I'm not sure why you're saying that we base our riding impressions on what the charts say. I don't care what the charts say, and we've said that many times in reviews and podcasts. We do sometimes measure the bikes and find differences but, just like you pointed out, it's more about how they feel on the trail than what the chart or company says.
I fixed that for you.
Seriously. Your statements describe such a very low level of testing that, in the real world, means that you are doing marketing...which you are. I'm sorry bro, your marketing outlet continually demonstrates no understanding of bike geometry or actual bike setup. I know that you can't do that as it might effect your advertising and cost you a lot more in payroll but just call it as it is, a shill.
Let me know when you need a marketing guy! How about a nifty catchphrase like, "Our bikes are ver-diculously good!" Or maybe, "You won't OTB on a PVD!"
You might believe that I don't understand bike geometry or setup, but you're not basing that on proven knowledge. I'm in a different position.
Example, in almost every article your folks write, you refer to the location of the upper head bearings as a parameter of value. Can you explain that? Why is the upper head bearing so important on a mountain bike? What does that do for a rider when climbing or descending on a trail?
Here's the game; show us. Include an actual setup print of the bikes that you are 'testing'.
Okay, what about "STD with PVD" for a catchphrase? The std obviously stands for Stable Trail Dynamics, your new patented geometry.
I'm a tall dude, who always slammed my saddles forward. My current bike has an effective angle, at my ridiculous seat height, of around 78. Now I am happy not running my saddle slammed all the way forward. long chainstays also help. wish more brands would get on the size-specific rear center train.
Thank god your father taught you those important life lessons about integrity and how you're the special one who can see reality through the smokescreen that is life.
They had a different opinion.
I don’t know where to mount my dropper
post leaver on my drop bars.
A small difference can have a huge impact on control and comfort. Basically, spend time finding your sweet spot for width. You'll know it when you hit it.
And I’m guessing you’ve only got two reproductive organs?
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