Alright – I’ve got a bit of a confession to make here. In the process of gathering all the hundreds of photos I’ve snapped of the project and the weird mode of hardly touching the project for weeks on end dovetailed with a metric shit-ton of dozens of things getting all knocked out in a few days I honestly have lost track of when some things happened in relation to others. Clearly for some of this an accurate timeline would be imperative. I wouldn’t have done the new electric loom before I fabricated a place to mount the mUnit and battery, for example. For other bits it doesn’t really make a jot of difference, so you may notice elements in photos I haven’t covered yet but will in the next few pages.
This next part is somewhere in the middle, so bear with me. Some of this happened a couple/four months prior to writing, and the very end of it happened literally three days ago and was officially the second-to-last thing I had to do to finish the bike. Spoiler, that. I actually -do- finish the bike. 😉
Enter the Saga of the Seat Mount – aka ‘another story of Kent fucking up more than once’.
When I made the fiberglass seat pan, I had a relatively solid idea of how I was going to mount it to the bike. I had already built the little rod for the front of the seat to hook into at the very front end of the seat hoop tube, and had made a “rear seat mount and brake light/turn signal bracket” as well. My intent was to bend some flat metal bar into a bracket that I would then fiberglass into place on the underside of the cowl.
That turned out to be a HUGE nightmare. First of all, I realized I didn’t have any way of -really- accurately bending that bar so the width was perfect from one side of the seat to the other. This became a VERY tedious process full of an awful lot of guesswork. One of the bigger problems was the fact that the underside of my fiberglass was where I did a TON of extra glass to reinforce critical bits, and it was pretty damn sloppy, so there was nothing uniform at all about where I wanted to mount this bent hunk of metal. After three attempts I got it close enough.
When it was as close as I was ever going to get it, I clamped the SOB to the mounting bracket, pulled the fiberglass up and slathered the top of those horns with bondo. I then pressed the seat pan back down and strapped it tight until the bondo dried, essentially using it as temporary glue. I pulled it off, and liberally employed some fiberglass-laced bondo to fill in the gaps between horns and cowl, then put another four or five layers of fiberglass over the horns to make the bracket one with the seat pan.
While I was doing this, I was also rigging the hook for the front of the seat mount. Same deal, but this one was a little simpler. Once I sorted out the angle and throw of the hook I glassed it into place. I was only going to use about 6″ of the steel flat bar, but I just happened to have about a foot of the stuff and figured the more of it I had, the stronger the fiberglass would hold it in place.
Everything dried, and I was stoked to slip that bastard into place, clamp it down, drill a couple holes and call the seat pan ‘done’. Oh, you silly, silly man. It wouldn’t go on. When I would engage the hook at the front, the seat pan would NOT sit back down all the way onto the rear mount without being forced enough that I feared the fiberglass would crack. Absolutely baffling. The only thing I could figure out was that my calculations were off and the hook was somehow at the wrong angle, therefore not allowing the seat to sit flush. I chalked it up to something shifting while the additional fiberglass was curing, though really couldn’t sort out how that could have happened.
Oh well. Nothing for it but to remove the hook and figure out something else. Chop chop, buzz buzz.
I still had no idea how I was going to replace the hook, but at least I could make sure the rear mount was going to work. I put the seat back on…
and again, it would NOT sit flush. It was closer, but now it rocked back and forth right to left across the center line.
That’s when it hit me.
It wasn’t the hook that had been the problem. It was that I had an additional 6-ish inches of that fucking metal bar fiberglassed to the underside of the seat pan… and the final couple/three inches were actually resting on the very top edge of the battery. Son. Of. A. Bitch. If I had just spent that extra, what, three minutes to cut that bar to my initially-planned length, I would have been done already.
Sooooo…. I figured out how much I needed to cut out of the fiberglass and oooohhh soooo gently approached the thing with the trusty angle grinder, first with a flap disc to remove the glass, then the cutoff wheel to do the deed.
And yep. Problem solved. The pan was now nice and flush, except I had no way to mount the front end of it anymore.
I put that thought aside and moved ahead with all of the painter-y stuff mentioned on the previous page, and not to get TOO terribly confusing about how all this worked out, I must for a moment follow the laws of temporal normality and quickly talk about THE NEXT STEP I ACTUALLY DID. In this case, it was make the plastic base for the actual seat.
