Dawes-man

I have an NOS Ideale Type 80 Record saddle with a distance rail to rail of around 35mm - that's centre to centre. I have several Brooks saddle clips and one Ideale but they're all for standard rails, approximately 45mm centre to centre.

Has anyone come across this before? Does anyone have the right clip for this saddle?


Ideale Type 80 Record saddle


Brooks rails


Ideale rails

Aubergine 

Dawes-man

That's because you've never seen one with narrow rails like this one before. I assure you, your suspicion is just that; these rails have not been bent. My wife has the same model saddle on her De Rosa, identical except for the rails. Indeed, it was when I tried to fit this one to her new machine that I came across the difference. You can be sure I wondered if the saddle had been blocked, thus narrowing the rail distance, but the cantle shows no sign of it.

I have around 16 Brooks saddles, dating from 1948 to 2006, 12 of them on bikes. Half of the latter are on Brooks clips (the rest on 2-bolt Campagnolo posts with one on a 2-bolt SR post) and I have 5 spare clips - I've come across small variations in rail distance, which sometimes required a bit of a struggle to get them fitted but this is very different. I'm not even sure it's possible to make a clip that takes rails this narrow as the clamp for the post needs to be at least 27.2mm ID with another total 3mm thickness to the metal, making an OD of 30.2. That only leaves a little under 2.5mm each side for the rail runners...

The only 'narrow rail' saddle I'm aware of is a particular model of Brooks that Campagnolo made a seat post for in the late '50s but that was even narrower, at around 28mm, centre to centre. Or maybe it was the other way round and Brooks made a saddle for the narrow rail Campagnolo seat post. Either way, I'm sure they talked about it beforehand...


Unbent rails



Unbent cantle
*

CliffordK

I've seen some Schwinn (I think) seatposts that were about the size of a pencil.

OK, according to the Sheldon Brown website, Schwinn had a 22.0 and a 21.15 (13/16") seatpost.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-197...8/382593156132

It looks like the clamp size was 5/8".

https://www.ebay.com/itm/1-Vintage-N...8/173518190562

I have no idea what the actual rail spacing was, but I'd imagine it was narrow.

Now, the question would be whether the bikes with those 13/16 posts & 5/8 clamps would actually get a really fancy leather seat.

rhm

I have two or three boxes of saddle clamps, including many from older French saddles, and I'll be happy to dig through them to see if any of them will fit a saddle with rails this narrow. But I doubt it. All these clamps came to me on saddles, and I never noticed a saddle that has rails that narrow. As you said, there is often a saddle with rails that don't quite fit the standard clamp, but with a little persuasion it can be made to work.

I tend to agree with @Aubergine, that your saddle is not the way it was intended to leave the factory. I suspect your frame is bent, or out of spec for some reason; but what do I know.

Can you measure the angle at which the rail is swaged to the cantle, on both the normal TB80 and the narrow one? I suspect you'll find the angle is different. If that's the case, the rail won't look bent, but will be out of spec.

(Emphasis added). As you suspect, Brooks made those saddles specifically for that model post. They have the word "CAMPAGNOLO" stamped into the leather on top.


Some of those Schwinns came with Ideale no 42 saddles (or the Sprint saddle, same frame and evidently made by TB), which have standard rail spacing; if I recall correctly it's just a different clamp shape, sometimes with a thick shim in it to take up the extra space. A lot of older American bikes had that size seat pin; I definitely have the clamps that came on a couple Persons saddles set to that size post. But the saddle rails were the usual spacing (more or less).

Not to digress too much, but I don't consider the Ideale 80 to be a very fancy seat.

due ruote 

Dawes-man

I've just heard from a Japanese friend who collects mainly French bikes, who'd heard from another friend I'd asked about this rail anomaly, saying, 'I think I have one of those narrow Ideale clips.' So it seems there was a narrow-rail Ideale. I hope he remembers correctly. If he can't find it I might be very grateful for your help, rhm. In any case, it's kind of you to offer.

Before I heard from that friend I took my wife's other Ideale 80 of her De Rosa to compare it with this problem child. I don't know how to measure that angle but the more I looked at this new 80 Record the more it seemed to me that it was manufactured like that. An obvious difference is that the used saddle has painted rails and cantles, the new one os chromed throughout. Both have rails on little pill mounts and both look the same, as well as the little raised portions of the cantles the pill mounts sit on. There is no sign of force having been applied.

Also, looking at the saddles upside down, the rails on both saddles are bent in and up from the pill mounts before running parallel to each other for around 60mm before turning down and towards each other on their way to the tension screws at the front. It's all seems too neat and deliberate to have been effected after manufacture. There are no marks in the chrome either.

If my friend finds the narrow Ideale clip my worry is that it will be meant for a smaller diameter seat post than the 27.2mm one on my wife's new bike, which I think, btw, you would like very much, rhm. (It's a 1948 Raleigh RRA with original black paint, white box lining and all the juicy RRA parts, like the original 1948 Brooks Champion Narrow B17 with aluminium cantle and stainless rails. Not original are the from brake, the pedals and the cranks, although the original crank came with the bike - the chain ring was cracked but a friend has braised it up. Oh, and the Noweight Bluemels have been replaced with later Lightweights.)

