Thursday, January 21, 2010

Imperfect Thing Follow Up: Imperfect Assembly

Since I'm starting to get a little stir crazy due to the inclement weather, having only ridden my bike less than ten miles this week (for reference, I pedaled 140 miles last week), I attempted to burn up some of this excess energy by putzing around in the garage this evening.

Following up on Wednesday's post regarding excessive knee-slicing bolt threads protruding on my Ritchey WCS stem, as well as contact from Ritchey's customer service department, the first thing I did this evening was to do a little investigating. So I popped off the top cap and found this:
Yep - just as Angelo at Ritchey suspected when he saw the photo, the fork steerer tube is about 5mm too short for the stem. So off came one of my 5mm spacers to bring it all back in spec.
Everything's back together. And while there's still a few milimeters of bolt protruding, it's nothing like it had been. A minute in front of the bench grinder will take care of the the rest, ensuring a flush finished product.

So, it appears that the fork steerer was either cut too short or that the assembly factory put one too many spacers in the box. I didn't assemble this bike, an over-zealous temp employee who was helping out at the old company did so. Regardless, it's much better.

Thanks to Angelo at Ritchey Logic for pointing out what should have been obvious to this hack.

2 comments:

Doubledrumlin said...

In fact, if that is a carbon steerer, we here at The Borg Collective like to see a 5mm shim ABOVE AND BELOW the stem in some situation. Above to prevent crushing from overtightening as in your case (I'm not sure of the exact conditions that this is recommened but the point is to not crush the carbon steerer). The shim below the stem is always recommened to avoid a stress riser between the stem and headset.

Green Laker said...

Thanks for the tip KVH!