Late night I was examining a recently acquired Brooks Ti Swallow and was again struck by how light it is. I don't have an appropriate scale handy, but it feels to me lighter than a classic plastic saddle, like a Turbo or a Concors. Anyone actually weighed these who can say which is lighter? It occurs to me that many people have an exaggerated idea of how heavy the actual leather is in a traditional leather saddle. Never really thought about it this way, but I'd wager the leather top is actually quite light, while the vast majority of the weight of a traditional saddle is in the steel rails, and most especially in the cantle plate and the nose bolt assembly.
In fact I suspect the actual leather top weighs less than the plastic shell of a plastic saddle plus its thin leather cover and the padding in between. I'd even guess that you can add the rivets on a Brooks to the weight of the leather and it will stiil come in at less than the weight of a selle Turbo less the Turbo's rails. After all, a plastic saddle shell has to be relatively thick to support the weight, especially at the rear, where it must provide the support provided by the cantle plate on a leather saddle. The plastic saddle does, of course, have the advantage of not needing the relatively heavy nose bolt, since it does not stretch and therefore need not be adjusted to compensate. Anyone ever weighed the components of a traditional leather saddle versus those of a lightly padded leather covered plastic saddle?
So the rails, cantle plate and nose assembly of a leather saddle is one place on a bicycle where titanium actually makes sense, especially since it actually produces a better ride in addition to a lower weight. Now I would doubt that the titanium rails, cantle plate and nose assembly of a Ti Brooks can actually be lighter than the steel rails of a Turbo, which need no cantle plate or nose bolt. But probably they don't need to be, but only need to reduce the weight enough to preserve some of the advantage of the leather cover (plus rivets) over the plastic shell with cover and padding.
Now there was a version of the Turbo with alloy rails and I believe even a realtively rare version of the Ideale 2000 series plastic saddles with Ti rails, both of these very close to the end of the CR era. But of course since it was only rails, with no cantle plate or nose bolt, that were made of lighter material, the savings were not as greats as with an alloy or Ti frame on a leather saddle. Anyone know of any traditional leather saddles that used aluminum rails of the same diameter and shape as traditional steel rails, as the alloy rail Turbo did? Ideale evidently thought that such alloy rails would be too weak, as they used alloy "I beams" on their alloy saddles. But I don't know that such conventional size alloy rails on a leather saddle would be any more likely to fail than on the alloy Turbo. I know there were traditional leather saddles that used alloy cantle plates and steel rails. In fact I have one, an Ideale model 134, the saddle that was also made as the Ideale "Columbia" honoring the American space shuttle. I suppose the next logical step in weight reduction might have been to make the rails as well of alloy, but of conventional size, like on the plastic Turbo. But I don't know if anyone ever actually did this on a leather saddle.
BTW, as a bit of trivia, only the original T&B French made Ideale Columbia had the allow cantle plate. The later Leppers-made (though still bearing the ideale name) Columbia had an all-steel frame. I have one such Leppers-made Columbia. The rails and cantle plate are also a slightly different shape, which is noticeable from the fact that the stamping of the space shuttle Columbia on the side is much closer to the forward-most rear rivet on thhe Leppers version than on the original T&B version. It appears that Leppers must have cut the Columbia top to the original T&B pattern, but then fit it to a not-quite-matching frame from some other Leppers model. It also has the Rebour stamp at the rear, but those more expert than I in these matters do not believe the Leppers version actually received the Rebour treatment. I do not know if Leppers ever made the regular Ideale model 134, without the Columbia stampings.
Regards,
Jerry Moos
Big Spring, Texas, USA