Quote Originally Posted by arielmoon View Post

I meant the clear coat down below the steerer.
You mean on the fork that's exposed or on the head tube? Paint chips here wouldn't have anything to do with failure at the stem. Actually, there's nothing I can think of that you can see on an assembled bike that would reveal a failure like this starting to happen unless you've got some weird gaps going on between spacers. Even if you had a stem with a cutout, you wouldn't see the problem without taking the stem off. I guess I'm not understanding what kind of blemish you're talking about...