What are the advantages for wider bars and a shorter stem?

thats interesting with the shoulder width. I can see with the printed out specs of my bike that 2 larger frame sizes 19,5 and 21.5 had 600mm and 620 mm width I guess in to proportion with body size.

I bet in a poll of shoulder width vs. bar width on here you wouldn’t find much correlation. It would appear logical although selling shiny stuff to the MTB masses isn’t always about logic and function 😀

nsdog interesting maths – ta. I would think that is not a significant difference but its more than I guessed.

Hey nsdog I wasn’t trying to start a barney. Its only Tuesday 😆

I’m actually very surprised at the result.
I checked your calculations also.
Using 680 bars and a 100 stem the radius of the arc is 354mm.
If you turn 60 degrees the hand arc mvt is 370mm.
Going down to a 50 stem with the same arc and bars moves your hand 359mm.
Thats only 11mm or 3% difference in hand mvt by halving the stem length!

Thanks for making me download a scientific calculator that I haven’t used in over 15 years!

Note the diff in arc length is proportional to the diff in radius, so there is no need to calc the arc length. So if you reduce the radius by 14% then the arc length for any angle will reduce by 14%..
Either way nsdogs analysis is interesting.

Hi guys, I’ve been getting a bit too involved in this thread but… 😀

While the change in angle/ hand movement may be small the change in moment acting around the fork steerer centre as a result of changing bar width for the same force acting on the bars may be more noticeable. Just thinking out loud, may be talking pure BS! 😀

anyone do a 1m bar?……………. 😉

Superstar just bought out a 915mm (1 yard) bar 😯

As toys19 correctly points out above the hand movement is directly proportional to the radius.
The radius is more effected by the bar length than by the stem length as its at least 3 times as long (340 vs 100).
Therefore I think your right DanW that I think the steering response is more effected by bar length than stem length.
If you take this to the extreme, anyone that has ridden one of those singlespeed fixies with those tiny straight bars will confirm how twitchy they are!!

I found the biggest difference when trying a shorter stem was the ability to unweight the front end and not steering based, which would agree with DanW’s comment about moments. If you half the distance from the front wheel. From going from a 100mm to 50mm stem, simplistically you will half the moment(which is a big difference) you’re putting on the front wheel(as the moment is distance x weight) and make it much easier to lift the front wheel over stuff.

I find certain frame/fork set ups don’t suit wider bars, I’ve recently gone back to bars ends on 600mm from 660mm bars without bar ends on one bike as they didn’t feel right, but I’ve just gone up from 700mm to 740mm on the other bike.

I think I could do with shorter stem or more stack height.I notice how I have to reach out when I havent ridden my bike a for a while or been riding my dad’s Parkway Reflex city bike.Would be less strain on the shoulders.