I have an Intense 5.5 with Lyrics, 685mm Azonic ST1 bars on it and had been running 90mm ritchey stem – just stuck a Deity 50mm on it but found massive amount of wandering on climbs and the Deity is a bit chunky- I dont do DH, just agressive trail riding.

Before I buy YET ANOTHER stem what are you guys doing on similar bikes – shall i go back to the 90mm or is it a 70mm I need??

Cheers for opinions,….and yes I know everybody rides different and likes different things 😉

I've got a 100mm on my orange five. had a 70 on there and it was well short. think I'd like a 90 really.

Suppose what i should mention is I am 5'8''- 29.5" inside leg and have a medium 18.5" intense which is quite a big frame for me

I run a Hope 50mm 5deg rise on my 5.5, but with 140mm forks, not 160 and found it spot on for larking about, and not too bad on climbs. Your forks are longer than recommended by Intense I think, but you probably know that 😀 Can you not just wind them down for climbing and keep the sharper handling for the downs?

yeah i do. I run them at 145 for trails, 115 for climbing and only do the 160 thang for DH duties. The 5.5 is a tad twitchy at the front eh so thought the extra 20mm would slacken it off on big gravity drops. Just found that even at 115 climbing the 50mm gave me a lot of front wheel wander

I run a 70mm Thomson one on my Heckler, combined with Float 36's.

Its a large frame, but is only half an inch longer than the Hustler it replaced.

Seems perfect to me…

If you want to slacken things without messing up the climbing, get on the phone to BETD who will sell you an offset shock mounting kit for about £30 IIRC. Drops about 1-1.5 degrees off the head angle, and with 140mm forks makes the bikes feel awesome. Made a big difference to my setup, probably the difference between me keeping it and selling up for something newer and slacker.

With the adjustable forks you have you'd probably be able to cover all bases pretty well once the kit was fitted.

I have a 65 mm Sun line with zero rise with 160 Fox forks on my Orange 5 AM
Very confident on the downhill tech sections.
have been thinking of going for the 55 mm.
Regarding the twitchy you may be better of by trying a zero rise stem first

The zero rise made it more comfortable at 160 and the bike feels less unbalanced
and I more or less, unless climbing leave the forks at 160

i'm also using a 65mm sunline stem and 28" wide bars on an Orange Five with Pikes – it climbs fine with the forks wound all the way out; i don't know whether its the fact that its just the long top tube that helps, or whether a nice wide bar also aids the climbing