Of course, when you’re choked up on the bars, where I seem to be most of the time when riding distances, your weight is moved forward and further away from the pivot and you can really feel the stem working its magic. I did find that there is still a little bit of relief when riding the sweeps as the direction of impact when the front wheel strikes an object is up and backward, not just straight up. Because of all the hand positions that are available with the Jones Bar, there are times when my hand position would be close to if not behind the pivot point of the stem. Since I run a Jones Bar, which has a ton of sweep, I was curious as to how the stem would work. The stem works best with a flat or drop bar. Stem adjustments could be done on the trail, but it would mean removing the bar and using the provided wedge removal / installation tool. There is an included weight chart with elastomer recommendations, but I find that there are often too many variables for these charts to be useful. I’d recommend this to anyone deciding to try this stem, as you need to feel how the stem reacts to the terrain you’re riding on before you can truly know if it needs to be stiffened or softened. These live within the stem body itself so the bars need to be removed for access.Īfter reading a bit about the different durometers and combinations, I decided to just run the stem with the stock bumpers installed and take it from there. The package includes various elastomer bumpers, of various durometers (hardnesses) that can be combined to increase or decrease the stiffness of the stem. The stem arrived and I checked out the instructions on how to change the elastomers. In retrospect, I feel like I should have gone with the +-6°. To account for this, I asked them to send me the stem with a 30° rise so it wouldn’t affect my reach as much. Due to the guts involved in adding travel to a stem, the shortest length offered is 80mm. I run a short 60mm stem on my custom RollingDale Cycles bikepacking rig affectionately named TiMBR. As a purist, it’s a little outside of the box for me but I had heard from other Divide riders, who had run this stem, that it’s a game changer and I was pretty stoked to try it out. I was privileged to receive a Redshift Sports ShockStop Suspension Stem in the mail the other day, thanks to my buddy Jim from MTXC in Missoula, MT and Dylan at Redshift Sports. Never say no to 540 free road calories! GOLD! The only good that came out of that stretch was finding a king size Mars bar that another rider lost due to the seismic vibrations. The washboard leading into Hartsel was relentless however, and trying to find a line through it was futile. Racing the clock and the rain meant that I was pushing hard. I recall hammering to Hartsel, Colorado to try to get to the Saloon in time for a good feeding. That said, there were times when I wished for a reprieve from the insanity of having the shit beaten out of me for hours at a time. The terrain didn’t warrant having inches of front suspension, in my opinion, and I was able to adapt to the hundreds of miles of washboard that I had to navigate. Riding fully rigid on the Divide wasn’t that big of a deal to me. Sure, I realize that having some cushion up front would help take the edge off and that front suspension systems are super reliable these days, but I’m a bit of a purist when it comes to my riding and I wanted to mount stuff to my forks simply, without having to fuck around with different types of mounting systems that just add weight and risk. When I thought about the kind of bikepacking rig I wanted to ride, suspension was something that wasn’t that important to me.
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