Surly Bike Owners

The Gorilla cages mount to std bottle boss positioning (64mm between bosses)

straggler owners, what size are you riding? I'm short 5'5" - with longer legs vs torso (female proportions)

at 5'5" you are not really that short

no I'm regular height for a female. I just feel short, relative to the world....

But they are frigging expensive!

I'm 1.82 which should be about 6'-0", am riding 56cm with 100 stem, and +1.5cm forward on the saddle. Could probably do with a 110stem

My wife is about your height and she rides a 52cm straggler, but it's too big.

Good to know. I'm leaning towards the 50cm. Do you have a pic of her setup?

Excuse the weird set up. I'm persuading her to ride with a higher saddle, which she's not used to, but open to. I'd say the seatpost can go up another inch and I need to adjust the drops and move Levers back I think. But you an see it's large for her - that's a 60mm stem and the saddles pretty far forward.

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A compact handlebar would do wonders to riding position of this bike, the current one seems to have quite a long reach.

Not much choice in silver / 31.8mm clamp, but I was tempted to try some Soma Highways which I think would be a more compact size. Worth a try, certainly.

Pulling kids on this one... max capacity of three in at the back (two in the seats and one behind)

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I did a quick mapping of the 46 (blue), 50 (red) and 52 (green) to visualize the differences...(http://www.bikegeo.net/; stack is off as there is no input for seat tube length)

Not a lot of difference between the 50 vs 52 (3mm reach vs 20ish)....so maybe our collective size would actually be 46?

hmmm...

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Just go with a black one. It's almost entirely covered by bar tape anyway and she'll get a lot more options.

The Surly sizes are pretty strange. It it mostly stack/head tube length that changes with the sizes. I´m 5´6´´ and figure I could ride anything from a 42, 46 and 50 in the same position without anything looking to crazy. Well, the 42 would have some goofy rise stem. A 52 cm would also work.

Super strange. What do size do you ride?

It is really strange. Surlys come is lots of different sizes, but they are all the same size... I don´t actually ride a Surly, but min CX bike is inbetween the 46 cm and the 50 cm.

In the sizes that you probably are looking at, the main difference will be how many spacers you leave under the stem. If you pick a smal size and want a high stack, you will have lots of spacers under the stem (unless you by a compleate bike with the sterer cut to low...). If you by a larger bike and want a really low stack, then you need a strange stem.

Ah! that's really useful, nice one! Yeah it does look that way, doesn't it? She reckons the reach is fine on it as it is now, but i reckon if we'd gone with 46, she'd find it more comfortable.

@MisterMikkel that's a good point. i may just reinstate the bars we had on it before, which were fine. "Make it shiny!" she says :-)

I know the feeling!
And there's a subtlety to balancing silver and black components, but in the end, what good is a bike if it doesn't feel good to ride?

Maybe get an inline seatpost rather than summat with offset. And as @MisterMikkel says black bars offers up many choices, if yer good lady isn't fussed about a traditional curved bar have a look at Ritchey venturemax comp, just got some, lovely shape, many hand positions, flared and slight sweep back on the flat.

46 it is!
do you think this is the cheapest frameset option around?

Looks like a good deal! Buy a shit load of spacers for the fork sterer and dont cut it too short straight away. Riding a Surly is so cool that you can stack any amount of spacers under the stem and still be a beast.

You going 650b then? That's more or less what our (700c) straggler frame was I think.

If anyone has a medium ECR build they want to part with then let me know....

Inline seatpost is a good call. The bars I have spare are compact and comfy and I quite enjoy doing bar tape, so I think I'll swap them over.