Toe overlap issues

[janus77]

Hi All, my commuter's a mid/late 90's Alu Kinesis road bike with Shimano 600 ultegra gear.

The geometry is quite tight on it with the rear wheel sitting very close to the seat tube, and the front wheel doesn't sit very far forward meaning I get a lot of toe overlap, which makes navigating traffic and low speed maneuvers difficult.

Funny thing is that on my nice road bike, i get no toe overlap at all and the handling is better.

I burnt through the front crudracer2 mud guard because my toe would push it into the tyre, which would then suck it through the forks... it survived a remarkably long time considering this happened around 10 times.

If i put a fork on it with more rake to get the front wheel further out front to try and eradicate the overlap, is the handling going to be screwed up?

Cheers.

[rustychisel]

possibly. Amount of rake and trail will effect steering precision, too great and the fork will tend to 'slop' from side to side.

Toe overlap is more a function of front-centre measurement, which is a direct function of top tube length, hence it's much more common on smaller size frames. It has little to do with head tube angle also, since they have a close range from 72º to 74º, usually. Of your two bikes, what is the effective top tube measurement in each case (measured from centre of head tube to centre of seat tube [or seat post] perfectly horizontally? Is the commuter a smaller frame?


I have toe overlap on my two principal bikes, one geared road and one road going fixed gear. Once I knew it was there it's never given me a moment's hesitation or thought. With a crud catcher or mudguards I can see it might be more of an issue.

[janus77]

I'll check out the effective top tube measurement and see.
Thanks for the response.