Do they put a load on the fork steerer at the base of the crown?
Will it (could it) invalidate your frame warranty?

Read one comment that someones made a ‘popping and cracking noise on a regular basis 😮

Looking at getting a 1.5 or 2.0degree angleset but is 2.0 too severe a change?

Already compensating for having bought the wrong frame eh Hora? 😀

I’ve heard about the creaking and cracking as well but I pressume that this is just from very small movements between the two faces of the gimball and it unlikely to be anything worse than other parts of your bike. I can’t think of a time when there wasn’t some sort of mechanical noise coming form my bike.

I guess it is more annoying than dangerous; I’ve read that it was the frame manufacturers that placed the largest orders for the Anglesets as they saw it as an easy way of altering geometry on their frames.

2 degrees would be a lot to change on any frame; which bike are you going to fit it to though as the Turner doesn’t have a 1.5″ head tube.

Lets just say the front feels abit tucked in even with a 160mm fork. 1.5degree will sort it.

Surely it shouldn’t make any difference to the fork as it’s just “seeing” a headset or frame with a slightly different angle if that makes sense, or am I just talking bollocks?

I think what Hora means is that the front end feels like it wants to tuck under at times. This is what a steep HA can feel like when riding and it makes it hard to weight the front end correctly because the more weight you move over the front wheel the more pronounced the feeling of the bike wanting to tuck under becomes.

Slackening the HA will solve this problem to some degree (no pun intended).

Hora is this the Five Spot we’re talking about? It won’t take an Angleset but you can fit a Works Components one or that one from The Holy Land. My mate runs a one degree reduction on his Five Spot and that seems to work very well. 1.5 would probably not feel to different but I personally think two degrees would make it a bit of a barge.

Saar’s from Israel?

Yes 1.5degree would be better. I was thinking about the WC one and assumped all had the same ‘angleset’ name although thats ‘Cane Creeks isn’t it.

It’s a good point, regardless of what they are actually called, ultimately I think they will all end up being called ‘anglesets’ like ‘hoover’ has become the generic name for the vacuum cleaner.

The Cane Creek one works differently to the other designs. The ‘gimbals’ is the mechanism that they use to achieve correct alignment with the off set cups; it’s like two semi-spherical cups sitting inside each other that naturally align with the head tube. It’s that feature that can cause the creaking as the two faces move against each other ever so slightly but it does mean you don’t need to worry about correct alignment of the cups in the head tube.

The Works Components and the one from Israel just use off set cups and bearings and as such you must align them right otherwise the forks aren’t going to be sitting flush with the internal faces.

Use them on both my bikes with no issues at all. Just grease everything up (don’t be stingy) and that includes the bearing race that sits inside the gold coloured cup. You’ll understand that bit when you get one.

I bought mine from the USA via ebay for about £140 new delivered.

apparently its only the cane creek ones that make the scary noises. sonme reports of not staying tight too.

can’t comment on the works components one yet as i havent had mine long enough.

Saar’s from Israel?

Yes 1.5degree would be better. I was thinking about the WC one and assumped all had the same ‘angleset’ name although thats ‘Cane Creeks isn’t it.

Yep, and he’s ace, really helpful, bright and great communications. I have actually fitted a -2? Saar head-set to my RC405 and it makes a big difference – not surprisingly – but I knew pretty much what I was doing. You need to think about the different ramifications on the bike overall.

When you slacken the head angle, you also steepen the seat angle by a corresponding amount, which potentially makes for better climbing and may change your position on the bike, but playing with different seat-posts and saddle positions means that’s somewhat tuneable.

You also drop the bottom bracket slightly.

Then you need to think about the front of the bike. The RC405 has a zero stack head-set, I actually got the Saar headset because I wanted to keep the lower cup as a zero stack rather than an external cup which would have lifted the front end slightly because one of the reasons I did it was to be able to run a slightly longer fork – 150mm as opposed to 140mm as opposed to suggested 130mm – without the front end getting wandery.

I also fitted a shorter, erm, 55mm I think, stem, to keep the steering sharp.

I’m really pleased with the results, yes, 2? is a big change, but I suspect 1.5? will be similar anyway, but the bike’s now significantly more stable at speed and on steeps and it still climbs brilliantly thanks to the steepened seat angle. Before the head-set mod, I tried it with a 150mm Rev on the front and it was wandering about on climbs and lifting on steep ones.

Anyway, I’d look at Saar and Works Components before Cane Creek unless you’re likely to swap the headset onto another bike in the future. But it’s not as simple as ‘slack is better’, it’s more complicated. Part of the reason I changed my Pace was that I’d got very used to a Ragley hardtail and wanted my full suss to have a similar feel, partly because I was finding it hard to swap between the two.

Oh, and it’s totally reversible, so if you spend, say, £70 on a Works Components headset and don’t like the results, you just revert to a normal headset. I found installation fine, btw, with a bit of care, some thin cord and a steel rule plus a headset press.

Saar reckons less than 1? change is barely noticeable btw. I slackened by singlespeed by 1? and you can feel it, but it’s nothing like as obvious as a 2? change.

So… yes, but think about the other changes to the geometry too.

Edit: neither of mine make a noise. The Cane Creek ones have a bit of a reputation for that, the Works and Saar ones work differently, are specific to a small range of headtube lengths, but otherwise work just like normal headsets in that the bearings just sit in the cups. No gimbals, though ‘gimbal‘ is a fantastic word. I kind of want a CC Angleset, just so I can say I have one….

Will it be noticeable enough to transfer the ride? I was abit 😐 when I rode the 5 Spot. Didn’t exactly hate it just felt ‘oh’. I like the feel of the rear etc- just not the steering that just feels tucked-in.

Can you get offset bushings for a 5 spot? Might be worth looking into.

Yes, a 2? angle change is very obvious and does alter the feel of the bike a lot – on my Pace the standard statc head angle is quoted as 68.5?, I always ran with a 140mm fork, which probably made it around 68?, so with the headset fitted, it’s in the 66? region. Obviously how much sag you run out back also has a bearing on geometry.

Saar actually started making his sets because he wanted to slacken a later Five Spot, posted about it on mtbr.com, got a bunch of people asking him if he could make one for them. Might be worth dropping him a line, his headsets cost more than the Works ones, but you have a few extra options, like zero stack on a 44mm internal headtube, though you might want to go with an external cup to avoid dropping the BB – I wanted to run a slightly longer fork with the bike, which has worked nicely.

As I said above, you may also want to stick a shorter stem on to keep the steering sharp otherwise it may feel like a bit of a barge. Anyway, mostly I just ride the thing and it seems to work.

Found it http://forums.mtbr.com/turner/5-spot-~67-deg-hta-maybe-bit-less-672117.html