Steerer Tube Extender

8/3/2025

This is pretty close to what you could call the genesis of Blue Liquid Labs. If we’re being honest, it all came about due to a form of North American poverty. Not the type of poverty that’s necessarily an immediate threat to your life, just the type that’s going to insure that you’ll always be on sub-par equipment.

The year was 2003 and although I had been riding cheap mountain bikes since 1997, this was the first year that I was able to scrounge enough parts to build my own bike. Scrounging being the key word here. Of course, like many people who scrounge, I was faced with a situation where my old fork was slightly too short for my new frame. Buying a new CSU was so expensive, it was out of the question. I was limited to a low stack stem and that’s how I dealt with the problem.

Over the years I would think about how this steerer tube problem could be solved safely. I did work at a bike shop that had a lathe in 2010 but at that time, the steerer tube problem strangely never came up. By 2014 I was working at another shop and an employee there had a tiny lathe in his garage. Sure enough at that shop someone was faced with this same situation that I faced back in 2003. I rode my bike over my friend’s garage and he allowed me to make the first steerer tube extender that I had dreamed up years earlier. No pictures of that first extender from 2014 exist, as far as I’m aware.

By 2017 I had moved across the country and was working at a different shop. At that point I finally bought my own lathe and was renting a detached garage where I could slowly develop my own products. Someone was again faced with the same situation that I faced in 2003. I was able to make them my extender and this time I took some pictures of it. The original design intent for the extender was to be for mountain bikes but this particular one went on a track bike. My design always combined four main elements. A BMX starnut, a strong steel bolt, some loctite and a light press fit. I made each extender custom sized for the inside diameter of that particular steerer tube. You can read the original article I wrote about it in 2017. Click the image below to make it bigger.