The Dentist Association; Cervelo Owners Club

how is a company like Cervelo not able to develop one good seat clamp design

I blame the customers, especially triantelopes. Trying to accommodate proper cyclists and triathlengers without having different SKUs means providing yards of set-back adjustment. If you want an aerofoil seat post, you either have a circular cross section at the frame interface which works well but again adds extra SKUs to provide the desired range of adjustment or you have an aerofoil all the way down and suffer the consequences of uneven radial pressure at the clamping interface. To be fair to Cervelo, plenty of other companies have done at least as badly in trying to square those circles.

I see the issues with the seat clamp.

But looking further up, at the saddle / seat post interface they used with the P3SL for example, they could have massively improved the manipulability of that without changing anything about the basic design. It just really feels like no one could be bothered to put in the extra bit of thinking to get from this to something like the Fizik Cyrano bolt system that has the same basic footprint in terms of where the bolts go, but is just absolute miles better in terms of ease of assembly. Essentially just because the 'thumb' part of the bolt is below the clamp rather than above it... so you can actually access it.

I guess what I'm saying is that the design just feels a bit rough around some of the edges, which personally surprises me considering this is not a cheap brand at all.

(However, I really bloody love my 'new' frame, even though it's possibly a bit on the big side for me, so it's not like I'm regretting buying it)

Count yourself lucky, you could spend £7k on a Look and have the saddle fall completely off.

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Is that a thing??

(Well I'd be safe from that happening anyway because I have not even a fraction of that money available to spend on a Look... :D)

I've seen it happen, a stack of 1mm spacers pinging everywhere!

At least Cervelo got the saddle to stay attached...

The group noun for Cervelos is, I believe, 'a wall of Cervelos'.

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actually, I think it's 'wealth' as in a 'wealth of cerveli'

^ Definitely the correct word.

All I need to do now is get the P5 up and running. Not enough space on the wall for it, so it's staying on the floor.

Quick question, is there any resource somewhere that lists which frame from which year used which seatpost standard, or at least when they switched between different models? I'm especially interested in what they put in the Soloist Carbon / early S2 frames (~2008-ish?), and whether there's anything around that would still fit that. So that was before they used the wedge design, when seat clamps were still a thing, but it did have the aero teardrop shape.

seat clamps were still a thing

There appear to be two teardrop seatpost clamps for Soloist/S2 etc., one from 2001-2004 and one from 2005 until they stopped using a collar-type clamp.

It looks like the new SP6 is the fit for anything up to MY2004 to replace any of the various delicate old versions using the same tube cross section.

Oooof course, why would I assume they didn't change before that too... :D

I'm definitely looking for a 2005+ version then - thanks for the link, I was actually on the seatpost overview page before but didn't check the descriptions of all of them in detail, so I missed that one! "fits all Classic S- Series" should mean it'd fit a Soloist Carbon then, I'd assume. Have you ever come across info on the actual dimensions somewhere? I've done a bit of a search, but actual data about their frames from 10+ years ago seems a bit sparse.

actual data about their frames from 10+ years ago seems a bit sparse

Yeah, they seem to have taken a pretty steep dive down hill in terms of actually documenting their history in a way which is useful to owners of old stuff. Their web site looks exactly how all web sites look when some new bell end comes in to make the current product range look like every other shit website as is the fashion and couldn't be arsed to port legacy content to the fucking hideous new front end. Mind you, if I were Cervelo I'd probably want to keep my seat post history buried too :)

If you're mad for it, you can buy the book

If it comes with full geometry charts and measurements of seatpost types, it's almost worth it.

Happily my Cervélo has a 27.2mm post and a BSA bottom bracket so I don't need to worry about any of that.

So the old aluminium frames came with brass shims for the seatpost. Am I correct in thinking this is not needed for any of the carbon frames? I've never encountered one in other frames, but... I'm not sure. If it is needed, it's easy to make, but does someone have an idea of the ideal thickness of the brass?

I have an old alu S1 but am pretty sure there's no brass shim in there - fwiw I have both the original and SP6 posts and they have the same dimensions.

Fair enough, I'll correct that to "some alu frames came with brass shims"...

Am I correct in thinking this is not needed for any of the carbon frames?

AFAIK, yes.

Great, thank you!

Anyone got an Aspero?
They look pretty interesting.

Anyone got a hambini Bottom bracket?
He was slating cervelo build quality in a YouTube video

It was specifically the tolerances allowed in the BB shell which did look shitty behaviour particularly as they had been worsened from the previous spec.