Repairing steerer on Raleigh International

[raleighnut]

Buy a shorter stem.

 

[digital domestique]

The "deformation" you found is the butted bottom of the steer tube. Your stem should NOT be tightened with the bottom of the quill the far down, as it will not tighten properly, work its way up into the wider part pf the steerer, and your bars and stem can come out of the head tube....

I DO ride short frames (51-52 cm ST, CTT) and CANNOT drop a quill stem very far down the steer tube on any of them.

You could change your stem to one without an internal wedge at the bottom, which would make shortening it somewhat easier. (I have had to shorten several Nitto Technomic stems from their stock 225mm quill height to 180-190mm because of the same issue: I need a taller stem but do not have the steerer length to use one with a 225mm quill height.)

Jon and Chris were correct! Short head tube so that the stem ran into the butting.

Since the stem wasn't tapered internally for the wedge, I quickly marked off 20mm and cut it cleanly with my hacksaw. That's when the "Oh fooey!" moment hit the fan as the trimmed pieces fell away to clearly show the 10 degree taper that I missed. Oh intercourse! Twenty minutes of inventorying every home cutting tool I'd ever seen left me at "Oh Duck!, I'm goosed." Well, as is often true, procrastination sounded good, so I grabbed a mill file to clean up the cut a little before stepping away for the night. With the file in hand, it occurred to me to compare the tapered tip of the file to the wedge... Holy cowpie! They were a perfect match, for both angle and size. So, after grinding a 45degree countersink to start, I just twisted the file in the stem to form the taper. Worked a charm. Took an hour, but it would have taken that long to find a replacement stem on ebay, with the high risk of bidding on something expensive.