The Seatpost and the Damage Done

I'm not really that complicated. If you want to understand me, you really need to know just one thing: I have a deep sentimental attachment to, as The Beatles said, people and things that went before. And I don't give up easily (except in my musical endeavors where I give up way too easily). So, two things—people and things that went before (that's one thing), and I don't give up easily. Plus, I value kindness and intelligence. Right. Three things. People and things that went before (still one thing), not giving up easily, and valuing kindness and intelligence (which is also one thing, not two). Got it? And I'm loyal. Help me out by doing me a favor and I'm yours forever. Okay, four things. Start again. Amongst the things you need to know about me are such diverse elements as... (any good soul-searching should digress into Monty Python's "The Spanish Inquisition").

As I wrote in my first book Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic, before I was a car guy, I was a bike guy. I pulled bikes out of the garbage, fixed some of them, stripped others for parts, and used the parts to improve the actual bike I was riding. It was where I learned about maintaining and repairing mechanical systems. I didn't know it, but this would prove to be a natural jumping-off point when I got into cars.

But I also did a lot of cycling. The apogee of it was in junior high school where I'd do week-long trips into New Hampshire and Vermont with bike clubs (thank you Jim Luippold!), but it continued into high school and beyond. 

My father's death was service-connected (long story), so we received money from the Veteran's Administration. In addition, when my grandfather passed away, he left my sister and me each about $1500. When I got into college, I blew that money on the things you'd imagine, but in high school when I was still pretty clean cut, a lot of it went into bicycles. When I say that I pulled bikes out of the trash, that's true, and it sounds very egalitarian and hack mechanic-ish, but in addition, I bought an ever-nicer series of bicycles. I moved from a Raleigh Super Course bought at the Amherst Cycle Shop (Fred Rosewence's store in The Alley in Amherst, where I worked for a brief period), to a Lejeune bought at Peleton in Amherst, to a used full-Campagnolo Legnano which then got stolen from my bedroom in Lexington, to a full-Campy Rolls-Colnago bought at Lincoln Guide Service in Lincoln, MA, to, when the Rolls turned out to be too stiff, an R.E.W. Reynolds bike set up for touring. These last three were so nice that it was absolutely ridiculous that a middle-class kid from a single-parent family whose mother was a college administrator had them (much less had the last two of them at the same time), but again, my mother really did kind of let me get away with murder.

As I entered my senior year in high school, the plan was to formally crown my bike mania by participating in the loosely-organized cross-country "bike-centennial" being held the summer of 1976.  In preparation for the trip, I inexplicably decided that the R.E.W. Reynolds wasn't nice enough and built myself another touring bike, about the best available anywhere. In those days, if you wanted a 15-speed bike touring bike with very low "granny gears" for long hill climbs, you could either buy a Schwinn Paramount P-15, or an expensive boutique European bike like a Rene Herse, or you could build your own. I did the latter. I went into The Bicycle Exchange at their original location on Bow Street at the top (east end) of Harvard Square and bought a Charles Roberts frame. I then outfitted it with a T.A. triple-chainring crankset to get the 15 speeds, Campagnolo Rally derailleurs and Nuovo Record hubs and brakes, Ambrosia rims, Cinelli bars and stem, Phil Wood sealed bottom bracket, a Weyless seatpost, Cool Gear "The Seat" (a very early padded saddle), and other period-correct top-of-the-line goodies. 

"The Roberts," showing how my attraction to things brown began far before the Lotus.

When my mother saw that the receipts totaled over $700 (again, this was 1976), she sharply rebuked me, one of only two times I ever recall her doing so. Anyone who new my mother knows that her having an outburst like this directed at someone she loved could only be caused by them doing something completely unacceptable.

It gets worse. My planning to cycle cross-country alone (and the "alone" part was really because I was far more focused on building the bike than I was on making any specific plans for the trip) so scared the shit out of my mother that she laid down the big bribe: "If you don't go, I'll buy you a car." 

I took the bribe. 

As I said in Memoirs, that was the event that produced the 1970 Triumph GT6+ and kick-started my life as a car guy, after which things were never the same. I wrote in Memoirs that the car bribe was one of a number of areas where my mother was too easy on me for being the son whose father died when I was ten. But I didn't go into detail on the bike itself, how ridiculous it was, or what happened to it.

I did use the Roberts a few times after high school for a little bit of light touring in NH and VT, but in truth, the apogee of Robby The Bike Kid was already years in the rear view mirror. The fact that I did most of my touring on that old Raleigh Super Course and less and less of it as the bikes got more expensive isn't lost on me now, but it was then.

