FAIR Bicycles DROP BEST UC Offset Saddle Clamp Review: Back and Forth – Travis Engel | The Radavist | A group of individuals who share a love of cycling and the outdoors.

The FAIR Bicycle DROP BEST UC is more than just an excuse for Travis to talk about how much he really loves steep seat angles. It can add years of life to an outdated mountain bike by moving its saddle forward by more than an inch. Or, it’s a solution for people who really hate steep seat angles.

I am not an engineer. I haven’t studied metallurgy or ergonomics or AutoCAD. I did design a BMX bike once, but lemme tell ya’. You do not need a college degree to design a BMX bike. Which is good, because I also don’t have a college degree. I just know what I like. And when it comes to mountain bikes, I like steep seat tubes. Even on thoughtfully conceived bikes like the Norco Optic or Ibis Ripmo, I always end up slamming the saddle well past its MAX line. If you ask an engineer, they would say that I’m disrupting my bike’s cockpit length. And I would say they’re absolutely right, but cockpit lengths have seen a lot of disruption over the years.

Truth is, the rise of the almighty reach measurement has allowed cockpit lengths to evolve without much attention. I actually planned on opening this review with a flawed but well researched sidebar about how, despite bikes getting longer, most saddle-to-bar lengths are actually significantly shorter than they were fifteen years ago. But it was getting to be a long walk to tie that into my affection for the FAIR Bicycle DROP BEST saddle clamp. My manyfold point was that, for the average rider, being forced to stretch from seat to grip does not necessarily make you a faster, more efficient pedaler. What matters is making your bike suit your needs, and that’s exactly what the DROP BEST is meant to do.

FAIR Bicycles DROP BEST UC Quick Hits:

Made in Switzerland
Ships worldwide
Postitions saddle forward or backward 27 mm
Compatible with round 7 mm rails and 7×9 or 7×10 mm oval rails
Compatible with almost every dropper post on the market
Also available with hardware to fit many non-dropper posts
Increase (or decrease) in stack height depends on seatpost brand and setup
139 – 174 grams, depending on configuration
CHF 139.00 ($145.62)

FAIR Bicycle is a Swiss manufacturer whose name reflects their attention not only to how they treat their own employees, but also how the employees of their suppliers are treated. Even, in some cases, their suppliers’ suppliers’ employees. FAIR publishes documents provided by many of their business partners (machinists, bolt makers, raw material suppliers, etc.) outlining things like wages and paid vacation time offered to their workers. FAIR also makes it clear on their site that, in the majority of their markets, they wait for enough nearby orders to accumulate so they can ship in bulk, avoiding the waste of single-item express shipping and eliminating the need for customers in the EU or USA to pay VAT or customs duties. It even arrived to me in a plain cardboard box, packaged in Swiss newspaper, not fancy cutout foam or even bubble wrap.

At the moment, FAIR essentially produces two items. One is a hook that attaches to your old inner tubes to make bungee cords, and the other is the many configurations of the DROP BEST saddle clamp. It replaces your seatpost’s saddle-clamp components, allowing you to position your saddle about 27 mm backward or forward from center. The very first DROP BEST launched in 2021, and was designed to work only with the hydraulically actuated RockShox Reverb dropper post. But recently, FAIR Bicycle launched the DROP BEST UC or “Universal Compatibility” lineup, which works on pretty much any post (dropper or not) with a “Thomson-style” two-bolt adjustment mechanism.

This was good news, because I don’t have a first-gen Reverb anymore, and that original DROP BEST lives in my overflowing saddle-and-seatpost bin. But I once had a Reverb on my XL-sized 2019 Scott Ransom. It was the perfect candidate for a DROP BEST. Out of the saddle, its 500 mm reach was great, but the 75° claimed effective seat tube angle put my seated stance way back—well—into 2019. I plunked down the 109 CHF the moment I learned the FAIR Bicycle DROP BEST existed. It breathed two more good years into a bike I might have gotten rid of much sooner. There are a lot of similar models still in service, where nothing is outdated except for the seat tube angle. Six- or seven-year-old bikes from Scott, Niner, Trek, Giant, and countless others have perfectly modern geometry and features. Moving the saddle forward an inch may be all you need to bring them into 2025.

If any steep-angle skeptics have made it this far, let me reach across the aisle by admitting that the DROP BEST does feel weird at first. Especially because, at first, you’ll probably feel it on the flat sidewalk outside your house. But that’s probably not where you do most of your riding. The moment you point your bike uphill, I promise you won’t want to go back. And you already know why. The main reason we might stand up on a super steep climb isn’t because standing is inherently more powerful than sitting. It’s because we can get in front of the saddle and on top of the pedals. If you’ve ever had the strength of will and sphincter to sit on the very nose of your saddle in a steep section, you know how much power it puts in your legs. The initially unfamiliar feeling of a forward-facing DROP BEST gets you a little bit of that same sensation, without the need to clench.

