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Aww phek me. I am laughing like mutley and drying tears from my eyes as i ttype this!
Just use the Infinite Monkey Technique, fanny about with it forever til it feels OK. (if you're ever out for a ride and making an arse of it, take the opportunity to adjust the bars and say "Oh, I think they're .0001 degrees off perfect, no wonder I'm running wide in corners")
A friend of mine set his bars with the rise in line with the stem angle. Tried to claim it was for a racier position. :
Superficial - Member
Am I the only person reading this that doesn't quite understand why it was such a stupid question?
No such thing as a "stupid question" just stupid answers, and when the stw collective smugness kicks in you sure get some stupid, self congratulatory answers - far easier to mock than help isn't it 🙄
stw smug ****ers get together thats all. To be honest even if it was a stupid question it gave them an opportunity to think the are cool/good where as in normal life they mostly look like this:
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I get that setting up bars once you've got them is trial and error - but how do you figure out which ones, from the bewildering array of rises, angles and sweeps, to get in the first place?
Once you've fitted them and tried them out, they're usually marked from the various things that have been bolted on to them and therefore used - can't imagine any LBS or mail order outlet being happy to take them back in that state.
Once you've fitted them and tried them out, they're usually marked from the various things that have been bolted on to them and therefore used
I guess you could put some plastic film over the bars where controls are fitted, not sure it would work too well with the stem clamp.
I've never even thought of returning bars unless they were wrongly supplied, and to be honest, I reckon almost any bar can be made to fit comfortably if you have a stem or two to choose from.
I reckon almost any bar can be made to fit comfortably if you have a stem or two to choose from.
I dunno about that, you can compensate for rise quite easily, but most of the 'fit' comes from the combination of upsweep and backsweep, and some people s wrists are quite sensitive to it.
Some bars are very 'flat' (ie: very little upsweep, like old Answer Pro-Tapers, where as others like Azonic doublewalls had a really odd upsweep.
Same with backsweep, some are very swept, some are very straight. Most of the time you will get used to what you have but I know some people that get wrist pain with overly swept bars, and others that do with straight bars.
You can only do so much with stems and rotating the bars, for some people a change of bar is the only option.
The problem, as mentioned above is working out what you need! And trying your mates bike out is not always a good test a as you need to ride bars for a while to get over the initial 'it's all differenty!' feeling, and you need to try them on your own bike while keeping other factors constant.
I'm pretty sure that the bar/stem combos I have on my bikes are wrong and could be improved, even though I've tweaked and rotated the angle of the sweep and the stem every which way. My default hand position, if I'm travelling any distance and not doing a technical section or braking, isn't gripping the bars, it's kind of resting the balls(?), the fleshy bottom bit, whatever you call it, of my hands, on the "back" of the grips, the part where my hands/wrists meet the bars.
Do this for any length of time and you get sore hands and arms. I'm sure there are bar and stem combinations out there that would sort this out but the number of possible permutations is so bewildering that I just stick with what I have and put up with it.