Reading this, you can probably appreciate how the Roberts became more than a little bit of a symbol of my own excess and overreach and what was a terrible tendency to become more fixated on the thing than the activity that the thing was supposedly for. Yeah, I know; the current me who owns eleven cars and a similar number of guitars doesn't have a leg to stand on if I lecture about how material objects don't bring long-lasting pleasure, but in general, over time, at least I got better about not being so fixated on having the finest possible configuration of "the thing." Of all the guitars I own, there's only one that I bought new; the others all were purchased well-used and were bargain-hunted and snagged for their low price due to wear or damage. It's similar with the cars. Even my gorgeous red 3.0CSi's beauty is only skin-deep; it's a writhing mass of hacks, kluges, and imperfections that would be nitpicked to death if it ever was put on Bring a Trailer. Really, my entire automotive stock in trade is based on owning cars with patina and damage and not chasing perfection because perfection doesn't bring you happiness. Further, the older I get, the more I'm actually attracted to patina and a bit of damage because they mirror ourselves. We are damaged goods, every one of us. We wear our scars out in the open. Why shouldn't the things we own?

If it sounds like I'm apologizing for the Roberts, yes; I'm totally apologizing for the Roberts. I'm sentimental about it—how could I not be?—but those sentiments aren't entirely positive.

The bike got moved down to Austin with Maire Anne and me in '82, back up to Boston in '84, and to Newton when we bought the house in '92. It was hung upside down from the ceiling in the basement for nearly all of those 28 years, only ridden the handful of occasions when all of the cars were broken at the same time and I had to get to work. 

A few years back, the Roberts got briefly pressed into service when my son Ethan relied on a bike to get to work, and his bike got stolen. I took the Roberts down from its upside-down bat-like perch in the basement and found that its tires were badly dry-rotted. I had a funny moment when I thought "That's odd, because I so clearly remember replacing them not that long ago." I continued the interior monologue with myself, asking "Okay, Mister I Clearly Remember, exactly when was that?" "Well, I remember replacing them in the bicycle co-op in the UMass Student Union, so... it was over 40 years ago." Boy, memory is a funny thing. I installed new tires and tubes, adjusted a few things, and explained to Ethan that he was free to use the bike but I'd be really pissed if it got stolen out of carelessness like his last bike. He rode it into Harvard Square and came back reporting that a few people were like "DUDE! Nice vintage touring bike!" The idea that the Roberts was out and about in the world, and in fact was returning to the location of its birth (at least where the frame was purchased) made me smile.

Ethan,  briefly rocking the Roberts a few years back.

Unfortunately, though, this use uncovered a problem: Ethan is about 4" taller than me, so the seat needed to be raised, and I found that the seatpost was seized in the frame tube. This is actually very common. There's a phenomenon with cars, bikes, and other things made from metal and used in a wet environment called "corrosion of dissimilar metals" where, especially with steel and aluminum, an ionic transfer occurs that causes the metal to corrode and practically weld itself in place. I did a little reading on methods to remove stuck seatposts, and found that, if you can't work it free by simply using penetrating oil and twisting on the seat (and I couldn't), you have a big problem and need to destroy the seatpost to get it out. I didn't want to take a bike that was rideable and render it useless, and I certainly didn't want to risk damaging the bike, so I elected to leave it alone. Ethan really wanted the seat higher, so I sent him into Harris Cyclery in West Newton for an estimate to have the seatpost removed professionally, and he came back saying that they quoted him a worst-case $200, something I didn't understand until later. Ethan bought another bike whose seat was adjustable, and the Roberts got hung back up for several years.

A few years back, Maire Anne and I bought a small RV (a Winnebago Rialta, which is a VW Eurovan with a Winnebago camper body on the back, sort of like a VW Westfalia camper on steriods) and began using it to do weekends on the Cape. I attached a bike rack to the back, strapped on a couple of pulled-from-the-trash mountain bikes I had lying around, and we began enjoying riding on the bike paths that run along the beach. I briefly flirted with using the Roberts, but one 20-second ride in front of the house showed me that, with my 60+ years, bad back, and sciatica, the geometry of the bike with its long reach and dropped handlebars was instantly pain-inducing. After trying a few Craigslist bikes, I found a "Specialized" hybrid bike with flat bars and a much shorter reach that was surprisingly comfortable. It felt great to be riding again, even just a few miles at a time along level bike paths, but it was also sad to acknowledge that the idea that I'd ever use the Roberts again was fantasy.

