Yes, you have to use spacers to adjust the height of the stem.
Most frames we sell come with a 1-2 cm headtube extension, and you can safely use up to 4 cm of spacers on a steel steerer (but no more than 2.5 cm on a carbon steerer). With the variety of stems out there, you should easily be able to find one that will allow you to position the bars exactly where you want them.
And you don't cut the steerer until AFTER you've properly fit the bike and positioned the rider ... even then we'll often leave a little wiggle room, by putting a small spacer (0.5-1 cm) above the stem, before tightening down the adjusting cap for the headset ... then if the rider later decides s/he wants to be higher, we can swap the spacer and stem and get the bars back up.
Swapping stems for test rides is a helluva lot easier using stems with bolt-on front caps ... although in this case it makes no difference if it's a quill stem or a clamp-on stem.
No, they're generally not as aesthetic as old-style quill stems ... but they're more convenient to change, they're lighter, generally less prone to flex, more forgiving of variances in bulge diameter (Nitto's 25.4 v. Deda 25.8 v. 3ttt/modern-Cinelli 26.0 v. old-Cinelli 26.4).
That said ... all my bikes use tig-welded steel Interloc quill stems ... the CrossRoads quill which can be seen at:
http://www.interlocracing.com/
--
Steven L. Sheffield stevens at veloworks dot com veloworks at earthlink dot net aitch tee tea pea colon [for word] slash [four ward] slash double-you double-yew double-ewe dot veloworks dot com [four word] slash
> From: Jerry & Liz Moos <moos@penn.com>
> Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 10:51:53 -0400
> To: Huthornton@aol.com
> Cc: classicrendezvous@bikelist.org
> Subject: Re: [CR]Bike technology peaked in the 1984?
>
> Haven't ever owned a threadless stem, old or new. Can someone who actually
> works
> on new stuff confirm or refute my impression that one has to use spacers to
> adjust stem height? Did the old threadless stems have any provision for
> height
> adjustment? To me it is ridiculous to design a component that prevents
> fitting
> the bike to the rider. A threadless stem might be OK on a custom Singer or
> Herse, where the bike and stem were produced to fit the owner, but on massed
> produced bikes, height adjustment is critical. The other problem is that many
> stems now come no shorter than 100mm, probably because small frames with short
> top tubes are in fashion. But if you like to ride larger frames with less
> exposed seatpost, or don't like a stretched out riding position, or happen to
> be
> a typical female with a shorter torso to leg length ratio than a typical male,
> 100mm doesn't work. Stems are just another example of the industry selling us
> what is easiest and most profitable for them to make and to hell with what we
> want or need. Or the ad boys will try to convince us to want whatever they
> make. Thank God for a few companies like Georgina Terry that make short stems
> for women and several other products actually designed to meet customer needs.
>
> Regards,
>
> Jerry Moos
>
> Huthornton@aol.com wrote:
>
>> In a message dated 20/04/01 16:23:04 GMT Daylight Time, bikevint@tiac.net
>> writes:
>>
>>> While threadless headsets seem ugly and less functional, they do have the
>>> advantage of being really quick to change. Some can be flipped around for
>>> very significant changes in rise in only a moment. Many riders cannot find
>>> that their optimal position might change over a season - and threadless
>>> stems offer much easier changes in reach than threaded ones provide.
>>> Again, the threadless ahead type stem is nothing new - a varient of that
>>> can be seen on ebay right now - a Daudon ahead type stem that works on
>>> 1950's French bikes!
>>>
>>
>> My 1908 BSA road/path effectively has an aheadset -- the only difference is
>> that a threaded cap screws down on top of the stem which clamps to a
>> threadless portion of the steerer. I believe that this design was in
>> production at least 5 years earlier.
>>
>> Hugh Thornton