All-road/Gravel bike custom geometry help

[snguyen268]

Originally Posted by madsciencenow

To the OP, curious how tall you are. I also noticed the stack and reach numbers and based on your saddle height you have really long arms and maybe torso? I use the same numbers on my road and gravel bike for stack and reach and I'm 172ish cm tall. My saddle height is always set around 69.3 cm and saddle to bar drop is about 4-5 cm. I know this doesn't tell the whole story but your numbers seem even more extreme than mine by an appreciable amount. Seems like you are going to have be in a pretty aggressive position relative to your height which you may or may not find you like for gravel riding. Not sure you'd find a bike you could rent to get your numbers but might be worth trying before having a custom frame made and then finding out you hate the position.

So I am 172cm tall, 83cm inseam, 62cm arm length, 137.5cm total body length. Not sure where these numbers fall on the distribution but my fitter said I have longer arms than average?

The geometry of the gravel bike copies over my current road bike set up (is that sufficient? or I need to search for a gravel bike with that geometry?). What I mean is that the saddle to handlebar reach on my road bike is the same as shown in the geometry and the stack is the same as well. The only difference is that reach is 378mm on my road bike + 120mm stem while it is 403mm reach + 100mm stem on the "longer" version of gravel bike. I honestly have been surprised by how aggressive my position is but I haven't felt
major discomfort on ~4hrs road rides. Not sure if that is of any value? Do you think I should still consider going less aggressive? I am planning to do more 5-6 hrs ride this summer to make sure there is no problem but I feel like it's hard with really long rides to know if some soreness is just inevitable or indicative of wrong-fit? For the records, though I have felt some soreness on my back at times during my 4-6 hours ride, the sensation goes away if I just get off of the saddle and stretch for a couple seconds and I have never finished a ride with back pain.

Originally Posted by fredd

As for the crankset, I'd go with Ultegra over the Rotor. Yes the Rotor is lighter and arguably looks nicer, but Shimano rings shift significantly better than Rotor ones IME. And Rotor's 4 bolt spider won't really take Shimano rings, which is deeply annoying.

Perfect! Yeah, I should just stick with ultegra. I have never used Rotor crankset before so good to know about the shifting experience. I was just on a weight-weenie mode for the past couple days looking at Rotor but I don't think it's worth the $500-600 extra.