My new fork should be arriving today so will be fitting it tomorrow, before cutting down do I put spacers and stem on, mark a line where the stem ends,remove fork, then cut on the line?

Is it as simple as that?

Really hate this phone sometimes, that’s cutting DOWN steerer tubes

No, you need the stem/spacers 3mm below where you will cut.

IMO – install and ride it with however many spaces it needs to work, and once you’ve the stem in the right place, cut.

But remember, you can always cut again…

Pretty much yes…

You’ll need to chop about 5mm down from that line to allow clearance for the top cap to tension everything up nicely.

But, do make sure you check it, and check it again… it’s an expensive mistake to get wrong!

and when you make the cut, either use a really good pipecutter, or clamp an old stem on and use it as a hacksaw guide.

Dave

try it first to get the bars at the right height. Measure twice cut once

Measure twice, then measure twice again. I made this mistake but got away with it (just).

Or, if it’s to replace an existing fork, and you’re happy with the number of spacers, stem/bar height etc you have at the moment, you could measure the length of the steerer of the existing fork and cut the steerer of the new fork to the same length.

Measure twice, plus once more for luck, cut once (with a decent hacksaw)

yep theres no real science to it. just done it on a new fork but everytime i do it i think there must be a more advanced way of doing this, it really is the most primitive thing to be done on a mountain bike: man buy expensive product, man bring expensive product back to cave and cut it in half so it will fit. 🙂

Thanks for the advice, won’t be a problem

When you do the cut, it’s not actually important to get the cut exactly square apart from in aesthetic terms… the end of the steerer doesn’t mate with anything. Just make it neat and clean off any burrs that you get.

if you’re using a ruler on the old forks to measure steerer length reqd, do remember to measure from the crown up when deciding where to put the mark on the new one.