Why should the saddle being rated to 300 pounds tell you something pray tell ?
Do you have issues with riders of such weight?
Whoa! Hold your horses cowboy!
Who said the saddle is rated to 300 pounds? It is "Stress tested to 300 pounds."
Most bicycle items will easy take 300 pounds of weight. I'll work in kgs, because that's what I understand better and it can be related to g-forces better with a near 10/1 relationship. 300 pounds is 136kgs. If the saddle/seat in question was stress tested to 136kgs it isn't very strong and they don't have much faith in it. Most of us, hitting a ridge in the road or dropping off a kerb will easy subject the non-suspended parts of a bike to 4gs. A quick calculation would show you that 136kgs in stress test mode (i.e. expressed as weight @ G forces) is only 34kg at 4g. In other words, the saddle stress tested at 300 pounds is actually only strong enough 9(or was tested to) a person of 34kgs sitting on the saddle, dropping off a kerb.
That tells me a lot. It tells me that the manufacturers don't know what they're talking about. It tells me that they perhaps did know what they talked about and wanted to hide the weakness in the product or, it tells me that it is all BS.
Most of us dropping off a kerb would not sit on the saddle but suspend ourselves on our legs. However, the wheels are not suspended and they would experience the full force of the drop. An average-weight person of say 70kgs would easily "load" a wheel at 400kgs when dropping off a kerb. Wheels take this in their stride. A person sitting on a trike hitting a bump or dropping off a kerb would not be able to suspend because of the bike's configuration. The saddle would take the full brunt of the force. A "stress-tested-to-300lbs" saddle would not cut the grade.
The point of my original post was to a) point out why a butt-dividing saddle works better on a bicycle and b) to ridicule the ridiculous brochure and its set of claims - just for laughs, if you like. I could have gone further and laughed at the #1 Bestseller claim (really really funny BS) or I could have puzzled over point four and three kinda contradicting each other. Instead I focused on my area of expertise - basic physics.
Take a deep breath, go for a ride and have a beer.
