View Full Version : Serotta now Longer building seat posts
hooverone
02-22-2004, 11:07 PM
From what I have heard Serotta is no longer go to build their carbon seat posts. I always thought that seatpost was a work of art, too bad they are not going to be made any longer.
Is this true, has anyone else heard this?
Smiley
02-23-2004, 06:11 AM
They stopped making these last year , I think they had a few problems. I would not hold my breath on Stem , seat posts or the famous now dead DKS. There are way too many good seat posts and stem on the market today to make these viable business ventures for the time it would take Serotta to develop such a new product. I'd tell them to stick to making good bikes even better.
Too Tall
02-23-2004, 06:54 AM
Must be someting in the air. I just got an AlphaQ seatpost and expect it to arrive tommorrow. If it is anything like their forks am expecting it will look and work well on the new CSI. Give it a look see.
BigMac
02-23-2004, 10:19 AM
Captain:
I'll respectfully disagree with you on one point; custom stems would be an area of considerable need, high demand and large profit margins. We needn't digress into the long lamented loss of your precious Hors Cat/DKS design -- kind of like arguing musical accuman with a Dead Head ;). Unfortunately the very vocal DKS advocates were not plentiful enough to make design viable from an economic sense...or at least that is what I have implied from "official" comments by Serotta reps and my LBS owner.
Seatposts, especially the 0 setback and glued construction design of the former Serotta model is not missed by myself and I suspect most others. For about 1/4 the cost of those posts I can still get a far superior one piece forging from Ritchey, enough said.
Stems are another issue altogether. I would doubt a new quill design would be fiscally prudent nor would it fit well with the current design direction of Serotta Cycles which appears to have fully embraced the 1.125" steerer. That's fine by me, the threadless is in fact a firmer, safer and more secure design (sorry, dbrk but that is my opinion based on many years of riding quill stems) although the 1.125" "std"seems to have addressed a problem that never existed for roadies. The problem as I see it is the dearth of quality, safe stems. How many truly well designed threadless stems are currently in production? The Thomson is very well designed and built but is dead fugly! An item as prominant as a stem MUST have some artistic grace, no? The Moots is thing of beauty and superb craftsmanship but $250 for a stem? I will never, ever pay that coin for ANY stem. That's it for my personal list of currently available stems that I could be reasonably assured will not fail...that is pretty sad in my book.
What advantage does a Ti stem have anyway? A few grams lower mass than a steel unit, meaningless...a bit like folks paying similar amounts for magnesium stems. If these folks actually knew the structural properties of magnesium and it fail rates -- it was also a very popular material in 70's when we used to drill out everything including headsets, headtubes, brake calipers...-- seems we should have evolved at least a little in last 30 years but sadly we have not.
So what about a line of filet brazed steel stems with matching spacers all available painted to match your Serotta frame? Cut the spacers from same tube stock as steerer clamp for a completely seemless transition from stem to spacer down to headset. I no longer have a single bike that does not wear a Rex custom stem although mine are mostly nickel plated in satin to reduce glare versus a polished chrome finish. Serotta is already building filet brazed HT joints on CSI among others, certainly the skill and tooling is basically already in place. For many Serotta buyers, I believe they would actually like a matching stem. For others, they may not feel like any local builder is that accessable although in truth Steve Rex is a very nice gent, the most skilled filet brazer I have witnessed and very capable of sizing a stem via phone conversation. The single-point shopping experience just fits so well with the current business model advocated by LBS owners. I'm sure a line of custom and semi-custom filet brazed stems would be warmly embraced by the Serotta dealers.
Ride on!
Smiley
02-23-2004, 10:44 AM
Hello and check out Dave Kirks website as he will build you or others a fillet Brazed Ahead stem and I am sure he'll trick it out anyway you want it. Steve Rex was too busy to build me a custom stem and his quoted price to me at the time reflected this attitude , but I am NOT Big Mac , I do have some brownie points with Dave Kirk, as swell a guy as you'll meet and building his client base one at a time. Point is this small market niche is being filled by the smaller players and you just need to ask and I am sure someone out there will tell you where to look.
Hows your Canti Ti bike coming along sir.
BigMac
02-23-2004, 02:12 PM
Captain:
Sorry to hear of your apparent difficulties with Sr. Rex, he's always been very polite and gracious in our dealings. FWIW: he's charged me somewhere around $165/stem, including nickel plating, the same painted black was around $125 if memory serves. He does charge a few bucks extra for removable faceplates, which I do not use for safety and aesthetic reasons. Plating is expensive (I've done enough rehab of vintage motorbikes to know) so the $40 upcharge is actaully reasonable. Most custom paint surcharges are <$15. If his quotes to you were substantially higher, could it be a left coast bias? That would be humorous in a sort of dark way. If you ever wanted a Rex stem at "left coast pricing", drop an email and I'll see what I can arrange for you.
The winter canti boss Legend remains in a conceptual mode at present. I am bound and determined to use a Rohloff Speedhub just to be different and embrace what I personally view as a brilliant design. In that I do not ride mtb's -- I'll take my KTM 950 in the loose dirt; self-powered 2-wheelers belong on fire trails and aspault -- I must adapt the mtb-type shifter for road bar duty. I have a machine shop buddy that has fabricated various parts for vintage motorbikes and we are slowly cobbling together a Rohloff road shifter. We took apart the Rohloff shifter on his mtb to measure exact cable travel/shift required by the Speedhub and then sketched a couple of possible designs. We came up with 2 designs and will fabricate prototypes based on these designs. We then will mount them on an old Specialized touring bike that a friend had collecting dust.
One design places a barrell shifter clamped around bar adjacent to stem clamp, very similar to the current Rohloff shifter only larger diameter to fit road bars and a 2-piece split-shell design for ease of installation. The cables are routed over TT similar to current Rohloff specs. This should be a very easy moification in that it is so similar to the OEM shifter.
The 2nd prototype is one that I believe dbrk will appreciate, its a modified DT shifter that fits standard DT shfter bosses. The difficulty with this 2nd design is cable travel/shift lever travel. With 14 speeds the total lever travel would be nearly 300 degrees. We've come up with a cam device that limits the travel but causes shifter assembly to be rather large, wide and cumbersome. The latest idea for this design is to place shifter atop DT like the old pre-braze-on days perhaps allow for a clamp that can use the DT braze-ons for attachment but shift cam assembly is still located atop DT.
We're probably 4-6 weeks from working prototypes that will be worth setting up a bike and demoing. I will not order the new Legend till I have the drivetrain issues resolved and can accurately spec appropriate locations of cable stops and guides. Albert Eisentraut has agreed to build me an appropriate flat crown steel fork with 395mm crown-dropout height, canti bosses and a 1.125 steerer to fit Legend HT. If you're interested in progress reports/updates on the Speedhub road adaption, send me an email and I'll be happy to update you. We've been in touch with Rohloff USA and they may be interested in our road shifter if we can get it to work reliably. Apparently they've had several inquiries from roadies, mostly from the loaded touring rider set. Could be an appealing setup on your tandem, no? You could get single-side drivetrain for dramatically lowerQ if proper cranks are chosen, eliminate your FD, use drop bars and not lose any gearrange...heck might even gain some along with being able to shift while stopped. Super strong rear wheels w/o any dish is yet another great benefit. What's not to like about all that?
Ride on!
Ahneida Ride
02-23-2004, 02:56 PM
Big Mac
Hmmm.. You are a bit suspicious of my standard Serotta
+10 Stem. I believe it is ITM. Do you advise replacement?
You have me concerned. I cannot afford a stem failure!
Thanks
Smiley
02-23-2004, 03:01 PM
Sleep like a baby tonite ride man ! If you really think the folks at Serotta would be crazy to put their name on a stem that is suspect then one day given a failure you would own the Serotta factory assuming you have a good lawyer like Kevin or Dave Novo.
BigMac
02-23-2004, 09:53 PM
With all due respect to my friend Smiley, I due suspect any and all OEM alloy stems, no matter if it wears a Serotta logo or not. I mean really, Serotta's liability exposure in this case is minimal at best, unless of course they had some knowledge of a design defect in said product.
Why am I suspect of these stems? Well, Deda, ITM and Cinelli have all had recalls of at least 1 alloy threadless stem model with removable faceplate. There may be others (very likely in fact) but these are the cases I actually know of. At last years 'Cross Nationals I know of 2 Ritchey WCS stem failures and that was on just a single team. One may have been crash related but it was a very slow speed incident and other than some scuffed bar tape, nothing else on bike showed any signs of the crash excepting for the stem whose faceplate cracked. In fairness to the Ritchey design, the 4 bolt arrangement actually allowed the rider to continue riding and the faceplate crack was only discovered post-race. I have personally seen a 3TTT Forgie stem actually bend under normal usage, rider was a 220 lb former NBA player of relatively slight upper body build. I can personally bend almost any OEM alloy stem, quill or ahead. Durability/safety issues aside, the precision of a torsionally stiff steel stem makes bombing down high speed descents a great deal funner and more confidence inspiring.
If your stem is of the magnesium variety, please be aware that mg has very poor fatigue life and is non-ductile -- it catastrophically cracks rather than bending like a forged alloy stem.
I guess the question to me is not only one of safety but also of fiscal prudence. OEM alloy stem prices have gone through the roof of late. A custom filet'd steel stem, once seen as an item of luxury, is now competitively priced with most OEM stems and even cheaper than some of the weight weenie exotics. A filet'd steel stem is a true lifetime item and a whole lot more pleasing to the eye than any OEM stem, imho.
Whether you choose to replace your Serotta/ITM stem is completely at your discretion. At the very least, I would recommend you consistently check all bolts for proper torqueing.
Ride on!
hooverone
02-24-2004, 09:56 AM
Could the problem be when there is a removable faceplate there could be an overtightenging of some of the bolts where the faceplate becomes stressed because it is tightening unevenly.
Jim
BumbleBeeDave
02-24-2004, 01:15 PM
I seem to remember that you ARE a pretty big guy and (if I remember correctly) a former pro football player? It doesn't surprise me that you would be able to bend stems.
I don't think that equates, though, to possible safety issues with a wide variety of stems. Manufacturers have to design their product to some degree to accommodate some broadly defined "average" rider. If they designed their stems to be break-proof for every CONCEIVEABLE rider, then they would all be made of steel pipe and weight 10 pounds each.
If you are particularly large in stature and/or particularly muscular--which I'm thinking you are--then it makes sense for you to go for custom made stems that deal with those specific issues. But I have to disagree with you about a line of custom-made stems through Serotta. I strongly doubt they would sell at all because the vast majority of riders DO fall into that broad definition of "average" the stem builders are catering to and most riders just have no use for such a stem.
BBDave
Serotta PETE
02-24-2004, 04:30 PM
Does anyone have the address, phone, or WEB page for REX? THANKS Pete
It's Steve Rex (http://www.rexcycles.com) .
rick
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