Last year, as part of a general trend of my realizing that I'm bad at ending things and moving on and that I should do something about it, the Roberts' sad unfulfilled existence began to bother me, and I decided that, like the Guild D40 guitar I bought with my bar mitzvah money when I was 13 but that drove me nuts because its intonation was never right, it was time to pass it on to someone who would love it and use it. I did a quick survey on what 1970s-era Campagnolo-laden road bikes in fair condition were going for, photographed it and described it, warts and all (including the stuck seatpost) as I do when I sell cars, priced it at $600, and put it on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. 

I received a number of inquiries, including a fascinating one from a guy who'd previously worked at The Bicycle Exchange in Cambridge where I'd bought the frame in 1975. He said that that Charles Roberts frame was, at the time, the best of the best, that anyone who worked there wanted one of those frames back then and would kill to get their hands on the bike now, that I'd massively under-priced it at $600, and that, to the right person, it might be worth as much as $1500. He explained that he had a daughter completing her graduate degree and that, as was a tradition with former Bicycle Exchange employees, he wanted to build her a vintage bike as a present. He offered me $1200, saying that all I needed to do was take the bike to Rim and Wheel Works in Belmont where he knew people who'd pack it and send it out to him in Wisconsin. He also said that he'd connect me with a private Facebook group for former employees of the Bi-Ex to see if anyone would offer me more. I had some great back-and forth with the group. I posted the receipt I had for the purchase of the Roberts frame, but couldn't read the signature of the salesman. Richard Olken, former owner of The Bicycle Exchange, chimed in, saying "It says "RMO." That's me :^)"

The fellow said that he was heading into the hospital in a few days for a surgical procedure. I said I'd think about it and would get back with him after he recovered, but it sounded like I'd found the perfect new home for the Roberts.

Unfortunately, about a week later, he contacted me with some bad news—his surgical procedure was to remove a tumor, and they'd found that the cancer had spread, so he needed to pull his offer off the table.

I continued to float the Roberts for sale on both the Bi-Ex Facebook page as well as the "Steel is Real" page (vintage steel road bikes), but the only real traction I got was advice that I needed to deal with the stuck seatpost. This, actually, made perfect sense. When I advertise a car, I write up the warts-and-all description for the ad, then look at the warts and decide which ones to put time and money into removing. After all, any time you need to apologize for something in an ad, it's far better to fix it instead.

I read up in more depth about removing stuck seatposts. The more stuck the thing is, and the more invasive the method of removal needs to be, the greater the risk of damage to the bike. The basic methods involve trying the following things in combination:

• Lubricating: Squirting penetrating oil (I use SiliKroil) between the post and the frame tube to break up the corrosion.
• Freezing: Packing the post with dry ice to get it to contract slightly (you can't really heat the frame tube to get it to expand, as you'll blister the paint).
• Twisting: Grabbing the post with a monkey wrench, or putting the bike upside down in a bench vise and twisting the frame.
• Pounding: Using a dent puller (slide hammer) or other device to try to knock the post upward.

The advanced methods were:

• Pouring ammonia down the frame tube (ammonia reportedly is good for dissolving corroded aluminum), putting a cork at the top, turning it upside down, and letting it soak.
• Cutting off the seatpost flush close to the frame, then using a hacksaw blade down the inside of the post to essentially resect it.
• The nuclear option: When all else fails, filling the frame tube with lye which dissolves the aluminum. This reportedly requires disassembling the bottom bracket to pour the lye in, and typically damages the paint at the top of the seat tube where it leaks out. This was the worst-case $200 estimate that Ethan had gotten from the local bike shop.

I tried all the basic methods. None budged the seatpost. I was quite surprised by the failure of the pipe wrench. I use two of them to remove stuck collar nuts holding in front strut cartridges in vintage cars, and the grip and leverage that they impart is significant. As they say, when an immovable object meets an irresistible force, something's gotta give. But what gives is that the protruding part of the thin aluminum seatpost begins to buckle and crush, and its deformation actually makes the post harder to remove because the bulged sections press against the inside of the frame tube even harder. I worked it to the point where, if I tried any further, I'd crush the seatpost, at which point the seat wouldn't mount and the bike would no longer be rideable. Again I backed off.

The Weyless seatpost with pipe wrench marks from my removal attempt.