The fiberglass pan is, of course, the bit that will allow my seat to mount to the bike, but in order to make the seat itself, there needed to be a substrate of some kind that Christina will be able to work her upholsteristic wizardry upon. After some research and speaking with someone at US Plastics, I ordered a 1′ x 2′ chunk of 1/4″ Kydex black thermoplastic. This stuff will heat-form at temps my heat gun can produce, and can be cut nicely on the bandsaw.
I mucked around making a template from card stock for the shape, traced it on the Kydex and cut it out. I decided to mount it to the seat pan via T-nuts with both rubber and zinc fender washers on the underside of the pan to distribute the load of tightening it down. Definitely don’t want to get this far and crack the fiberglass in a moment of overzealous bolt-tightening.
To bend the Kydex, I set my heat gun to medium-high and ever so slowly began warming it up. I’ve had a -little- experience doing this kind of thing bending binding strips to the body contours of a couple electric guitar builds I’ve done, so I knew I didn’t want to hit it with too much heat all at once. I rigged up some clamps involving a pine 1×2, some thin plywood and a strip of 1/4″ red oak that could all act as sort-of variable pressure clamps. I wanted to put enough pressure on the thing to coax it to bend as the plastic heated up.
It was slow going, and I ended up having to re-heat it a couple of times to get it to fit perfectly, but in the end it worked like a charm. You can see a couple places where I hit it too hard with the heat gun and it started to get a little wonky, but all of this will be hidden by the seat itself, and it didn’t cause any structural problems. Oh – almost forgot – I also used the heat gun to warm up the plastic around the T-nuts as I pounded them in. That Kydex is VERY tough. Once they were seated all the way I hit them with the heat gun one more time to let the plastic ‘flow’ a little and really lock them in. Last thing I did was use the T-nuts as guides to drill the holes in the fiberglass for the four mounting bolts.
Now that I had that sorted, it really was time to figure out the stinkin’ front hook that I probably didn’t need to remove in the first place. While rummaging through my toolbox I discovered a steel bar that came with it as a locking mechanism. It was the perfect width and was already powdercoated… so I figured I’d see if I could modify it and save a trip to the hardware store.
I had been toying with the idea of trying to fabricate a new ‘hook section’ and weld it to the steel bar that was still embedded in the seat, but after reading a handful of welding articles I wasn’t convinced that the fiberglass around it wouldn’t suffer dire consequences, so it occurred to me that I could cut a hole in the seat pan just big enough for the hook to slip through, bolt it to that embedded steel bar which would also wedge it under the installed seat for a little added stability. I just needed to then cut a hole in the Kydex to accommodate the new bolt head. The pic with the masking tape was the only way I could sort out how to keep it in place while I drilled the initial pilot hole through both the hook and the seat pan.
So now all the seat-mounting nonsense was -supposed- to be done. It worked nicely, but I still had to sort out how I was going to mount the license plate. I at first cobbled together a simple setup using some scrap aluminum and mounting it as planned to the two bolt-holes I put in that rear-turn-signal mounting bracket. I don’t seem to have any photos of that process – but let’s just say it wasn’t stellar. A little wonky in the construction, and as it turned out, it ended up being a little too far forward and when I would sit on the bike, the springs compressed just enough that a good bump or two in the road would make the rear tire grind at the bottom of the license plate itself. Not good.
My buddy Mike was in a similar stage on his build and had found these killer little spring-loaded quick-release buttons, and I friggin’ LOVED that idea. Soooo. Back to that sheet of steel that keeps saving my bacon on this project. I lopped off a chunk and measured width, figured out curvature to match the shape of the hoop, and came up with this as a mounting bracket.
The harder part was figuring out how in the world I could get the pins mounted in the cowl. The quick-release buttons had about a 3/4″ thread depth, which would rise above the plane of the current metal bracket inside the cowl. I figured if I could come up with a way to make a sort-of big-ass angle-iron-like bracket all would be swell. I mucked about with a couple designs and came up with this:
Since I’m still sans-welder, I needed to take it over to Mike’s to do the deed. I was a -little- nervous ’cause again, this would involve welding onto metal that was embedded in the fiberglass – but our plan was to just tack-weld onto the existing bracket and test for issues between each weld. Since the welds would be a few inches from the fiberglass we figured it would be ok.
First we welded up the bracket itself, then clamped it to the seat pan and hit it with a bunch of tack welds.
The last step(s) was to bend some steel and make a base plate for the license plate, drill the mounting holes for it, get the bike-side mounting bracket welded on and paint the bits.
For reference – the first shitty license plate mount vs. the super-groovy new plate/seat mount combo.
Finally wired up the plate lights and called it. Fork inserted, declared done.
