Chris and I were scratching our heads with recent stem sales.
Just about every order leaves VO Imports and Velo Orange with a new threadless stem and usually an adaptor so it can fit 1" threaded forks. We picked a great couple of products and are not complaining.
What I thought would be unrelated news, it seems our Nitto stems are a little off. This makes us wonder if we should even bother to persue a quill stem from Taiwan. Mold costs are not cheap- we would be on the hook for a mold for each stem extension and quill length. The minimum order per extension and quill length will be prolly 100-300pc. I believe there is a need for a decent quailty quill stem in a full range of sizes (50-120mm in 2 quill lengths) like you would find in a Cinelli 1A or Nitto Technomic. Something cold forged, with stainless bolts and an alloy wedge. Nothing special, just a nice intrinsic value.
Staring at 10's of thousands of dollars of mold costs (and these would be actual cold forging molds, not just the 'mold cost' euphemism bandied about asia for tooling and fixturing costs), plus being on the hook for thousands of dollars in inventory does not make it attractive for little ol' VO Imports. There may be some OE business from Riv or Soma, but I'm hesitant to talk to them until there's some more due diligence on our part.
I guess you can argue that the threadless stem with adaptor is of the French Tradition, or at least a classic on-topic CR list method of attaching your handlebars to the rest of the bike. Rene Herse, Jack Taylor and Pino Moroni all used a similar system on occasion.
So who knows. I'm sure there's plenty of other places to sink our new product development dollars into. Maybe a stem should be left alone. Nitto doesn't need competition- they make a great product at a decent price.
11 comments:
How about a fillet-brazed quill stem from Nitto?
What about it? I'm not sure what you mean. The Nitto fillet brazed stem is quite hard to get. There are similar Taiwan versions. The pricing of both are not cheap. I don't see the advantage of a filled brazed stem coming out of Taiwan. We would still be on the hook for tooling and fixturing costs, and the order qtys would not be any less- hundreds per size. The pricing would be a premium above a forged alloy stem.
I'm interested in the fillet-brazed version of the nitto lugged stem. Kind of a production version of a custom Singer stem.
It looks as though people value the convenience of the front-opening stem over the good looks of the quill. The threadless stem and quill adapter combination is certainly the most versatile option - the easy height adjustability of a quill stem with the easy change of bars (or stem length) that threadless provides. Aesthetics is the only downside, and the VO product is certainly among the best of a bad bunch. It would look better if the stem clamp and the bit of the adapter it clamps to were the same height, though.
I tend to agree that quill stems wouldn't be a good business decision. What would you be offering that people can't get from the Nitto Technomic or Tech. Deluxe? If there isn't a persuasive answer to that question I'd stay out.
Longleaf said what I was thinking--if you have an idea of how to make it better (or perhaps less expensive and just as good) compared to Nitto, that would be a reason to do it. If it's just a duplicate, save your efforts for areas in which a good product is not yet available.
fmackay mentions the convenience of a front-opening handlebar clamp. There's no reason a quill stem couldn't have that feature.
Designing an open face quill stem that looks elegant is hard.
anyone know an ID type engineer?
Nitto made one for mtn bikes, Cinelli, TTT, and a few others made them in the past, but they were all ugly in my opinion.
I'm happy with Nitto's quill stems. Unless you came up with something really cool, like a stem with a cable stop for center pull brakes, I'd just keep buying Nitto.
I'd rather see VO's resources go into making the threadless stem available in different rise/drop angles. It's the nicest threadless stem I've owned, but I wish there were more options.
I really like the look of the current VO aheadstems. I guess you should be able to get different rises, which would be key for me; I like Torelli's Bormio stem, but it's only available in black.
Remember that Deda (Murex) and Nitto (Pearl/Technomic types) both still have nice quill stems in their lines. I think that there are still enough quill stems to go around.
I agree that most open face quills don't look great. They're no worse than threadless stems, but there's a different expectation for each genre. It would make the most sense, I think, to do a single bolt bar clamp, a streamlined cast clamp (simpler than the Nitto/Riv lugged stem). An elegant steel stem would offer something that the Technomics and Dynamics don't. There would be some performance appeal (it would be lighter, stiffer, no creaks, more durable than an alloy quill); but I admit a lot of the appeal would be aesthetic, which is ok too.
m. white
A classic cold forged quill stem with generous rise and 31.8 clamp would eliminate all the adaptin shimin boltin shenanagans.
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