KS has been making a name for itself by providing full featured and high functioning dropper posts at prices that undercut the big names, but their cheapest model of all is a bit of a disappointment.
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It’s a bit short on travel at just 100mm, but that’s not much of a surprise at this price. It’s a stepless design that allows you to stop it anywhere within its travel, with a sealed air spring and hydraulic cartridge doing the business.
It’s reasonably smooth, if not overly quick, with a noticeably sluggish return to full extension in the last third of the travel, all accompanied by lots of squelching from the internals. There’s not much in the way of side to slop and it didn’t develop any up and down sogginess.
The external cable remote is actuated via a small lever at the top of the post that’s operated via a bar mounted remote. The positioning of the actuator and its exposure to the elements means it’s more likely to encounter to dirt over time, but it worked just fine during our sloppy and mucky test period. The post comes with a neat guide to try and tame the external cable, which works reasonably well to keep it from flapping about around your knees when riding.
The bar mounted remote is a bit of disappointment however. While the button shares the same pleasant shape as the more expensive KS models, unlike them it doesn’t integrate onto a lock-on grip. The remote also doesn’t have a split clamp, so getting it on and off means removing your grip and any other cockpit parts that get in the way. There’s a fixed 90-degree exit guide from the remote that incorporates a cable tensioner, but we found it could sometimes get in the way depending on how you position your brake lever.
It’s got a single bolt saddle clamp that rather limits adjustment, though the spring-loaded jaws do mean that fitting is simple. A bigger issue is the rather large 20mm of setback, which can leave you struggling to get the saddle far enough forwards. All in all, we’d rather see an inline micro adjust clamp.
On the plus side, it’s available in a skinny 27.2mm diameter as well as the more commonly found 30.9mm and 31.6mm, so it’s an easy way to upgrade if you have an older frame.
The model we tested came in a 385mm length and tipped the scales at a pretty lardy 736g for the 31.6mm diameter. The 27.2mm option is 410mm long and if you can spring an extra £15 then there’s an internally routed Integra model, while proffering up an extra £10 on that gets you 125mm of travel — though there’s no 27.2mm option there.