Originally Posted by
Polaris OBark
Is there a question being posed, or is this more of an exposition?
Not sure I could give myself credit for an exposition, and I have used a range of stems from fairly long to quite short, but I was curious to see if there could be any sort of a formula or established guideline for determining stem length, so I went online and searched and what I wrote was a brief summary of the information I discovered.
I think a good starting point is to get the seat height and fore/aft position correct, so that you are balanced, and then adjust the stem's length so that your forearms are about 90° from a line drawn through your spine. This implies that the stem length is going to be dependent to some extent on the reach of your bars, brake hood position, etc.
Yes, seat height and adjustment is always the first thing I pay attention to, yet even when that gets done here in my living room it is usually not until after I have put some miles on a bike and have made some minor adjustment tweaks that the seat finally gets into the position it needs to be in.
Then after that comes getting the bars to where I want them. I rode with drop bars for more than a dozen years and eventually found myself spending nearly all of my time with my hands on the tops of the bars, so I switched over and experimented with a number of different styles of flat bars and my favorites became the 48mm Velo Orange Porteur bars which are somewhat like drop bars but without the drops.
Along with experimenting with bars came experimenting with stem lengths. Long story short, I found my bikes get along nicely and I get along nicely with shorter stems and 50 or 60mm is about right for the both of us. But I was curious as to whether there could be a 'best' stem length, which led to my searching online.