External Headsets vs. Integraded Headsets

“Staats Bicycles is always looking to make the highest quality frames that are lightweight, durable and designed around true and tried designs and styles. Although it is important to continually look for new innovations in design and technology, we are also careful not to follow a tread just because other companies are using new ideas. Staats is widely know for the thorough R&D we put into our products. We test our entire line of products through our highly skilled and elite team riders from around the world, including 2005 UCI Supercross World champion Robert DeWilde and 2005 NBL National Champion Mikey Day.”"When many bicycle manufactures started building frames compatible with integrated or internal headset, Staats looked into what advantage the new design could offer. Although the traditional external headset design has been working great in our frames, we wanted to see if the internal or integrated design offered an advantage. We made a couple samples and found that the new designs did not offer any more durability or weight saving. What we did find is that it is much harder to find components and parts for this design. We started looking at various headset manufactures for more information about integrated headsets and visited the Chris King web site. Chris King makes high quality headsets and components and is very respected in the bicycle community. Their website states that integrated headsets have no advantage and can actually cause many more problems over the external headset. Please read the following article for more information: http://www.chrisking.com/pdfs/Int%20Headsets%20Explained.pdf Staats is proud that all of our frames are built with a tried and true, durable and lightweight external head tube design. Please look forward to more frames models soon to be releases from Staats, without any trendy or voguish features.”