Originally Posted by
RollCNY
Robert,
I appreciate you trying to share my experience, but you are not doing it well. I have short legs, long torso, and long arms, and my fitting style corresponds to C4L's. He is long legged, so he sizes taller for his height. I am short legged, so I size down for my height. He finds "endurance geometry" head tube lengths comfortable, where I find them unfavorably long.
I use short head tubes and high amount of saddle to bar drop to achieve a comfortable reach. The bike I tour on has about 5.5" of saddle to bar drop and a 120mm stem. My hybrid had about 4.5" of drop and a 130mm stem.
There was a thread some time ago that nicely pointed out the differences in people's proportion. It asked about the best way to tighten a rear QR skewer. My answer was to push down on the saddle with your chest, hold the lever in one hand, tighten the nut with the other, and flip the lever open and closed as you go. I quickly found out how few people can reach both sides of their rear axle in that position, and all sorts of people who have never met me told me that my saddle was definitively too low. Proportions obviously vary.
With the OP being close to "normal" morphology, assuming his measurements are correct, I would size frame conventionally, and get dialed in with seat post setback and stem length. I am no expert, but his numbers don't seem highly disproportionate.
Roll
I am horribly embarrassed. And I am painfully aware that this is not the first time I have made the mistake. I could have sworn that you were both long in the legs and the arms and short in the torso. I was sure that I remembered that your case was an example of doing something unusual, but what you are describing now seems quite normal, the same thing that would have been arrived at by just standing over the top tube in the old days. For some reason I keep thinking that there is a growing interest in a counterintuitive sizing method these day. I guess that prejudice is what keeps me making this same mistake. Must be all in my head. I apologize to all concerned for the misinformation. In future I will just put this topic off limits for any replies by me.