Dear Lennard,

A rainy day here so I’ll catch up on some stuff.   Don’t know if you ever saw this bike after Dave T. dropped the toptube and added the extra stays.  You’ll remember that it was designed for dropped pedals.   I wanted to have two bikes exactly the same so I could go back and forth between them so I switched this bike to standard-pedal cranks.  The saddle is pretty far forward because it’s 4cm higher than it was with the dropped pedals.

I set each one up according to my tests and then measure them to make sure I wasn’t fooling myself.  The tests work!!!  You could take my bike apart and I would put it back together exactly the same without measuring saddle height, reach…..anything.  That could be an interesting challenge.

You remember the tiller aerobar?  I’ve been playing around with it ever since I got it but was never perfect until I got the saddle design worked out.  It’s too sensitive, so far, to changeable winds to be practical overall, but on a calm day or a steady breeze it works.  There are no forearm pads.  Don’t really need them.  My wrists touch the bars but there’s really no weight on them, or on the tiller either really.  My other bike needs some work so I haven’t tried the tiller on it outside yet.  It should at least be more stable since the BB height is 4cm lower.

There are several cool things going on as a result of this saddle.  My upper body stays in the same position regardless of gearing.  In the past I’ve mentioned how I set the hoods for 53/12 and my hands come back on the bars as gearing decreases.  But, in the past, my upper body rose as my hands came back, not the greatest for aerodynamics.  The tiller still worked but my grip moved down progressively.

Another cool thing is that I can put the cranks in any position and they will stay there.  With stock saddles, I can put either foot down around 4:00 or 5:00 and it will go backwards up toward 3:00.  That says to me that the dead weight of my legs is more on the back leg.

I’m ready to get back to Luca now.  I think I’ve figured out how to approach him.  I got a new Concor so I could be fully informed.  I thought it looked dorky in photos with those wings on the side but it looks pretty cool in person.  But it doesn’t work as well as the old Concor for me.

I’ve got to take some photos of the pelvis model on the various saddles.  I think you’ll be surprised.

Thanks,
Ron