Selecting An Appropriate Bolt

On Thursday, April 20, 2017 at 8:22:05 PM UTC-7, John B Slocomb wrote:
On Thu, 20 Apr 2017 14:25:46 -0700 (PDT), Doug Landau

On Thursday, April 20, 2017 at 2:17:23 AM UTC-7, John B Slocomb wrote:
On Wed, 19 Apr 2017 22:37:15 -0700, Art Shapiro
wrote:

On 4/17/2017 1:52 PM, Doug Landau wrote:

Get a new stem. This one is a flawed design. There is built-in problem with the shape of the part, and that is a lack of remaining metal around the bolt hole. The stem has been made bigger around the front bolt hole to overcome this, but it still has the 2-bolt-1-failure problem. The traditional shape does not make this concession to ease-of-handlebar-change, and carefully places the single bolt in the rear where there is plenty of metal surrounding the threads.
The traditional design is both less likely to experience a bolt failure, and - in the wild guess dept., be more likely to hold on to the bars and remain usable in the event that one does.


I'm he OP. It so happens that the rear bolt was the one that snapped,
which seems to contradict your assertion about the design's weak point.