This was a fairly daft episode which I will admit was motivated partly just by the itch to see whether I could do it. The Brooks Flyer (the one with spiral springs at the back) and B17 saddles use the same leather. And it’s possible to buy frames and rivets as spares.

I got the Flyer originally to be easier on my lower back, where I have a longstanding small problem. At some point when I’d been riding more, I started to find it slightly embarrassing to be using the heavy old thing and wondered whether I still needed it. And then in the course of experimenting with saddle setback, the need arose to save a little bit of saddle height. So I got a B17 frame and some copper rivets.

The process of conversion went like this: drilling out the rear rivets and dismantling the frame of the Flyer, then riveting the back end of the leather onto the B17 frame. I got a set of rivet head punches but they turned out not to be very relevant. It was just as good to use a length of 8 mm stainless rod clamped upright in the vice as an anvil for the inside end of the rivet, while hammering on the outside of the head.

Then I ran into a problem: I had forgotten to assemble the nose of the saddle. And in particular, the adjusting bolt has to be hooked into the metal of the nosepiece (the nosepiece is the same on both Flyer and B17 and doesn’t need to be changed). The bolt has a projection at the end that sits in a hole in the nosepiece, and the nosepiece also curls back towards the rear, and what this means is that to hook it in, the leather needs to be stretched almost 1 cm more than in its final position. You can ease this off obviously by screwing the bolt to the slackest possible position, but it’s still a stretch. Maybe it would all have been easy if I had assembled the nose before riveting the leather at the back end, but I don’t know, because I didn’t think to do this. I then, a bit frantically, improvised a saddle stretching device that did the job for me.

You will notice on the picture that the copper rivets are quite domed; this is because I erroneously chose the larger of the two kinds of copper rivets. Note: the smaller ones are right for these saddles.

Time passed …

Some time later, with the Mercian, when I thought I had the fit right, my bum was still getting sore over a 30-km ride. At first I thought this was the new improved sitting position activating my glutes, which may be partially true, but I also realized that the glutes that were trying to do more work were sitting on the bumpy rivets on the unyielding back end of the B17 frame. And my lower vertebrae periodically go in and out of having a slight niggle. So I thought it was time to convert back to the Flyer.

This was quite easy. The Flyer frame has more joints between parts and can be assembled with less tension on the leather. For access to the rivets, the springs need to be disassembled. But reassembling the springs is easy enough, it just needs a thin 13 mm wrench and a bit of patient fiddling to get the nuts onto the bolts and tighten them up. And this time I used the right size rivets.

I can’t say for sure that the process has no adverse effect on the lifetime of the leather, but the whole experiment cost about half the price of a new saddle of either type.

Alternatives to the Flyer might be a suspension seatpost, but I haven’t found one with the setback I need. or fatter tyres, which this frame doesn’t have room for. So that’s why I think the Flyer is my saddle for the time being.

The switch back to the Flyer also led to a modification of the Carradice Bagman.