Reach – what’s your ideal frame reach…?

173cm with 30″ inseam and on a small 100mm FS XC frame with 445mm reach which feels spot on for XC riding.

I agree it’s only one number in an equation of numbers that make it work. You could create a franken bike with your perfect reach on it but mess with the other numbers to create a horrendous ride.

There is no perfect, it’s always a compromise.

What’s my ideal reach? No idea!

I’m ~177cm tall with short ~82cm cycling inseam, arms ~61cm ish to “wrapped around bar” centre.

My road bike (Cube Attain GTC Disc “58”cm) frame has 388mm, with 120mm adjustable stem close to parellel and is a bit higher than normal with 20mm of spacers under stem (so reach would normally be ~6mm larger), effective reach to bar hoods is currently ~620mm.

18″ Voodoo Marasa frame is ~430mm, stock 50mm stem is +6 and at least 30mm spacers under (been lazy and never tweaked, meant to take Knucleball off fatbike), effective reach to bars is ~480mm.

18″ Wazoo fatbike is ~425mm iirc, swapped out stock (50mm?) for 110mm to make steering less twitchy for largely road duty, so effective reach to bars is ~535mm… Really miss not being able to ride it since July ’20, was such a fun tarmac eater with FatNotFat 29″ wheels, got it down to ~10.25Kg with On One fork, quite nice road tyres etc. But sheared driveside crank through pedal thread on way to work. 🙁

I’ve no idea what my ideal Reach is but I do know that my current Reach is 440mm on my hardtail. This currently feels fine but when I’ve ridden full suspension bikes recently I found anything from 460-510mm seemed fine.
The FS bikes had steeper seat angles but both them and my HT had head angles around 63-64*.

I think I prefer a slightly shorter hardtail with a bit slacker SA compared to FS bikes.

My inside leg is 787mm
Height – 1803mm
Wingspan – 1810mm
And I have rather wide shoulders and chest.

Hardtail
HA – 64.5
Reach – 440mm
CS – 440mm
STA – 74.5
ST – 425mm.
40/50mm stem (no idea which)
780mm bars (25mm rise) and 35mm of spacers (needed to raise the bars up for Kids Ride Shotgun Seat)

I’ve no idea what my ideal Reach is

Good observation. I doubt many of us have done enough experimentation to work this out.

5ft8, 462mm + 40mm stem, happy with it.

If I went any longer, it’d have to come with a steeper seat tube angle as I’m at my limit of top tube length.

It’s also interesting to try the Atherton size calculator, for me it suggests a 449mm reach were I to opt for a custom frame.

5’10” on a large Ranger. 460 reach, 40 stem. I understand the reach on an hardtail is affected more as only the front fork compresses, stretching the reach a little. Also worth factoring in bar height, especially if the stack is low, that’s a different topic..

Low stack height bikes – the bane of my existence!

I can mess around with reach, with the bar/stem length/rise, only so much before a bike designed around someone with really short legs just causes so many problems its no fun at all riding.

Case in point, the latest Marin San
Quentin frame adds 30mm-ish to the stack height. They finally realized. Dartmoor bikes has dropped the stack height on a model i wanted to buy. And then there is a new X-Cobra 587 street frame that none of the suppliers can state what the stack measurement is so i refuse to buy and build up to find it doesn’t fit me at all. I already have two frames I’m ditched because of this issue.

6ft 2

Full suspension bike – 490 reach + 40mm stem
Hardtail – 510 reach + 35mm stem

The hardtail is an experiment in longer reach, 140mm fork so the the reach & head angle don’t change too much with sag.

I always look at reach, stack & headangle first. The above figures mean nothing in isolation – e.g I have a 160mm fork on the full suss (designed around 150mm) and this kicks the head angle out by 0.5degree, decreases the reach and increases the stack. Then take into account the 10mm of spacers under the stem, the reach figure is prob sitting closer to 478mm.

There’s about 30mm of spacers under the stem on the hardtail so again that 510mm reach isn’t as long as you think!

@CalamityJames – I think it’s also because I ride hardtails in a different way that I enjoy a slightly shorter reach. I could be wrong as I’ve never tried a super long HT whereas I have ridden plenty of long FS bikes. I really liked the medium Geometron I tried.