This effect is slightly more prevalent on my current bike than it was on the Ransom. My Canyon Spectral 125 has a 1° steeper claimed seat tube angle, and 40 mm less rear travel to sag into. I had been doing fine without the DROP BEST, but after getting used to it, I’m hooked. It’s not even that extreme. Because I’m no longer slamming my saddle past the MAX line (a benefit in itself), it only moved forward about 20 mm. At my 800 mm saddle height, that’s the equivalent of increasing my seat angle about 1.4°, from 76° to 77.4°. Not crazy in 2024. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its disadvantages. On the rare occasion that I’m pedaling flat trail for extended periods, I find myself wanting to slide to the rear of my saddle to stretch out my back and shoulders. And I can pretty much abandon hope of ever attaching a saddle bag for bikepacking. But it’s a worthy tradeoff given how much more comfortable and efficient my bike has become on long climbs. That wasn’t really a surprise, though. What was a surprise was how another bike opened my eyes to the FAIR Bicycle DROP BEST’s application in its rear-facing configuration.

This Marin San Quentin is part of an ongoing secret experiment that I’ll be writing about soon. I want to keep the details under wraps at the moment, hence the blurred-out front end, but it will be a shredpacking hardtail designed around maximum versatility and minimum unsprung weight. I specced it with a fork that’s 10 mm shorter than Marin designed the bike around because I wanted a steeper head angle and lower bottom bracket, but that brought the seat angle too upright given that the bike will see a fair bit of flat mileage. That, paired with a handlebar with some pretty healthy backsweep, made the DROP BEST a perfect accessory.

Both of the above examples come from my perspective as an outlier. I’m tall, so I’m particularly sensitive to slack seat angles. And my application for the Marin San Quentin is not exactly what that bike was meant for. It’s pretty much a gravity bike, so 77 degrees on a sag-free hardtail makes sense. But there are plenty of common situations where an offset saddle position can solve a problem. Maybe you want your road bike to do double duty as a triathlon / time-trial machine. A forward-facing DROP BEST UC ROAD gets your hips on top of the pedals and your chest on top of the aero bars. Or maybe you’re on the shorter side, and the march towards steep seat angles hasn’t taken your saddle height into account. A rear-facing DROP BEST might return you to an optimal weight balance. Or maybe you’re just all legs or all torso, and you were forced outside your new bike’s recommended body height range. A DROP BEST gives you a way to hack a better bike fit. But it doesn’t really feel like a hack.

Although that Reverb-only model was more simple and elegant than the UC version, I was still pretty impressed with the updates FAIR came up with. Most notably, the nuts are not in fixed positions, but instead can be slotted into two of multiple semispherical recesses to align with a given post’s cradle dimensions. There is a bit of nerve-wracking trial-and-error in this process, because it seems easy to pick the wrong recess. It simply says “Position the thread inserts to achieve the most vertical orientation of the carrier bolts possible.” In a perfect world, I’d like to have maybe seen those recesses numbered, and been told which two to use somewhere in the already extensive compatibility notes on the FAIR website. But it’s pretty clear where they “want” to go, and I’ve had no error after my trial.

The other bit of faff is the pins and spacers that may be necessary if you want an extreme saddle angle, or if your seat tube is extremely slack. They raise the DROP BEST stack height slightly to offer more clearance for maximum tilt. Even though I’m a nose-down kind of guy, I didn’t need any of the spacers. And it should be noted that the FAIR Bicycle DROP BEST may actually reduce your post’s stack height if you don’t need any spacers. Despite seeming bulky, it shouldn’t add much height or even crowd the underside of a slim saddle. You just may need to cut the included bolts if they stick out too far, something I still haven’t gotten around to.

Installing and removing the saddle actually includes less faff than a traditional clamp. There’s no 3D puzzling required to free the rails from an upper plate. The pinching components are adjusted individually, and allow you to remove the saddle without dropping any parts. As a bonus, they make for independent adjustment of angle and fore-aft position. And they even work with either round or flat-oval rails.

Perhaps most importantly, it’s silent. I was pretty generous with the grease I used, making sure no interlocking surface was left dry, but I haven’t had to go back and hunt down any creaks. And nothing has slid or loosened up in the month since I’ve been using the FAIR Bicycle DROP BEST. I should note, though, that FAIR recommends fully disassembling, cleaning, inspecting, and regreasing every 40 hours of ride time. I’m sure I’ll push that a bit, but after swapping it between multiple bikes for this test, disassembly and reassembly has become sort of second nature. Despite seeming like a hack at first glance, it’s actually a clean little solution. I mean, think of all the other things the industry comes up with to make climbing easier. There’s suspension lockouts and electronically controlled dampers. Or all manner of ultralight parts … Or motors. I reckon moving your saddle forward may be the best solution. Then again, I’m not an engineer.

Pros:

Offers otherwise impossible setups for riders who want steeper or slacker seat tube angles
Easy independent adjustability of angle and position
Easy saddle removal and installation
Sustainable, fair manufacturing