OK. So I have had my new Soloist on the road for a few weeks now (about 800 miles) and this morning the allen head bolt on the top of the seat post (for the flippable seat) came loose during a training ride. No gradual feeling of loosening, simply tight one minute, flopping about the next.
I have only been using it in one position (i.e. have not been switching back and forth) so I was wondering whether any other riders had experienced similar events?
Is this just me being lazy about preventive maintenance or is it a design limitation that I need to watch out for going forward?
Well, either it wasn’t tightened in the first place, or its stripped. I would check the latter before anything else.
I had problems with the old Cervelo seat post head design… the one with the set screw from a few years back. The new design hasn’t been a problem for me, and the company was very good about exchanging the bad bits for the good ones, at n/c.
Actually, during my first ride, the Allen bolt that holds the front part of the clamp down snapped in half as stopped to make a minor adjustment. I got really lucky in that I could remove the snapped piece without the head with my bare hands. Then I actually took a bolt off my stem (not highly recommended but it was the only choice I had…either that or ride 30 miles standing like Scott Tinley in an Ironman) and inserted it as a replacement.
While the flippable seat post design is nice, there appears to be a lot of stress on some very narrow parts. Perhaps how Kestrel does it with a forward clamp and a laid back clamp may be more “fail safe”