Hey folks,
I moved from MTB to Gravel and have been eyeing adding a road bike recently. However, I'm trying to figure out if it's just my bike that has weird sizing or if it's normal to have a large difference between road and gravel sizing?
I have a Cannondale Topstone carbon in Cannondale's medium size. Their geometry table gives the seat tube length as 50.5cm.
Really, the bike is a size too large for me — I should have bought the small. The fit for the legs is okay, but I've had to replace the stem and bars to shorten the reach significantly and raise the bars higher up. The bike just about fits now with the shortest stem I could find (went from 90mm@7deg to 65mm@30deg upwards), but is still maybe a couple of millimeters longer than I would like.
Now trying to figure out the equivalent road bike frame sizes, I hopped on a couple of my friends' bikes to check for fit and I need probably 54 or 56cm on a road bike judging from that. Which seems like a huge difference compared to the 50.5cm seat tube length of my Cannondale, which is too long for me.
What I'm trying to figure out is whether there's something strange about the Cannondale's geometry that is causing such a large difference, whether it's a difference between road and gravel geometry generally, whether I just have weird body dimensions, or if something else is going on altogether?
Here's a link to the geometry table for my frame. I reduced the reach (to the bars, not of the frame obviously) by ~51mm, and raised the bars about 22mm to make it (barely) fit.
by IncidentalIncidence