Today I got word from EFBE that two of my EBM seatpost had been tested - and failed.

As-printed sample

Failed after 80,904 cycles of 1230N, per ISO 4210–9:2014, 4.5. Full details of the part's surface finish treatment here.

"Bling" sample

Failed after 70,770 cycles of 1230N, per ISO 4210–9:2014, 4.5. Full details of the part's surface finish treatment here.

These are the as-printed and the "bling" samples (see this blog post for details); they failed after 80,904 and 70,770 fatigue cycles (at 1230N), respectively. As a result of their failure, I decided to not test the third "fatigue resist" part.

I'll write up a longer description of the results soon, but two thoughts here:

These parts were *not* HIP treated - which might possibly have helped their fatigue resistance.
It appears that some delamination occurred between the printed parts and the carbon fiber post, which makes me question whether the glueline itself was faulty. If so, it's possible that by improving my glue joint I could have relieved some stress from the printed part. Regardless, I will note that the glueup process was kind of a pain in the ass - and I'd like to redesign that anyway.

As it happens, I have three more of these parts on my desk now. They *were* HIP treated, and I intend to glue one of them up and send it for testing. It won't be a perfect 1:1 test (these parts were treated by REM Surface Engineering, through a different process than MicroTek uses), but the results will be interesting at the least :)

Onwards!