How to adjust handlebar and stem

This is an article on how to operate and maintain your bicycles. We will show you how we go about adjusting and tightening a mountain bike stem and to adjust and tighten this stem.

About required tools

To begin the process of removing the stem, you are going to want to take and just loosen your two sides Allen bolts. And you are going to loosen those two Allen bolts. Just loose on a little bit and that is going to give you the ability to rotate or adjust your stem whether it is straight with or in line with your front wheel. So we will get that loose about that. It will actually move and just like that you can see now the handlebars will slide from side to side. And now I can put the wheel in between my legs and I can look down. I like to close one eye look and make sure of those handlebars or straight line with my front wheel. And the only time you want to actually unloosen that or adjust that is that is actually the load to the bearings in the headset. And to actually straighten your handlebars side to side, you do not need to use the five millimeter about Allen bolts or Allen wrech and loosen that. So I get that adjusted side to side, and then I can actually tighten that back up.



Straight up the handlebars

If your bearings are loose and one way to determine whether your bearings are loose or not, you should just take your front brake and just squeeze your front back brake and put some pressure on the bike and rock back and forth if you can feel some play in the headset. If you actually feel it shift back and forth, it means that is loose. It needs to be tightened then you actually go about tightening the five millimeter top Allen bolt. And I’d actually loosen my four millimeters Allen bolts. Then I am just going to stick this 5mm Allen bolt in there and I am just going to take it. Just a little bit and you will just tighten it. Just a little bit to the right clockwise until you can eliminate that play make sure the headset runs freely and then you can retighten that back up. Get it good and tight now make sure my handlebars are straight and I will retighten my headset.



About the stem

I get that thing good and tight. You don’t want your stem coming loose while you are riding. Now to adjust my hood height if my hoods are up too much, I want to lower or higher. I can make the adjustment up front here. I will just take loosen these four out Allen wrech bolts. Now I can take and just adjust it up or down. I want the hoods to go a little bit lower right now. They are just a little bit high for my riding style. So with tights real time loosens, these are a little bit more. Get that down just a little bit more. I like my legs a little bit lower. I am going to retighten those or a Lomita bolts. And if you have a torque wrech, these are supposed to be set at five nanometers. If you don’t have a torque wrech, you don’t want to over tighten them. This is aluminum bar and stem not as critical if is carbon this carbon fiber little more critical to have an Allen wrech but you can just play it by here and just get them cinched down. Just get a little bit of torque on them, not whole lot. You want to just got four of them on this stem. So you just rotate back and forth get them all tightened evenly. And that is how you go about tightening or adjust a road bike down.



A closer looking in adjusting the headset and stem

We have got the top cap bolt the five millimeter Allen bolt. Now we got the two side four millimeter Allen bolts right here. And if you just want to adjust your handlebars, if they are out of alignment, you don’t want to be loosening or tightening the top bolt. That is actually to tighten your headset bearings. It is the bearing preload by loosening and tightening this. That is going to tighten the bearing and the fork down to the bearings. So you don’t need to mess around with this bolt unless the bearings inside your headset right here are loose. I will show you a simple method to determine how to determine whether your bearings are loose or not. The headset is loose, so if you are just trying your bars to get them in line with your front wheel, you are only going to be on loosening and tightening the two bolts right here. If you want to adjust the height that your handlebars and the height of your hoods, you are going to be using the four Allen bolts up front on the stem right there.



Adjust the handlebars

If you want to make an adjustment to your handlebars, you can loosen the four millimeter Allen bolts right here. We got four of them on a Richie stem. You will slightly loosen those four bolts and then you can rotate your handlebars up and down to get what you want is a good height. That is comfortable for you with your brake and shift lever hood this.