My first impressions? This seatpost is awesome. I love the "set-and-forget" seat clamp which basically lets you set the angle of your saddle, while having seperate clamps for the rails of the saddle. It allows you to change out your saddle or move it forward or back without messing around with the angle at which it sits.
The seatpost also has a handy bit of markings on the back to let you know how far into your seattube the post is so you don't have to worry about trying to find the magic position if you move your post around a lot. It also has a sticker on it that says not to use it improperly.
The lockout adjust is clearly marked and easily adjusted with a 3mm allen key. It takes just over a full turn to completely lock it out or completely unlock it. The hole where you insert the allen key aslo has a little dust cover which is just a ruber flap, but sits in there pretty securely. It should stay in there quite well while riding (unless you crash or something).
As soon as I opened the package, I threw a saddle on this baby, opened the lockout fully, and sat on it to feel the squish. It was above my expectations. For only having 3/4" of travel, it feels extremely plush and feels like there is more travel than there really is.
Actaul testing: Here I must disappoint, I am afraid. I won't be able to use this seatpost (at least not the one I got) as I have broken it. How did this happen? Well let me go back to when I installed it in my bike. After I finished playing around with all the shiny features, I pulled my old Thomson Elite seatpost out of my bike so I could throw the Sette into it and take it for a quick ride. Alas, that never happened. I mounted my saddle to this seatpost and lied it up with my steat tube. Being 27.2mm just like my Thomson, I was excited that I wouldn't need any spacers or anything. However, when I put the Sette post into my seat tube, it went down a fraction of a mm and kinda got caught so I smacked it a couple times with my hand. It went down about 2" which is about half of the minimum length needed in the seat tube. I still couldn't push the seat post down easily so I smacked it a couple more times, thinking it just needed some persuasion as it is new. Well it didn't budge past those first two inches. WTF? I decided to pull it out and make sure things were OK. Bad news bears, I couldn't pull it out! No matter how hard I tried I couldn't get it to move the least bit, not up nor down. This was pissing me off! So I pulled out my trusty rubber mallet and tapped the underside of the saddle a couple times to try to get this seatpost out. Nothing. I continued in this fashion with a bit more persuasion but I wasn;t able to get it to move at all. At this point, Ididn't care about salvaging the seatpost so much as I just wanted it out so I could ride my bike at all! After trying different things, my dad suggested I use a car jack to pop it out. So, I put a board on my top tube and a board on the botton of my saddle and started cranking. Of course a freaking car jack is going to push that sucker out of the seat tube, I was ust frustrated I hadn't thought of it before. Well, it didn't work. I ended up cracking the board under the saddle and and just bending the seat post backward. At this I pulled the jack out and sprayed liberal amounts of WD-40 into the seat tube to try to loosen the seatpost, but it has been two days of spraying WD-40 and still I can not get the seatpost out. I have decided to drill through the seat post and insert a length of steel and try to "screw" it out of the seat tube. If you have any advice to solve my problem, please share!
I did figure out that the problem is that the Sette seatpost was just a fraction of a mm wider than the 27.2mm it was supposed to be as I began to see metal shavings when I was trying to pop it out of the seat tube. I am not sure if all the Sette Ryde seatposts are that much wider or if QC was on lunch when mine came down the line, but I don't think I will bother ordering another one which makes me a bit sad as I was extremely excited about this. I would reccomend this seatpost, however, if you are aware that it could be slightly oversized and your seat tube is also slightly oversized. Otherwise, don't spend the money.
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