Ok folks, it was curiosity not a demand to descend on your garage with a tape measure and a team of helpers. I'll try to explain my thought process, for anyone interested, and why I was wanting to get other peoples setups. For those not interested I do understand that the urge to post that, and other irrelevances, is irresistable, so fill your boots.
As mentioned I started out with a bike that came with flat bars, it is a Giant CRS Alliance in large which comes with an effective top tube of 596mm and a stem of approx 105mm. When I changed to butterfly bars I had to change to a longer stem due to the sweep back aspect of the bars. Then I start reading more and realise that I have my saddle far too low, was getting some lower back and knee issues. Raise saddle to a better height but didn't adjust fore/aft so still had it well back, on laid back seatpost, which had been needed to get distance to pedals when saddle was lower. Fortunately I then go on a social ride and Teef & Co sort out my saddle fore/aft after my knees start to really suffer on a longer ride. Thankfully the 130mm stem I had bought was adjustable so could accomodate fore aft movement of saddle. But I now found that a setback post was making it hard/impossible to get the saddle far enough forward and get saddle pack clamp on behind. Bearing in mind I'm aiming for 80mm of setback here, so not exactly time trial setup.
So that was realisation No1, I need to start at the saddle and work forward.
I buy a Surly Crosscheck frame 600mm TT and build up as per Giant with butterfly bars etc. No problems as lessons learned and so not wasting money on parts that won't work. Only tricky bit was the Brooks saddle and the very short rails on it and fitting a saddle pack. But we're getting there and I'm understanding more about how my bikes fit me and what impact changes have. Then I decide that I want to use drop bars. This is only after some, truly herculean, efforts at getting the controls on the sides of butterfly bars. Cue some expensive failures and much reading about effective top tubes, seat post v head tube angles, HT length and heights, stem length and angle...etc...etc....etc.
Next discovery is around geometry and why frames designed for flat bars have longer effective top tubes than those designed for drop bars.
Then I realise that a longer top tube isn't always a longer top tube as the seat tube angle impacts on the reach. That's reach as measured from the BB to the HT. I note that several manufacturers now include reach in their spec charts, Cerveloe being a noteable one. Assuming that you'll be positioning your saddle in the same position relative to the BB. Then compare two frames with the same effective top tube lengths but differing seat tube angles. The one with the steeper seat tube angle will have more reach than one with a relaxed angle, as more of the top tube is forward of the BB.
Ok, I get all that but it then led to me considering seatposts and layback/inline as, when perusing bikes, I was seeing a lot coming with laid back seatposts. I then looked at my 3 bikes and I'm using inline seatposts on all of them and the saddle is slightly forward of center to achieve 80mm of setback. The seatubes are 72, 73 and unknown in degrees, now I thought that 80mm was quite high for setback. So I was puzzled as, by my calculations, a laid back seatpost will lend itself more to a 90mm+ setback and would be impossible to achieve much less than about 70mm.
This got me thinking again, am I having the saddle too far forward and vertically raised, is it more normal to have the saddle further back and lower? AND this led to me posting a thread curious to find out what others tend to have and if there is a correlation between size, ie do taller people tend to have more setback than shorter or the reverse. Maybe some people use lower and further back on some bikes and higher further forward on others, to alter the saddle height to bar height relationship depending on use of bike? But wouldn't this effect the KOPS relationship and I thought, however you work out your own KOPS, this was meant to be optimum for nearly all types of riding?(obviously I'm excluding things like time trial setups here).
Yes I can go and get a fitting etc but that will give me the optimum setup according to whatever flavour that fitter follows. I've read enough on this to realise that there is a reasonable amount of variation in the systems. I don't really want to spend a couple of hundred quid on a fitting that uses a method not best suited for me. But how to understand which one to choose, how to interpret what they tell me and how to tweak for the future. Surely this is only achievable if you properly understand the subject, I don't want to be tweaking a stem length when it should be a saddle position, or maybe just a little bit of both.
I also know that there's trial and error and that a heck of a lot of people have used this method for a very long time. Part of trial and error is chatting to others about what works for them, why they believe it works and how they go about setting things up and measuring. Some do it by feel alone, some use every measuring implement known to man.
I could hijack passing cyclists with tape measure in hand or I could post on the web and ask for how/what/where other do it.
(Rolls saddle - which is a rich man's Brooks... 
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