Long chainstay's rule!
My Rodriguez everything bike has 20 inch stays. I can definitely confirm the bikes mellow character. So much is made of steering rake & trail numbers and their effect on handling. What few people understand is the righting action of the tiller effect of the ground going by acting on the rear wheel.
I don't know the exact engineering term used to define the distance from the steering axis to the contact patch of the rear wheel but the effect is real. Longer bikes do indeed ride more stable, have milder manners for a given trail number.
Maybe we're both outliers.
The end of Garcia road by
Richard Mozzarella, on Flickr
If shorter were
always better, as many armchair bike designers seem to claim, we'd all be on unicycles!
