 one of those things is we could put on one of those adjustable stems that could get you your i would get trolled to death just absolute dickhead just ridiculous how could you not be thinking thousands of dollars you're gonna get in your fork in your bike what are you gonna need you don't even know because you don't even know much about bikes and you pretend to stupid youtube channel so i have been heckled in the comments a lot recently and rightfully so after my recent bike fit with nil stanbury the expert bike fitter who's been on the channel a fair bit recently we lowered my handlebars by 10 millimeters leaving what was essentially a 20 millimeter chimney on top of the bmc team machine and some of the comments i received from people out there were as follows including people really getting behind the heckling liking the comments and some people even throwing out a good old fashioned riddle chimneys on bmc stems are not cool and won't get you a super nice you're leaving me hanging captain pug wash but i get it 20 millimeters is not a good look and the reason why i left it there for so long and this is where the irony comes into the story what could potentially be a monster stuff up you see i was waiting for some new cranks to get installed on the bmc team machine at my local bike shop trilogy cycles and i've been waiting some time for these parts to arrive so the chimney has been present on the bmc team machine for quite some time however now that i've cut it off this is where i may have just wrecked my bmc team machine as it stands today for my purposes anyway you're a bloody flaming guy that's what you've turned into a girl now i know what some of you may be thinking all want answers to surely i would know if i've completely cocked this up before shooting this video but i don't yet know and there's some interesting technical detail i'll share with you shortly you see i was getting new cranks installed on the bmc team machine which were the 165 millimeter quark cranks replacing the old 172.5 millimeter cranks and this was completed directly before i asked dylan from trilogy cycles to knock the top off the chimney so you now might be starting to figure this out the cranks have a 7.5 millimeter differential so i'm actually going to have to move the seat up and it could be more than 7.5 millimeters which i'll explain for you why shortly so essentially what i've done in one hit is i've moved the back end of the bmc the seat up and i've chopped off the front so the front's gone down and the back's gone up and this is where the giant dickhead move comes into place now before we narrow in on this mistake let's briefly discuss the chimney and the unwritten rules surrounding the amount of length that you should leave and really this gets broken into two parts the first part is the section below the handlebar and from what i've seen in online forums and speaking with nil stanbury the expert bike fitter you really don't want more than 30 millimeters of spaces below the handlebars otherwise you start to compromise the bike's intended handling and number two above the handlebars so this is where the chimney comes into play and where we're going to narrow in on things a little bit more now once again i had to turn to online forums because i couldn't find any reputable cycling websites that talked about this topic in detail i could be wrong and if i am please share some links below so i turned to a very well known forum pulling up the very popular weight weenies forum and there i found quite a number of mixed opinions and views in this post the gentleman is asking the question of his 35 millimeter chimney on top of the cervello r5 which is quite a beast and people responded with cut it some people say leave five millimeter and some people are saying leave more and one bloke says be careful not to cut your finger off so to add to this let's hear what keith the store owner of trilogy cycles has to say on this topic so we're just discussing the appropriate chimney height what do you reckon mate look in my opinion a slam stand does look sexy yes the reality of it is when you slam a stand your resell value drops unless you're selling for someone who's going to be exactly sized the same as you are right i personally prefer leaving five ten more space on top mate right gives you something to play with what most of your customers do i leave a bit of gap on top five ten yeah so what do you reckon we leave here five or just what do you reckon we slam it i reckon leave ten mate that would be that'd be my advice bike fits are also something that evolved yes your position on the bike could change you've slammed the stand you want to go back up because you're finding shoulder pain compliance yeah complaints you can't do that very good point so i'd leave a 10 now if i can add another layer on this before we can make an educated assumption about what's right and what's wrong when i first purchased the bmc team machine i had the handlebars higher leaving me with 10 millimeters on top which left me with a more relaxed position given my goals at the time were for a 267 kilometer bike race called the melbourne to warnable and a relaxed fit for this bike race was ideal now before i dropped the handlebars running the 10 millimeter chimney i didn't receive any heckling in the comment section on youtube and if you look with the close eye within the propellant and also within experience cycling groups you'll see that 10 millimeters seems to be acceptable but i think if there's anything over that 10 millimeter barrier yes you're helping with your resale and de-risking the potential of extreme position changes due to whatever reason however aesthetically it's not a good look so before we narrow in on my crank conundrum let's do a chimney summary and let me preface this as it will depend on how much space is left below the handlebars but as a general rule of thumb a chimney 10 millimeters or more there's lots of room for resale there's plenty of flexibility if your position changes but expect chimney heckling if it's 10 millimeters you've got reasonable room for resale most likely enough flexibility for position changes not an ideal look but little to no chimney heckling five millimeters limited room for resale questionable if there's enough flexibility if your position changes but it is aesthetically pleasing to the eyeball zero millimeters good luck selling your stuffed if your position changes but very aesthetically pleasing to the eyeball so there you have it now what i ended up doing was going with the five millimeter option which is more aesthetically pleasing and gives me a little bit of flexibility but when i made this decision what my intention originally was was to put this five millimeter spacer below reason being i could completely squash the chimney hecklers with a zero millimeter chimney and number two i have recently lost quite a fair bit of flexibility because training is less of a focus as we speak and i felt raising the handlebars would take some pressure off my neck and shoulders but as you now know before we cut the chimney off to suit my current position with marginal room for any significant position changes dylan from trilogy cycles installed the new cranks on my bike and i was simply not thinking i was just too focused on cameras and content at the time yep i know so the 172.5 millimeter cranks were converted to 165 following the change of cranks i got home and i emailed nil stanbury to inform him that i had the new cranks on the bike and he responded telling me to raise my seat by five millimeters to accommodate the crank changes god damn it but some of you may be asking why five millimeters if the crank length change is 7.5 millimeters i was certainly thinking that it was something that i dug into with nil over the phone only last night and he explains that it comes down to my hip impingement and what effect the new cranks will have on my hip rotation he said he typically gets clients to start at five millimeter increase in seat height but it could be up to a 10 millimeter increase in seat height so we've knocked off and i really wish i kept the piece but at the time i wasn't thinking this was going to happen just over 15 millimeters off the stirritude and i just may have to raise my seat 10 millimeters when all i left at the front was five millimeters for when cam becomes inflexible which is inflexible cam right now which may just mean i might need to start doing a fair bit of yoga to ensure i don't have to go to extreme measures to rectify this silly move now this all happened on monday this week and today it is wednesday and my wife is currently away which means i have the kids so i have not been able to get outside and test the new cranks the seat position changes etc and all i've done at this stage is jump on the trainer for 20 minutes and the trainer is too hard to tell what is actually going on i really need to get outside and it's going to be probably another 48 hours before i'm able to do so i'm really assess what's going on here have i really messed things up so i think we've all learned a lesson today haven't we well i certainly have anyway and this clearly isn't the end of the story so there will be a follow-up piece to this to conclude with what i need to do to either salvage the chimney chop or whether i've actually dodged a bullet so if you're interested in learning where this goes and if you haven't already subscribed make sure you do a below and hit the bell notification to ensure you get notified when i publish a video i'm going to be on to this topic very quickly and to conclude this video what i want to do is leave on a positive note because it hasn't been very easy for me to express or articulate myself here because it's a bit of a silly move but it's a move we should all be aware of what i'm going to leave you with here is some scenes on sundays i take my kids when mummy's out doing her sunday run we go to the local noosa farmers market it's considered to be an essential service we go there we have a bite to eat and get some fresh food it's a great place to be i'll catch you all in the next video