Stem and Hoods questions

[Eden]

ah the endless quest for bike fit....

If your elbows are always straight out, I would think that just changing the bars will be unlikely to make enough difference - it sounds like you need a shorter stem, and possibly different bars.

If you do go with different bars, see if there is any way you can try them out first.... Personally though I am a small person and have small hands, I found ergo bars with a very shallow drop to be *very* uncomfortable... I was banging my forearms on the ends of the drops and actually bruising them... I prefer pretty traditional rounded bars and a decent sized drop. Though I have small hands I've never had any problems with standard levers hoods, but if its an issue for you - look into shimming your levers out a bit.

As we are all different.... I would have to disagree with Mr. SR.... for me, I like having my drops parallel to the ground... otherwise I feel like I'm all the time sliding off of them... I prefer to move my levers down to achieve a flat hood over rotating the bars (though from your photos it looks like that may be hard to do with the style of handlebar you have - it looks like there is little flat to the top of the bar...). Moving the levers down also moves them closer to the drop portion of the bar and should make them easier to reach. It seems to be in vogue these days to rotate the bars up and place the levers very high??? (or maybe my bike was just assembled by a teenager who didn't really know what he was doing) Just not comfy for me.