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.

One Imperfect Thing

Tom Ritchey's eponymous brand makes some pretty nice bike components, along with innovative folding bikes that don't look like circus escapees. Ritchey components are widely-spec'd in the bike industry - they're light, functional, relatively attractive, and, (the key part for cheapskate product managers without a house brand to fall back on) - affordable.

I've had plenty of bikes with Ritchey seatposts, handlebars and stems over the years. All have performed admirably, even if they weren't labeled with the trendiest brand.

However, I'm really tired of cutting my left knee open on this:
The upper stem pinch bolt. Sure, I'm not the most-graceful rider (after all, it is kind of hard to be graceful when you're 73.5" of pure lankiness with a healthy dollop of clumsiness) but still, think of our knees spec a *slightly* shorter bolt here, Tom.

I've put a list together of the parts I want to swap out - this stem, as well another Ritchey stem on my cyclocross bike top the list.