Cycling UK Forum

Anyone doing off the shelf hard shells (or in fact any seat options) in the UK?

Ta

ICE presumably get theirs from somewhere. Aside from them, I'd guess any 'bent dealer that deals with manufacturers which use hard shell seats would be able to source you one as a spare.

Pete.

Cheers- found these guys and am waiting for a ballpark figure from them...

http://oceancycle.co.uk

as long as its not an arm and a leg - have lost too many of those and I need to ride my bike

I've got one of their GRP seats with cushion... solid and pretty similar to the one on my Nazca. I fitted it to my Pashley PDQ but then reverted back to the original mesh seat. Sold the PDQ (to lingering regret) but still have the seat... PM me if interested... it has been drilled for fitting to the PDQ but otherwise fine.

Have a look on Ebay, search for "recumbent" under cycling.
Their are a few on there with or without "ventisit" pads.

HTH

Recumbent Parts.com in the Netherlands seem to have the hard shells for the Optima bents available. I have not dealt with them personally, but prices look good.

Ice do two hard seats, both the same but one is carbon fibre. The cheaper one is £355 and the carbon is £470.

I bought one directly from Novosport. They had one with slight cosmetic defects, so it was a reduced price.

On a related note, I have been wondering how many different hard shell seats are out there. I think it may be less than might be supposed, because Novosport supply seats to lots of bike manufacturers. For example Nazca "sport" and "comfort" seats, and Raptobike seats, and Metabike seats are all made by Novosport I think.

Here is the price list:

http://www.novosport.de/files/9/sitze-polster.pdf

I got the "Liegeradsitz, glasfaser". (Recumbent seat, fibreglass). The first one on the list. I think it was reduced to €100 because of the cosmetic defects (which can hardly be seen).

I did a part-ex mesh seat -> hardshell seat with Kevin at D-Tek around 7 years ago.
I've just had to buy a new ventasit cover for it this year after ~40,000 miles covered.

Also Thor seats, http://www.thorseat.eu/en/thor-composite-recumbent-seats/

The wide shoulder back on the ~Thor carrier was interesting. I do feel that a back wider than the shoulder blades wouldbe good. The exotic http://synthetictransport.com/railgun/ is similar in this respect, but designed for far low seat angles, I'd like something in between.

It depends if you want the seat to lock your upper body in place or do you want to lean into the corners.
If you want to lean into the corners then a narrower seat is easier because you can use the groove between your shoulder blades to hook the edge of the seat and that helps to hold you in place against centrifugal forces.
I've even padded my seat so it slightly convex at that point to make it even easier to do.