USE ring-o-star - any good?

pauljohnhart

I'm fitting some new carbon forks and the internal diameter is really narrow and wont take the bung that I have. Looking around I found the ring-o-star, does anyone know if they work okay - also what do they look like on as I'm guessing they may be a bit ugly?

Captain Fagor

My advice is to keep buying different bungs and you'll stumble upon one that works.

The USE Ring-go-star is, in my experience, totally rubbish. It's effectively a split ring, made of carbon, with a tapered / chamfered upper surface that fits into the underside of the USE Atom stem. You push the stem down the steerer to compress the headset as much as possible, before clamping the stem. This is difficult to do and keep your handlebars facing EXACTLY where you want them to. THEN you screw in ("tighten") the tiny 2mm grub screw in the split ring ring-go-star to make it expand. Only it can't expand because it is confined by the female chamfered base of the stem, so it goes downwards instead, further compressing the headset.

In my experience, if your headset assembly needs any amount of force / strain to prevent the fork rocking back and forth under braking, then the ring-go-star isn't man enough.

FWIW, I found the ITM bung to be quite accomodating in working with different fork internal diameters. Good luck.

pauljohnhart

Thanks for your help Captain! I think I'll take your advice and buy a bung

andyrr

I used one : initially got LBS to set my newly built-up frame including this and they managed but when I came to adjust the headset after a few miles I found that the stupid tiny allen bolt would not take sufficient torque to tighten/expand the ring. Found that the LBS had initially used a normal bung to take up the slack then tighten the Ring-go-star.
IMHO it is useless if you want to use it as it stands and my idea of having a nice as well as light replacement for the std bung came to naught.

Smokin Joe

That's a pity, when I heard of those things I thought what a good idea they were. I think Stronglight used to make a threaded headset that worked on the same principle.

Johnny G

I would agree with the advice to forget the USE split ring type of adjuster. It's a neat idea in theory but it just doesn't work. I had a new bike last January which was fitted with one and it came loose on every ride. After four weeks of tinkering I replaced it with a conventional bung and have had no problems since.

Nick Payne

To resurrect this *very* old thread, I have half a dozen of these on various bikes and have never had any problem with either using them to get correct adjustment of the headset or with them not holding the adjustment.

pippi_langsamer-2

Useless