Ha ha! It's the hardest saddle I've ever held in my hands. I don't know what leather they used but it's 5.7mm thick and only a tiny bit more flexible than wood. And yet, my wife finds them very comfortable. She found the B17 on the RRA very uncomfortable, hence the attempted change. I've lent her a 1950 B15 Champion Standard instead, which she finds comfortable but which I found agony. I replaced all the rusty steel rivets on that saddle with copper ones and added a piece of new leather underneath the tensioner at the nose as the leather around the 3 rivets there was badly cracked. I thought of you as I was doing it.

rhm

[QUOTE=Dawes-man;20619002]...

Also, looking at the saddles upside down, the rails on both saddles are bent in and up from the pill mounts before running parallel to each other for around 60mm before turning down and towards each other on their way to the tension screws at the front. It's all seems too neat and deliberate to have been effected after manufacture. There are no marks in the chrome either.





It's basically a swaged connection. One machine bends the wire into a rail of the right shape; that process is very good at putting the bend in the right place and to the right angle in one dimension, but it can have the angle off a little in another dimension if the wire twists between bends. Then a steel collar is placed around each end of the rail, the ends of the rail are placed through the holes in the cantle plate, and then somehow a lot of pressure is applied to the cut end of the wire rail. There is a video on YouTube showing how Brooks does this; somehow they hold the rail very securely, and then crush the cut end down. The wire gets shorter and thicker, the end of the wire gets smushed out into a head, and the steel collar is compressed around the wire rail. Heat is involved, I'm not sure whether the heat is applied separately, or if the force generates the heat. Anyway, it is a pretty secure connection. Paint or chrome is done afterwards.

I'm still of the opinion your saddle was made this way, but out of spec, not intended to be this way. Looking forward to being further (re)educated on this matter!

Cl904

Reading this thread I think I have a narrow rail ideale 90 and matching clamp... I had been wondering why it didn’t lay right in a regular microadjust seatpost.

Chombi1 

I have a Brooks Pro from 1984 that has the opposite problem. The rails are just about one half rail diameter too wide to fit on to standard seatpost clamps. I think it's just Brooks "factory tolerance" in play in my case as the castle does not seem to show any evidence of being bent at sometime in its service life. Been trying to bend the rails together with my C clamp for some time now, without any success. It just springs back to the same width, despite all the pressure from the clamp I dare apply to the rails. I'm afraid that I could eventually damage the anchorage points at the cantle if I squeeze them together with more force from the clamp.
It didn't help that the C clamp kept jumping off the slick chromed rails when I clamp it down as hard as I dared to
Per my experience with my Brooks Pro, I don't think spreading the rails apart with mechanical means would be such a good idea either..... Unless, maybe you can apply a lot of heat to the rails (like getting it glowing red hot?), but that takes it to a different level of fixing it that could damage other stuff on the saddle, if one is not careful....

rhm

Well, without digging too deep into my bin of seat clamps, I already found one that measures around 37 mm. It's a ratty, disreputable thing and I can't imagine anyone would want it, but evidently these things do exist.

Big Block

I accept it is not period correct

Dawes-man

I've been half meaning to reply and half thinking I'd wait till I'd met up with the friend I mentioned, who reckoned he had the right saddle clip.

I was going to reply to rhm's point about the saddle having left the factory out of spec. I hadn't understood that. I thought you (rhm) meant the rails had been bent post-manufacture, as I still think Aubergine meant. But looking at the regularity and purposefulness of the rail bends, and thinking a factory-second would be unlikely to be so far out of spec (almost 10mm), I still thought the saddle was meant to be like that. Also, Chombi1's post, about how resistant to adjustment he found the rails to be, which reflected how impossible I found to move the rails on this saddle even a mere fraction of a millimetre using all the muscle I could muster, made me think it unlikely anyone would have been able to bend the rails so neatly.

Anyway, I met up with my French cycle collecting friend this evening and he brought along the clip he'd mentioned. I was half expecting it to not fit but it does, perfectly. This friend, I'll call him Mr Dog - it's an in-joke among our small circle of vintage bicycle friends - is mainly interested in pre-war French cycles (he's mellowed in the 10 plus years I've known him but his eyes used to glaze over at the mention of anything post-war) and is very knowledgeable. He brought with him a 1950s Ideale saddle clip and explained that French bikes often came with the very same clip. He told me they are not that unusual.

As for this saddle, which I thought was probably from the 70s or early 80s, Mr Dog reckons it's either 1960s or perhaps early 70s, around when Ideale started making their saddle rails to the Brooks standard. Up to then he thinks they might have made saddles with both rail widths, maybe for the French and overseas markets. The clip is for a standard 22mm seat post top (in my earlier post I'd forgotten that clip-type posts were tapered to 22mm) so I now have a perfectly usable saddle. My wife has taken to the 1949 Brooks saddle I lent her... Plus, Mr Dog was horrified at the idea of fitting an Ideale saddle to a 1948 Raleigh RRA.

As you can see from the photos, the clip is pretty rough and the Ideale stamp is very faint but it's the right size. So there you have it...

CliffordK

So now you just need to buy a new bicycle to match your seat.