James, I am surprised by your experience that Berthoud saddles wore out prematurely. How many saddles were affected? If it's a small number, it could have been one hide of leather that wasn't as good as the others...
We've sold hundreds of these saddles, and amongst our team, we've got about a dozen in regular – often hard – use. Testing the Juniper Ridge tires was hard on the saddle - long, cold, wet gravel rides on a fender-less bike. I put a small saddlebag under the saddle to protect it as much as possible, and it's still fine. So are all the others we have in use, including one of the very first prototypes (No. 024, I believe) that I have used on my Urban Bike for 12 years now. The leather tops are replaceable – not just in theory by drilling out rivets and resetting them, but in practice using a simple Torx wrench – but we've sold very few tops, indicating that these saddles last as long as the other posters suggest. The only problem we've heard of is that the screws can loosen as the leather shrinks a bit with age. We recommend tightening them every 6-8 months. If you lose one, we sell the replacements individually, not just as a set. Jan Heine Rene Herse Cycles Reborn in the Cascade Mountains www.renehersecycles.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
