Converted from quill stem to threadless with an adapter, bought some cheap & colorful headset spacers online. Neither the orange spacers above the stem or the blue/white ones below it seem to stay in place with normal tightening (I don’t want to overtighten). They can be forced around by hand.
Is this a problem of cheap/ill-fitting spacers or something else? I’ve ridden it probably 50+ km with no catastrophic failures thus far lol.
by mybestmonkey
12 Comments
Wrong diameter spacers. Probably need to be 1″. There really shouldn’t be any play side to side like that.
~~Are you using 1 1/4″ stem spacers on a 1″ threadless stem?~~
Post a pic of the quill stem adapter
Looks like those spacers are too large of a diameter for your fork stem.
Do the blue/white spacers happen to be on the narrow/tapered section of your quill stem adapter? If so, there’s not much you can do about that.
And technically you don’t need headset spacers anyway. Headset preload is still handled by the threaded nut+knurled ring.
Usually there’s no need for spacers when using a quill adapter
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Commenting because I have the same problem. I assumed it was just cosmetic though because the quill stem adapter is what’s fixed in place into the headset.
Are the spacers actually required to ensure the stem statys at the correct height? I thought the pinch bolts were enough for that?
Quill stem adapters are only 1 1/8″ the the top of the adapter to allow the threadless stem to clamp on. The bottom section is smaller to fit in the threaded headset. Your spacers are too big.
Keep in mind that headset spacers on a quill adapter *serve no mechanical purpose*, they’re for looks only. You could get smaller diameter ones (1″) that fit better, or you could remove them entirely. It doesn’t matter.
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ufff, you can try to find those to fill the gap in the lower spacers, since the dimension of the adapter is not the same.
https://preview.redd.it/ncth3v562jig1.png?width=435&format=png&auto=webp&s=fc7dcfb0810de0df23cb4577995df70e9bd5b576
They don’t stay in place because they are not made to be there.
What you have there is a 1″ threaded fork which should have a quill stem in but you have frankensteined a shonky quill to threadless adaptor ontro then extended the adaptor and used a bunch of oversized threadless spacers to make your bars higher.
All the money and time that has been spent making a bodge of truly sad proportions could have been avoided if you just bought a higher rise quill stem which as well as looking better and being cheaper would have been significantly safer.
Had you this same question in r/xbiking, one of us would have told you to shim the excess space in the narrow part of the adapter with a bit of a beer/soda can, a bit of an old tube, or some tape. Since the spacers aren’t a mechanical necessity in this case, you can use just about anything you want to fill in the empty space and keep them centered on the stem.