Cycling Coast to Coast

Last weekend, my trip leader Jose was in town visiting his girlfriend and he awesomely decided to hold “shop hours”. I showed up with my bike, and we chatted about the trip and he taught us how to fix and patch a flat. If you’ve read his blog, then you know that Jose is a knowledgeable guy when it comes to cycling, and he cares a lot about good bike fit.

He helped me adjust my shoe cleats, saddle height, and then we were going to move my saddle back about a centimeter.

Most bike saddles have two rails on the underside running from the nose to the rear. A clamp on the top of the seatpost clamps onto these rails, securing the saddle to the rest of the bike. There are different clamping systems, and on my bike, there are two bolts that hold everything together. It looks like this:

And a side view:

If you look carefully though, you’ll notice there’s something wrong… there’s no second bolt! To adjust my saddle position, we needed to loosen these bolts, but as Jose did this, I heard the words that no one every really wants to hear, “…oh shit… um… I’m sorry…”

It appeared that whoever assembled the bike in the first place over-tightened the bolt. When Jose tried to loosen it, the bolt snapped in half, leaving part of it stuck inside the threaded cylinder. Without a second bolt, my saddle wasn’t properly mounted to the bike, and so it wasn’t safe to ride.

However, with some zip ties to the rescue, we managed to jury-rig something so I could ride home at least.

Thanks to Jose for these photos.

Yesterday, I took the T to Landry’s to see if they could fix the seatpost for me, or if they had a replacement part. With some effort, they managed to get the broken bit of bolt out of the cylinder, but the bad news was that the cylinder was completely stripped. It’s actually quite impressive; I’ve never seen anything stripped so badly, and the guy at Landry’s said he’d never seen anything like it either in the 20 years he’s been there.

The additional bad news was that Specialized doesn’t sell individual replacement parts for the seatpost; if I wanted a new bolt and cylinder, I’d need to buy a whole new seatpost. A new seatpost would cost $125, almost half of what I paid for my bike.

In desperation, I called up Jess, who’s a mechanical engineering major, to see if she could machine me a new part. After all, it’s just a simple threaded cylinder and a bolt.

The happy ending to this story, however, is that I called up Zane’s today, and they will be sending me a new seatpost, at no charge, and I should get it by Thursday.