Carbon flesh core tool

If you learn one thing from reading this blog, let it be this: choose the right tool for the job. For example, choose an alloy seat post with a robust clamp for mountain biking and cyclocross racing. When you choose a carbon seat post and it snaps on your remount, and you're left hovering tubing shards that threaten to eviscerate you, you'll need something good to get it out of your frame. For example, here is a fellow using a cable cutter to yank the remnants of a poor component decision out of an otherwise nice bike: (sorry about he crappy focus)

The rider who owns the bike snapped the post on his first remount of a race and twisted the now useless top section off like the stem of an apple, throwing it to the ground. He then ran to his team pit where one guy went at it hammer and tongs to get the old post out and swap an alloy post from another guy's bike. Meanwhile, his teamates and buddies taunted him with cries of "must have gone to 6 newton-meters man!" (referring to the 5 N-m torque limit on most carbon clamping bolts).

This rider now knows not to use a part that fails catastrophically in planned use. Specialized, for all the cyclocross riders they sponsor, still doesn't get it. They're still selling the Tricross with a carbon seat post that has a big gaping hole right in the middle of it filled with a gummy bear known as a 'Zertz' vibration dampening insert.

Airing out the undercarriage

Way back in 2008 we wrote about really firm saddles like the Tioga spider web creation seen at a race last weekend:

BTW, this was on a rigid carbon framed 26er. Although you'd do a lot of standing on descents, the bike is probably so light that you don't get very fatigued in technical sections or on ascents.

Wedgie Concept

This Oryx concept TT bike is splashed all around the web. So far, it's just a collection of CAD renderings. It's got some neat concpetual if not possible features. Hub brakes front and back and maybe an internally geared rear hub. The giant void in the middle of the bottom bracket would only serve to cause wind resistance but what really caught my eye was the out of place ass hatchet spine coming up out of the middle of the saddle. Well, I guess those sort of cool looking details will get ironed out if the designer ever decides to convert it from a design school project into a product.

Crazing Saddles

First, let me explain crazing. When you flex plastic enough, the surface in tension first develops microcracks (which look like little white-ish lines) before failing. This process is called crazing. If you stress the plastic enough times, the cracks will propogate (spread) and coalesce (join up) and create a fracture. This is what happened when my dense derrière remounted my cyclocross saddle over a series of probably 10 races. Result - cracked straight through:



The fracture finally competed it's journey through the shell of my saddle during a race in Livermore, California this year. On the first remount of the first lap, I heard a loud crack which I thought was my seat post slipping. I kept racing (since all the important parts were still attached to the bike) and eventually realized that I was sitting on the ass-hammock you see in the picture above. It probably dropped my saddle-pedal height about 2cm. The pounding of my heart in my ears pretty much drowned out all other sounds so I had plenty of inner thought time to consider how I was going to get a saddle and fix it before the next day's race. I have now broken three saddles racing cyclocross. Two shell failures and one rail failure (via bending). Anyone got any ideas? My remounts are pretty smooth, not too much high flying.

Recovering a leather (or pleather) saddle

I snapped two cell phone pictures of this pretty root beer colored Hunter cross bike at the McLaren Park CX race recently in San Francisco.  The owner stopped to talk to me about how he created that great matching seat.  He started with a worn out plastic and vinyl seat and advised me to do the following:

-Peel the vinyl covering off

-Repair any ruined foam padding with house hold caulk, let that solidify
-Soak the leather to make it stretchy
-Stretch the leather over the sadle and clamp it in place
-After the leather is in place tight on the saddle, trim so that you have just enough to tuck under and glue to the shell using contact cement

Sounds like a slightly messy but rewarding way to get yourself a leather saddle that looks much more classy than any of the stuff you can buy for cheap these days.

What do you call nuts with lotion on them? DZ Nuts!

Regardless of whether the proprietor of this chamois creme is a famous cyclist or not, you have to appreciate his product.

Pic purloined from http://www.dz-nuts.com/

Hardasses (firm saddles)

File this under the category of everything old is new again. While Sheldon Brown and most touring afficionados have long advocated the hard saddle, its popularity seems to come and go, with various forms of padded saddles always being more popular. It stands to reason that a spongy saddle will be more comfortable, but your perineum begs to differ. Anyway, I see the firm saddle as having three evolutions:

• The Leather Years
• In which gentleman, racers, and everybody rode a Brooks
• Which is now coming back in the form of a Brooks resurgence and with companies such as Selle Anatomica
  
• The Plastic Years
• In which cheap BMX saddles where made of hard plastic
• Which is now coming back when companies like Tioga start making high-zoot plastic saddles
  
• The Space Shuttle Material Years
• In which crazy Europeans are making saddles out of magnesium and carbon
• Which, at a cost of up to $450 a piece, can't last long

So, to review, the history of the bicycle saddle: