So you’ve got your heart set on a new frame. It’s sleek and cool and aero. It’s made in France, because in this case, it’s a Time NX.
There is one unforeseen problem though: your fit numbers require a zero-offset seatpost, and the stock Time seatpost has 15 mm of setback. Oh, it’s an aero seatpost too, so you can’t just buy a different one. What’s a cyclist to do?
At Ruckus Composites, we’ve seen and dealt with the worries and woes of nearly every different aero seatpost/mast-bearing bicycle. From the LOOK that got its mast cut too short to the Serenity without sufficient seatpost clamp relief – we’ve seen it all. A word of advice: if you fall in love with a bike that has proprietary aero shaping, buy two seatposts. Back to this Time though.
What we ended up doing here was carefully removing the original alloy saddle clamp hardware from the aero carbon tube. Once the tube was free, we built a custom 3d printed jig to hold the post in our horizontal mill. With aero carbon parts, orthogonality is the primary concern – you can’t rotate a non-round seatpost to point your saddle straight – and careful jigging is the key. Ultimately, our solution was to use the ENVE saddle clamp hardware inside a carbon shell. The original seatpost was mitered to accept the shell and the whole assembly was wrapped in carbon.
The result looks clean and minimal, hits the needed fit measurements, and as a bonus, dropped about 50 grams from the weight of the original seatpost. It may have come from France, but that seatpost has definitely been ReMade in the USA!