This spring, with Covid-19 tending to bias me toward around-the-house projects, I again tried to address the seatpost. I re-tried the pipe wrench and SiliKroil, again bringing it to the edge of destruction before backing off. I then tried the fill-it-with-ammonia-cork-it-and-hang-it-upside-down trick to try to loosen the corrosion (the fact that the bike had a Phil Wood sealed bottom bracket made me sanguine about pouring ammonia down the seat tube and then flipping the bike over). I waited for two weeks and tried the pipe wrench again. Nothing.

The next thing to try was to drill a hole crosswise through the seatpost, put a long bolt through it, and beat on the bolt. I again drenched the post in penetrating oil, then turned the frame upside down and took a sledgehammer to the bolt, trying to pound the post downward and out of the frame tube. All I succeeded in doing was elongating the holes until the bolt tore out of them, and when it did, it took the top of the seatpost with it. In other words, I went for broke, and I broke it.

The result of more twisting, drilling a hole, putting a bolt through it, and beating on the bolt with a hammer.

So, I'd destroyed it. The bike could no longer be ridden until the seatpost was out. Like Alexander The Great, I had burned the ships and cut off my only method of retreat. And so I took a deep breath and prepared to battle the beast to the death.

The "resection" idea was appealing since I'd done it before with seized bushings in the control arm of a car. If you have a hollow metal sleeve stuck inside a metal hole, you can take a hacksaw blade (just the blade; you can't use a hacksaw on a handle since the C-shaped handle doesn't let you stick the blade inside a closed tube) and carefully cut a few slots in the sleeve. This does several things. First, it makes it so that there's no longer an unbroken sleeve that's gripping 360 degrees around. Second, it creates edges that you can get penetrating oil under and pry up with a small chisel or other tool. In combination, these steps usually release the death-grip and allow you to lift the resected pieces up and out. 

Unfortunately, the challenge here was that the seatpost went nearly six inches into the frame tube (I measured using a coat hanger with a hook bent into the end so I could feel the open bottom). I bought a "close quarters" hacksaw handle that let the tip of the blade protrude so I could stick it down inside the post and saw outwards, cut the seatpost off with only about 1/2" protruding, and had at it.

The cut-off seat post, with blue tape marking the location of its bottom inside the frame tube.

The "close quarters" hacksaw.

The problem is that if hacksaw blade isn't on its regular C-shaped handle, it's not rigid, and there's almost no way to ensure that you're actually cutting a six-inch-long slot whose depth at the far end you can't see is the same as on the near end you can see while maintaining the goal of not sawing into the frame tube itself. I tried to always maintain downward pressure on the tip of the saw to bias the cutting force to the end while also knowing that it's naturally going to cut deepest at the top no matter what you do. So when a slot was cut all the way through at the top and any more cutting would hit the frame tube, it was difficult to cut any further at the bottom end, or even know how deeply you'd cut there.

The seatpost, resected with three slots, as well as I was ever going to get it.

I took a needle-nosed vise grip and wiggled one of the pieces, and became very hopeful when it began to break free and move away from the frame tube. If I could break one of the resected sections away along its entire 6" length, I thought I'd be home-free. I kept working it with the pliers while soaking the area in penetrating oil, hoping that the twisting would free up and snap the not-completely-cut-through slot started by the hacksaw. I was elated when I felt it give way, but when I pulled the snapped-off piece out, it was only about three inches long, not six. Crap.

I looked down the tube and could see the top of the pulled-away piece, but there was no way to reach it, at least not with vise grips. I tried prying the tops of the other slotted pieces, but they didn't budge.

I looked in my tool chest and found something I've had for nearly 40 years but have rarely used—a pry bar with a tapered round shaft. I placed it down the tube and got the tip of the shaft behind the snapped-off piece, and gently tapped the top with a hammer, hoping to break the slots I'd partially cut. I could feel as the gentle tapping moved the shaft further down, but then it stopped. Without really making a conscious decision to do so, I tapped harder, and harder still, until I was really pounding on it.

Then I looked at the frame tube. I could see a line where the paint was cracking due to the outward pressure of this rod being hammered between the seatpost and the frame tube.

Cracked paint from hammering a tapered rod in to break the slot I'd cut in the tube.

FUCK!!!

I was livid. The prime directive in all of this was not to damage the frame, and I'd damaged the frame. As a mechanic, I try to recognize the "red mist" of adrenaline, the feeling that you're nearing the end of a difficult repair and you're so close that a good hard twist on the wrench or a few good whacks will finish it off. These are things that I have the experience to recognize as being when you get into trouble, and I'd ignored them. 

