I’ve had drop bars (On-One’s Midge bars) on my mountain bike for a couple of years. Miles at Roseland Cycles (now in Berkeley) sent me this stem, along with some good advice and a CAD drawing of my ideal stem (52°x180mm?). I used it in its shiny silver state, then gave it to a friend and started using an extender and a shorty stem.
Recently my friend gave me back the stem, along with the bike it was attached to. Weird. I may take the sculpture he likes off of Etsy and give it to him on Boxing Day. The bike probably won’t work for my ten year old just yet, but it’s rolling again. When it gets honed a little, I’ll try to cover it in a post. It’s been a busy Fall – I can either mess about with bikes, or blog about messing about with bikes, but not both.
Something I did manage to fit in was painting this stem, since painting bike parts is 9/10 having the space and paint, and 1/10 not really caring how it turns out. I stuck a garden stake in one hole, put the whole thing in a box and shot it with Zinsser 1-2-3 primer. Over a couple days I gave it a couple of coats, then got on it with a can of “Color|Decor” blue 527796 (or cds24) I got at my Wilco Farm Store (Ace Hardware). It’s made by GPM, which has the worst website I’ve seen in a while. Anyway, it matches the front of a 1999 Bontrager Privateer pretty well. Better than the Rock Shox SID fork, at any rate. When that looked pretty well covered, not too runny and not too dusty, I gave it a good coat of Krylon triple-thick crystal Clear Glaze. Probably a triple coat.
So there it is. A little more reach to the bar, and a fairly chunky stem, but the color makes me happy.
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