Originally Posted by
3alarmer
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...one of the things you realize after you've encountered enough of them is that seat posts are not always standardized at the diameter marked on them, and frames are not always reamed to the standards you expect. So if it's an alloy post, there's no reason not to carefully sand down the portion that goes into the seat tube a skosh to get .the fit you need.
I replace a lot of seatposts at my local co-op and if a frame takes a 27.2mm post, for example, I can pull out any post stamped with 27.2mm at random and it will fit. That includes posts made by Thomson to generic steel posts taken out of 1980s practically throwaway bicycles. There’s lots of seatposts out there and there’s really no need to sand one down.
Originally Posted by
3alarmer
. If 26.8 went in there without deforming anything, and was just a little tight, going to something like 26.4 or less is a bad idea.
On that we can agree.
Originally Posted by
3alarmer
. I cam measure ten 27.2 seatposts out in the collection in the garage, and only 5 of them will come in at what I need on a particular frame. Which is why I have a milk cratefull of seat posts.

I don’t know where you get your posts or what is wrong with them but I’ve never had a problem swapping posts on a bike. My Moots 27.2 post will fit in my Dean frame (although they are dissimilar frames and might explode due to the incompatibility

). My wife’s mountain bike uses a 27.2mm post and I put a generic post, a Race Face, and a Tito titanium post in it. My Cannondale takes a 27.2mm post and I’ve had the OEM Cannondale post, a couple of Race Face posts and a Thomson post in it without any issues of size. The same holds for the other 10 bikes in my garage. I’ve never had to measure a seatpost of any size for any bike...ever. I’ve been through a lot of posts in 39 bikes over my life while suffering from a severe case of upgradeitis.