I sat in the driveway as a wave of shame and remorse flooded over me. For over 40 years this bicycle sat basically unused, accumulating little more than patina and a few scuffs from being moved around, and it's only now that I think about selling it that I damage it? Fuck. So incredibly stupid. So incredibly careless. So incredibly typical.

I tried to decide what to do next. Should I walk away from my attempted resection, with the only other choice being using lye, or should I take the tack that the damage was done, that I was close, and that I might be able to complete it without doing further damage?

I carefully proceeded. I switched to using a big long screwdriver, getting the tip of the blade under an edge of the resected section, and putting a wrench on the handle of the screwdriver for leverage and twisting it, figuring that twisting wasn't as destructive as hammering. I did that until it no longer produced motion. I then switched to using the tip of the screwdriver as a chisel, tapping gently with the hammer, trying to cut the piece away from the rest of the seatpost. I felt and heard it give way, turned the frame upside down to get it out, and saw a piece was too short. There was still about a 1.5" piece remaining. Crap.

Again I repeated the strategy of twisting and gentle tapping, but I began to see another small crack open up in the paint, so I stopped. I was sooooooo close. Finally, being very gentle, I heard the last piece give way. I put the needle-nose vise grips on the protruding section of the seatpost and twisted, and for the very first time, it began to move. Soaking with SikiKroil and twisting by small amounts, it freed up, and out it came.

VICTORY!!

I then turned the frame upside down and tapped the hole where the seatpost had been over a piece of wood. I had to laugh at the two puffy seatpost-diameter mounds of aluminum filings that came out.

These reminded me of the flower from Horton Hears A Who. 

With it finally out, I examined the bottom of the seatpost, and saw why the resecting wasn't nearly as productive as I'd hoped. Despite my having made every effort to angle the saw handle to apply pressure at the tip of the hacksaw blade, most of the cutting was at the very top; the cut depth of the rest of the slot was less than halfway through. No wonder the resected strip wasn't easily breaking free like I expected.

The shallowness of the hacksaw cuts.

I went onto the basement and yanked five seatposts out of a box of parts (I still pull bikes out of the trash. Old habit.) and was astonished that none of them fit. They were all the wrong diameter. I looked closely at the underside of the part of the Weyless post that I'd knocked off and saw it was stamped "27.2." I thought I'd order an inexpensive 27.2mm seatpost on Amazon or find a cheap used one locally, but I did something surprising: I spent fifty bucks and ordered a used Campagnolo Nuovo Record fluted seatpost from a guy in Ukraine who had it on eBay. This serves two purposes. First, it give the bike a period-correct seatpost that's in harmony with the rest of its Campagnolo components. But second, it lets me buy the Roberts a present and make up for the horrible way I've treated it.

Totally not kidding about the box in the basement with six seatposts in it.

With no other seatpost to install, I took a moment and assessed the damage I'd done. In terms of the removal itself, it's one thing to damage something and regret it when you haven't yet successfully seen things through to the end, but it's another to see it in the light of victory achieved. That line of cracked paint that had initially broken my heart, I now saw as relatively minor damage that was acceptable in the context of having successfully removed the stuck seatpost. 

But there was a larger meaning to it, though it took me a couple of days to grok what it was. First, in my worldview, I choose to see that line of cracked paint as a scar that tells a story. As long as the bike is in my possession, any time I see that crack, I'll instantly recall the whole epic stuck seatpost saga. 

But more than that, even though the damage wasn't from normal wear-and-tear use, it still oddly seemed like it was helping to complete a big circle, and it was this: At least, after all those years in storage, I'd laid my own hands on the bike, spending more time with it than I had since 1978, and with the best intentions, tried to make it whole again. I certainly hadn't planned it this way, but by damaging it a little, I actually felt more connected with it than I did before.

When I get the Campy seatpost, I'll install it, give the Roberts a thorough cleaning, and again try to move it along. It really will do my heart good if I can find someone who will love it and will give it a good home. If life were perfect, they'd trek it cross country, taking advantage of those granny gears that nothing else had back in 1976. But even knowing it's seeing sun and bike paths would make me very happy.

As I said at the beginning, I have a sentimental attachment to people and things that went before, and I don't give up easily. I can't fix the world's intractable problems, but I can remove a nearly-intractably stuck seatpost. Did I mention that I also value kindness and intelligence? Amongst my weaponry are such diverse elements as...