15,000 miles and that’s all folks
I was wondering if the divots in my saddle were not severe enough so I could ride a 400 on them. Um, no, this doesn’t seem to be the case – I spent a good deal of today’s populaire sitting well back on the saddle, because if I slid forward the front edge of the cantle and the rivets would start digging annoyingly into my butt.
So for the short term I need to cannibalize the project bike for the saddle, and then try to decide whether to buy another Brooks Pro or spend approximately 2× as much to try a Berthoud saddle (Boulder Bicycle has a fairly liberal “if you don’t like it, you can return it” policy on saddles, which makes the terrifying price less daunting.) And then when that’s sorted out, I need to sit down and figure out what I need to do to reblock this saddle to pull most of the indentations out and make it usable again (at which point I can worry what to do with the sag in the soon-to-be-cannibalized-from-the-project-bike pro.)
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If you can get the saddle hot – I don’t know about the undercarriage on Brooks saddles, and it’s clear you can’t take the leather off the rivets! – in an oven, to between 180 and 200 F, you should be able to rub beeswax (or carnuba) over the leather and have it melt straight in.
This will for-sure give you much harder, stiffer leather; whether you want to sit on that and how long it will hold are much tougher questions. (I’ve only done this for things like archery bracers, not anything load-bearing like a bike saddle.) But it might give a fix for the leather’s tendency to go right back into the saggy shape that 15,000 miles of riding has imposed on it, no matter how much wet-block-and-dry happens to it.
Absolutely best of luck with the Berthoud, too.