Stems, bars, headset stacks etc.

What’s the deal – seems to hark back to xc bikes with flat bars and ones arse in the air.

Personally I prefer hi-risers and a bit of a stack under my stem – but I am an odd fit. Is it just me?

Back in the day we all ran 26″ wheeled bikes, with 2″ tyres, short head tubes and that made for a low stack height.

These days everybody has a lot more fork travel usually, bigger tyres, often on 29ers. For a decade or more my MTB’s have pretty much always had the saddle and bar height level with each other. That used to be achievable with riser bars, a positive rise stem, and some spacers under the stem. On my new 29er, not so!

things change?
Had very little rise (if any) on stems for ages, now my new bars are fairly low/nearly flat but it seems to work.

Depends how often you like going over the bars.

Fashions change, driven by pro’s/marketers, exploited by latter so we can all keep spending £££ when they don’t have any genuinely new ideas that are worth buying.

See 31.8, tapered head tubes, 8 & 9 speed, 15mm etc vs indexing, hyperglide, suspension, spd, camelbaks.

Ooh! A new thread beckons!

Wasn’t sure if people were seeing some riding benefit in terms of control – the rise of riser bars seemed driven by the dh scene and yet they now seem to be championing the low rise style.

Obviously climbing is aided by a lower front end but I can’t see a lot else.

It may be more of a question when slapping low rise on an older bike, if the bike was designed with low rise in mind then what looks low may actually be high. It’s hard to pick a reference point and in a lot of ways it’s a shame that the build kits normally get left to the accountants not the designers. Sometimes it would be nice to see what they had in mind for a build spec/style for a particular frame.

Dropper.

I find lower front ends handle better but the arse up saddle effect makes things feel sketchy and counters any benefit. Since running a dropper I can slam the front end and just drop the saddle on faster, techy bits and stay nice and low moving about the bike.

I had high risers on my meta for a few years…the suspension travel went from 130 to now 150mm…so that’s another 20mm bar height from standard….
It started feeling a bit ‘chopper like’ so dropped some headset shims and went low risers – feels much more natural again now…

DrP