Originally titled "Elitaone Carbon Seatpost Crack During Install"
Edit: It has been brought to my attention (in posts below) that the install manual specifically points out that you shouldn't do exactly what I did to crack my posts. I'm an idiot because I didn't see that and cracked at least 2 posts because of it. Elitaone deserves a fair bit of credit for actually having that instruction noted in their manual (even if I'm too dumb to notice it).
I had one Elitaone post fail while riding a month or two back and I just got around to replacing it due to the difficulty in removing the broken seatpost from the frame. I didn't blame Elitaone for the first one because I'm 99% certain I had cracked it, initially, while adjusting the seat one day without a torque wrench. It seemed fine afterward, though, and I happily rode it for a couple months and just avoided adjusting the height again. Well, I was playing chicken with it and it failed while riding in about the worst time and location possible. I was practically in the middle of the swamp about 15-20miles outside of the city of New Orleans at about 2am. Yeah, it was not cool. I shoved what little remaining post I could back into the frame (I could only get about 3/4in or less into the frame) and tried to ride back on the road rather than the trail. It was 30mi back to my car. About 1-2mi away from my car the remaining bit failed and the seat fell off completely.
I had the damndest time removing the stuck post. First step was removing the Ltwoo battery pack, which I managed to do by putting a big wad of hot glue on a dowel rod and hot-gluing the battery pack to the dowel. Then I tried using a quill-stem but the one I had wouldn't work. I tried drilling a hole through the frame tightening slot and pulling out, but it just ripped through the carbon. My last attempt used a very, very long quill stem that managed to grab the bottom of the post and seemed to let me pull up from there.
Again... not really the seatposts fault and I can't believe I rode on it for months and under the conditions and places I did before it failed.
Today, though... I was DAMN sure to use a torque wrench, and even bought a newer, better torque wrench so that I wouldn't be tempted to make adjustments without it again. I was making some final tweaks to the seat height and, about the 2nd or 3rd time I adjusted it, I heard a sharp crack right about 4.5 Nm of torque. I pulled it off and cleaned it. Sure enough, it's cracked. I think I'm going to go with a different option this time, and I'm no longer so sure about Elitaone. Which is a little scary because I have one of these on 2 of my other bikes.
