Originally Posted by
mstateglfr
Your bike with MTB tires and a suspension fork was too jarring? You prefer steel because you have very limited experience and what you have works for you. A preference without experience has limited value.
You declared a wildly ill fitting MTB was the perfect fit for you and now claim your next bike is perfect fitting. Its as if you dont know much yet.
A quality new aluminum frame weighs less than a quality vintage steel frame.
A size 56 CAAD12 frame weighs just under 1100g. A size 56 531 road frame from 40 years ago would have weighed 1850g +/- 100g.
That is a significant difference in frame weight.
Your GT bike does not weigh 20#. Add 10# to that.
A Norco Monterey SL was nicer than the standard Monterey, but it was not 'a very high quality frame'. It was a good mid-range general road frame.
I weighed the GT at exactly 21lb. That was with the suspension post which weighs almost 2 pounds. Obviously if I had to use over 100mm of spacers, stem risers, a riser stem, riser handlebar... It not a good fit.
My current Norco is just about maxed out for me in terms of standover clearance. Some other 64cm frames out there actually won't fit me at all. I'd have to go with around 62cm or 61 depending on the bike.
The reach on the norco is well on the short side, and the stack at roughly 640mm is about the best ill get unless we're talking about a newer bike which has a sloped top tube. Plus, thanks to my tall quill stem and riser bars, the stack is plenty high enough.
so how much better of a fit can I possibly get? Pretty much any bike i find out there with sufficient stsndover clearance will have either a very similar or even more drawn out stack to reach ratio than what i already have. Plus, being threadless, the stem won't be very high up.
I understand that jts the reach which determines how the bike fits when pedalling out of the saddle, and the ETT which determines the fit inside the saddle - both of these measures feel super comfortable to me and the power transfer is effective.
In the future, id get something with a slightly shorter reach so that my butt hovers more directly over the saddle when pedalling standing up, and then I won't need to have such a high stack.
I think I have a good understanding by this point of what I need in terms of fit.