Robvolz 

My bike: 1975 Colnago super. Frame is my size. Seat post height seems right, knees not locked, good power, no pain.

stem is 120 cm reach

With your hands on the upper part of the bars, or even the brake hoods, look down to your front hub…..

-should the hub behind the handlebars?
-Should the handlebars block vision to the hub?
-should the hub appear in front of the handlebars?

What is ideal?

Thanks all
Robert

Iride01 

If you aren't having any issues, then any of those might be "ideal".

You are falling for a old adage that has a lot of popularity but really isn't how you should decide if something fits or whether you need to change stems.

ljsense

They used to say that the handlebar should block the view of the front hub when you're riding on the hoods. Maybe they still do.

I don't know how much value that advice has in general, but it's been true for me with bikes that fit.

79pmooney

I've found that with the same forward lean and therefore hip angle and shoulder location, I can swing my arms in an arc and for a perhaps 6-8" distance, my comfort and performance varies very little. Conveniently, that is closely approximated by adding 1 cm of headset spacer or quill height to every 2 cm long horizontally I go with the stem. Figured this out 30 years ago. Huge help in bike fitting.

But, you can quickly see that a shorter, lower stem is going to place the bars back in relation to the front hub view while a long and higher stem will bring the bars forward relative to the hub's view. I've run both on the same bike. Low and close feels classic track/criterium/race. High and forward, TT, all day upwind comfort and a nice stretch going up hard hills. But no bells, whistles or podium spots happen when I nail the bars hiding the hub. That's (usually) just an intermediate position that works. (Usually because on some bikes the hidden hub happens at one of the extremes.)

Edit: being of "normal" proportions means more bikes will have the hidden hub happening with "ordinary" stems lengths and heights while the rest of one's fit is "good". I am an outlier and seeing the hub behind the bars is pretty normal on bikes set up right for me.

Robvolz 

I find my hands getting numb on the pads. I thought my vintage leather gloves with the "no pad to speak of" were the culprit and tried some new specialized gloves with double padding, kind of like double stuffed Oreos.

Problem 1; new gloves are a slick material and hard to grip my mid-70s Bike Ribbon white bar wrap
Problem 2; now gripping harder because of frightened of losing bar grip. Last time that happened to me, my flaying about had me grab my front brake cable and that's why I have implants for front teeth.

I lowered my seat post a whisker, probably losing the optimal power stroke, but all of a sudden my hands felt better.

I see the hub behind the bars, (I see how that can be confusing).

OK, front to back, bars then hub.

My stem is pantographed "colnago" (oh the vanity) and didn't really want to change it, but I think 120 might be a tad too long.

Have you looked at Panto prices lately?? Silly. Nitto I go.

Thanks for the advise. I am aware we are all different and what works for one might not work for all.

Robert

Iride01 

I find that padding only delays the inevitable result for a time if I'm using poor hand positions. And not for very long either. Conversely, less padding seems to help even when I am using poor hand positions. Maybe because it encourages me to change positions more often.

Since you say it's a old vintage bike then I'm assuming it's the old type brake levers that don't have a hand position. And likely you keep you hands on the top of the horizontal bar. A few things things might help there. Only wrap your fingers around the bar and don't let your palm rest on the bar. Especially don't let your wrist bend much if any at all. If your hands are in the drops or on the part of the tops running forward to the shift lever, then only rest the part of your palm just behind your thumb on the top of the bar.

Keeping a big bend in your elbow also helps if your bike fit is such for that. If your bike fits such that your arms are angled front of you and you are stretched out then straighter arms are okay. But anytime your arms are perpendicular to you and fairly straight going to the bars, then that's bad for lots of things as well as hand numbness.

For the most part, just make sure you don't bend your wrist backwards and don't put the rear half of your palm on the bar.

If you yourself are old too, then maybe your hand muscles are losing mass and getting weaker. It takes quite a while, but squeezing on those springy things to improve my grip seems to have helped me some. Being older and retired and not one to exercise everything I should I find through the years that I've gotten various aches and pains while riding when nothing else has changed. Exercising the muscle groups for that area, many times solves the issue without any bike changes.

oldbobcat

A bogus fit "rule." Set the saddle height and setback for pedaling efficiency and balance over the feet when pushing down on the pedals. Set the handlebar reach and height to where your hands want to find the brake hoods when sitting at your preferred back angle, with slightly bent elbows. If you were to get a profile photo, you could form an angle at the shoulders from the back angle to the brake hoods. For most of us this angle is about 90 degrees.

Kontact 

The hub rule was in the drops. I don't know how you apply it if all bikes your size don't have the same front center.

zandoval 

I remember when I was on the hoods the hub view was blocked by my drops and when in the drops the hub view was behind the bars. As I get older and need a more comfortable ride the hub view is slowly creeping forward of the bars.

I know its not an exact science but some of the old rules used to hold true.

Like the top bar grazing your crotch when standing flat on the ground.

And your middle finger just touching the bars when your elbow is on the nose of your seat.

