What kind of shim - fitting a stem to seatpost for stoker bar

daniel_b

Morning all,

I need to adapt our Kona Minute to carry my nearly 4 year old daughter - we have a Yepp Seat at present, but she is soon to be too big for it.

I have bought one of these (Yet to fit)


But realise I now need to fit a 'stoker' bar of sorts, for her to hold onto.

The Seatpost is a 27.2mm one, so it would appear the 130mm stem I have just ordered should do the job.
It's a 1 1\8th" which equates to approx 28.6mm.

So my question is, what can I use as a shim to make the seatpost big enough to get a nice solid fitment with the stem?
I have used innertubes for lights and so on before, but this will be taking more weight, and it has to be completely safe, can;t have it rotating at all - are there any off the shelf shims I can buy, do I need to cut up some aluminium cans, and use enough layers to get up to the desired thickness?

The other end will just take a normal set of chopped down flat bars I have lying about, so that's no issue.

Thanks in advance,

Dan

daniel_b

Just found this on the bay of e - 28.6 conversion do the job.......?

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Cycle-Seatpost-Shim-Bicycle-Seatpin-Shim-Alloy-RRP-8-99-/400254651791?var=&hash=item5d31094d8f:m:m1eN1-S6ylklzscy9hXidyA

Nick Payne

That should be fine - you might need to chop the length down, as the shims are usually around 100mm long and the height of the clamp part of a stem is less than half of that.

Easiest way to reduce the length is to have the seatpost out of the frame, clamp the shim and stem around the bottom of it so that the bottom of the stem and seatpost coincide, with the excess length of the shim protruding, and hacksaw off the excess and clean up the cut.

daniel_b

Thanks Nick for taking the time to reply.

I have the shim now, so will be looking to fit in the next few weeks - thanks for the handy tip re cutting :-)