Technical & Reference Section > Tech and Restoration

A Tale of Two Saddles: Elina Restoration

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Avro:
This will not be to everybodys taste but bear with me.

Over the last few months I have picked up two Elina 4387 saddles in 'rider' condition. I would have kept them thus if I had genuine 'rider' bikes to put them on but I do not, so I decided to have a go at restoring them to something approaching 'smart'. The saddles are for specific builds (a yellow one for my Laserlite and a black one for my Rhino Charge, although this may be reversed as parts are found).

First the yellow saddle, dated April 1981. This looked quite good in the pictures, scrached up in the usual places but not as bad as any saddle I every had as a kid! The seller said that there was no rust, so I thought worth a punt, overdraft be damned. It turned up and was fine although the 'no rust' claim was a bit optimistic. The rails have scars where the guts have been and have rusted (unfortunately the guts are Viscount but no worries). A dip in cirtic acid solution did a good job but scars remain.

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I masked off the decals, they appeared to be og, and set about working on the scratches and gouges. I have restored plastics before on classic motorcycles so tried what I knew. It all came back to me how tedious it can be returning a soft plastic surface to anything approaching new condition! I started with p400 wet and dry, listening for the sound of the paper cutting and listening for when it changed. Then through the grades up to p2500 and then with two grades of paste polish (designed for acrylic headlight lenses). The result was ok but not great. I had started too gingerly so went back to the start (wiping out several hours of work). This time I went hard with p120 dry then onto p240 dry with my palm sander. A more uniform finish was more evident. Then to repeat the labourious process of wet and dry through the grades and then to paste polishes. I would like to say this was the only run I made at it, truth was I made three - hours and hours of sanding down a kids bike saddle!

Due to so many runs at the surface the scratches traversing the decals became very stark, so, and please don't ban me from every posting again, I stripped off the lightning bolts and set about blending in the area beneath the decal to the rest of the sanded surface.

Getting there. I then made several runs with p2500 and several with the two grades of paste polish I have. Then a thorough deep clean and a finish with a high wax polish.....

Avro:
...nice yellow Elina 7387 saddle:

griff:
Looks ace  :4_17_5:

monkian:
Nice work  8) :daumenhoch:
What type of paste did you use?

Avro:
So to the black saddle, dated August 1982. In the pictures offered by the seller this saddle looked worse than the yellow one. It had more scratches, rusty rails and grubby guts. It turned out that the guts were correct and, after a citric acid bath, the rails turned out mint - result. The restoration process was as before, just as labourious and tedious. I reckon each saddle owes me 8 hours of my life, that's at least 16 hours fettling kids' bikes saddles!

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