Touche Mr. Cascade.

I respect your opinion and experience on greasing and the bit from Craig Calfee is very cool as I had not seen that piece before.

My experience both personal (Trek 5900 OCLV, Cannondale CAAD 5, CAAD 9) and professional is what has lead me to my "general recommendation" aforementioned in the thread. I have seen issues where certain types of grease may have lead to frame issues (namely Lithium based) as a new customer came in about 2-3 years ago and had what I would call a "softening" of the seatube and it had in fact been greased with a lithium based grease. While that generally isn't a cycling grease and the manufacturer and I still debate whether the grease, production defect, other enviromental factor may have lead to the degradation of the tube...in reality we may never know.


My use of assembly compund in many ways offers a similar protection between the CF component and frame material. At least in my experience, never had a customer or my own post stick when using this practice.

I mentioned the texturation of stem & handlebars as anecdotal evidence of slippage issues. Yes, we are talking about seatposts but I have recently seen a few manufacturers "texturing" the surface of their seatposts as well.

I will think long and hard though when/ if I run out of assembly paste as to whether forgo it on a build or just use some grease.

Thanks for keeping me on my toes...

Chris