Seatpost Stuck? You need The Seatpost Man!

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When you get home tonight, promise us that you’ll pop out all the seatposts on your bikes and make sure they’ve got a nice, thin layer of grease (or carbon-prep), ready for the winter.

It’s an all-too-common situation to find yourself in – a winter of wet riding, damp bike sheds and garages and a lack of preventative maintenance and you come to fit that shiny-new seatpost or dropper post in the springtime, only to find out that it’s stuck fast.

A thumbnail of grease, once a year, would probably stop this kind of thing.

Sometimes it’s possible to fix yourself – a lot of penetrating oil and maybe some help from a vice and Big Reg from next door and you might be able to shift it. Sometimes you can’t and you end up with a snapped or sawn-off post just poking out of the frame. And if not, then you just have to tell yourself you’re happy with that seatpost after all… Or sell the frame on (which is why you should always be wary of frames that come with ‘free seatpost and BB’). Sometimes you can get a local engineers to shift it for you – but in the same way that any powder coaters can powder coat a bike frame, you probably want to trust it to someone who knows bikes.

You may be familiar with this kind of sight. Seatpost Man is…
And – fixed! Any damage was already there, so stop before you get to this point.

John Lee, an engineer by trade, but a cyclist at heart has set up with the very niche, but rather essential, business of shifting stuck seatposts. Costs vary, but for around £50, plus shipping, he’ll get your seatpost out, without damaging the frame (and often the post – especially if you’ve not broken it already!). If you’re local to his Chorley, Lancs, workshop, he even offers a ‘fixed while you go and drink coffee’ same-day service.

There’s even hope for fossils like this
Even carbon on carbon can be removed. We’re impressed.

We’ve got a couple of frames in mind to send John to see how he gets on.

He can be found at theseatpostman.com

Chipps Chippendale

Singletrackworld's Editor At Large

With 22 years as Editor of Singletrack World Magazine, Chipps is the longest-running mountain bike magazine editor in the world. He started in the bike trade in 1990 and became a full time mountain bike journalist at the start of 1994. Over the last 30 years as a bike writer and photographer, he has seen mountain bike culture flourish, strengthen and diversify and bike technology go from rigid steel frames to fully suspended carbon fibre (and sometimes back to rigid steel as well.)

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