How can I reuse or recycle a bike saddle?
We’ve had an email from Jenny (who makes cool stuff out of old bottlecaps), asking about saddles:
i got a nice new soft bike saddle to replace my old hard one so i can cycle in comfort. but i was trying to think of what i could do with the old one.
any ideas? i’d love to turn it into something funky and cool or useful.
I have a feeling I’ve seen some cool bike seat repurposing but can’t think where or what it was (although a lamp springs to mind for some crazy reason).
Ideas?
(Oh, and recycling cyclists may also be interested in our posts on wonky wheels rims and inner tubes.)
(Photo by cribbe)
IIRC, the book Low Tech: Fast Furniture for Next to Nothing by Rick Ball & Paul Cox has a design for a stool made from a bike saddle and a tripod of recycled piping. This book was published in 1982 and is out of print, but 2nd hand copies are available for sale online, or you could check at public libraries. It has lots of ideas for reusing items that readers of this blog might be interested in.
I saw someplace once where someone had made a sort of cow skull from a bike seat and other parts, and it was used as a hatrack. I guess you’d have to paint it white and paint in features and add horns of your choice.
If you have the rest of the bike to use too, you could use the handlebar (whatever it’s called) as the horns, and use the saddle as teh face to make a longhorn wall decoration.
Considering the lack of suggestions it is probably best to strip it down to its component parts (plastics, fabrics, metals) and take them to the correct recycling places.
If you have a thin stump in your yard about a stool high, then attach the bike saddle to it and have a comfy sit sometimes.
Make improvised bike seating for a little one. Dig two polls into the ground. Place bike handles on one and bike saddle on another.
Or, cut our horse silhouette and place bike saddle on horse’s back.
Build unique bar stools with bike saddles.
Build a sea sow with bike saddles on each side.
Screw several of them flat to the sharp slope and practice alpinism.
Make not very tall jumper, so your legs actually reach the ground.
Perhaps, bike seat can be use for certain medical conditions, when there is immobility in pelvis, and person ca not sit in a normal chair. Donate it to the shops that build individual devices for disable people.
Attach it to the back of the bike, where you carry baggage, or in between the sit and the handles, then you can give someone a comfy ride.
i like the idea of attaching it to the bike infront of my saddle. i could use it as an ipod holder!
I was thinking of making a hanging basket out of it for some flowers!
its too uncomfy for a stool – thats why its being recycled in the first place!!