When I finally ordered the frame, I was perfectly willing to fly out to Montana and visit Carl. I figured the ideal thing to do would be to head over there, have him personally measure me, and head out on a ride with him so he could observe the riding style. Yeah – that would be ideal. From what I can tell, if I showed up at Carl’s doorstep, I’m sure he would personally measure me, and timer permitting, he’d probably head out for a spin too. But let’s be realistic. I never even brought any of that up. I did ask him if people ever book a flight out and see him, and his response was something like, “that doesn’t really happen.”The measuring was problematic for me. I put on my cycling shorts (bibs) and had my wife measure me a few times and averaged the measurements. It’s problematic because these things are somewhat imprecise. If you’re holding your arms out at a 45 degree angle, unless you have a rig that sets your arm at that position, you’re not really at 45 degrees. On the other hand, I’ve heard many a story about people going in for the Serrotta fit kit system and using a couple of shops. It seems that even with a rig to do all the measuring you’re still going to get different results and these stories I hear about that system turn up differing results based on the shop you use. Just goes to making my point that these things are variable, that the interpretation of where a measurement starts (at the front, middle or end of a bone for example) is definitely subject ot interpretation.
In the end, I measured several times, measured the bike several times and was finally comfortable enough to submit my stats to Carl. He called me back about the bike measurements and told me they made no sense and had me remeasure a couple of things while on the phone with him (lucky I work from home sometimes and could do that). Turns out that even measuring a couple of times, I got one of them wrong – I think it was the stem drop.
After than, Carl and I had another conversation about my body measurements. Turns out I got one of those wrong too. Based on my measurements, I would have been a 6 foot tall guy with normal legs and a huge torso – must have had a really bad slouch or something. At any rate, my wife remeasured me and we came up with a better, more reasonable statistic. I don’t know what software Carl uses to plug all this into, or if he’s just doing it by eye and experience, but by the end of the process, I was pretty comfortable that we were plenty close enough to move forward. My gut says that if you want better results though, head into a bike shop with some sort of a fit system. Even if the results differ from one shop to another, it should not be that different, and if it’s off by too much, Carl will know.
Here are the measurements for me and the current (non-Strong) bike. (click for full sized image)