And the sound of your spokes having an even tone when holding a small stick to them. Equal in tone on each side of the front wheel and at the back a lower tone on the non-drive side.

In my book these things still have some importance on older bikes. I certainly have no idea what things hold true on newer bikes and their bailiwick...

oldbobcat

And the handlebar stem should be level with the saddle.

The shop owner who put me on my first bike had the perspicacity to ignore them. After a couple years of riding I began to understand why, and then I broke more of them.

Kontact 

Why so high?

oldbobcat

It was 1970. The friends who got me into cycling were AYH tourist types. Eugene Sloane's "Complete Book of Bicycling" was our bible, and that was his rule. Also, the Whole Earth Catalog. Sloane also gave us the elbow-to-the-fingertip saddle-to-the handlebar rule, and setting the saddle to lowered crank distance to 108 percent of inseam. If I had followed those rules, I've have been riding a 25" Raleigh with an 80 cm stem. It took me a couple of years to figure out why I was perfectly comfortable with 2-3 inches of drop--long arms.

Kontact 

I have that book. Wasn't Sloane talking about touring bikes?

oldbobcat

In terms of the bikes themselves, that distinction hardly existed in the '60s until 1970 or so. Racing bikes were built with eyelets and clearances for winter training tubulars and fenders. Non-racers mounted racks on them, changed the gearing, and bought clincher wheels. Schwinn may have differentiated early with touring and racing Paramounts, Raleigh was starting to differentiate with its Professional and International, and there were custom French touring and randonneur bikes. But in those days I saw Internationals and Peugeot PX-10s set up for touring and racing. It was understood that budding racers would be getting guidance on technique and equipment from their ABL of A racing clubs.

Iride01 

At any rate, The Whole Earth Catalog didn't know about bike design and fit beyond the 90's. And one might wonder if the very occasional printing it had beyond the early 70's even knew about bikes made in the late 70's, 80's and beyond or the newer ideas of fit.

ClydeClydeson

There is no logical way that the location of the hub wrt your handlebar and eyes can be generalized across different bike designs. A bike with a long top tube and slack head angle would have the hub visible in a very different location than a bike with a short TT and steep head angle, if both bikes have stem lengths selected for the same reach.

People, too, all have different requirements, preferences and flexibility, so a bike with a particular layout might be fine for one person and totally unacceptable for another.

Kontact 

Maybe, but a very long time ago the geometry of touring bikes developed to allow stability with fork panier loads, and that isn't something a racing bicycle in the last 60 years would have had.

Sloane's book was updated in the '80s when I bought it, so I don't think he was stuck in 1959 with bike set up.

oldbobcat

I was working with an edition from around 1970 when I started. Road bicycles were not as differentiated. Professional bike fitting did not exist. Mass-market touring bikes did not exist except for the lowly Peugeot UE-8, a U0-8 fitted with fenders, rack, and lights. One of my classmates toured with his family but never brought his bike to school. I finally saw it at commencement, a PX-10 with training tubulars, a Pletscher rack in back and a small rack mounted on the front brake bolt. Handlebar bags came in various sizes. Front panniers were practically unheard of. We were students and custom tourers by Rene Herse were off the map. A lot changed over the '70s.

I bought my first bike in early spring 1971 and thoroughly wrecked my knees by fall. That's when I parted ways with Eugene Sloane. An old ex-racer opened a shop in my parents' neighborhood in '72. He was half-crazy but by the next summer he got me into cleated shoes and spinning. We'd chase each other around town after work under street lights, and I was riding to work almost every day. By late summer I was fit enough to ride a hilly century and then take a girl out on a date. Back at school I joined a training group and started racing in the spring of '73. It was primitive. To learn about fit, technique, and gluing tubulars, we just emulated the older guys.

oldbobcat

The idea of the Whole Earth Catalog was to show you where to find resources for getting started in a new activity. It was not meant to be a bible. Of course, some contributors, especially in the "Nomadics" section, would get carried away with authoritativeness. And in bicycling the resources were mighty slim if you didn't live in a large coastal city. Try the Boy Scouts of America bicycling merit badge handbook and newsletters from the AYH and LAW. If you happened to fall in with an amateur racing club there was the newsletter from the ABL of A. And the older riders.

Iride01 

Yeah, I missed your reference to the other book, "Complete Book of Bicycling".

Still, the viewing of the front hub lining up with the bars isn't a good way to tell anyone if they fit on their bike. The better way is to ask themselves if they are having some issues of pain or not being able to achieve some metric that they think is within their physical ability. If yes to either, then that's when to figure out what is wrong to solve that.

And if no to both, then definitely quit reading old adages to imagine one needs a bike fit.

cyclezen

Hub viewing is a boring activity with no relevance at all; back in the day or now.
It needs burial, but will likely remain a zombie, along with snake-oil politicians....
On the positive side, putting your attention to what's ahead is a surefire way to reduce the possibility of unwanted incidents.
I live near UCSB, and the number of cell phone zombies in the student population is a discouraging and alarming majority...
Ride On
Yuri