Although a seemingly small change, building a new seat support took several
hours to complete. Here's a sequence of photos showing how it was done.
At left is a view beneath the seat, making it easy to see how far inward the
extensions had to go to attach to the frame. It got the job done but needed to be replaced.
At right you can see a pair of 1/8" steel strips cut to length, drilled
to match the stock mounting holes and bolted down.
When I originally mounted the seat, shown at left, I built crude extensions
to hold the seat and sliding tracks using the stock mounting holes. The
result was ugly, heavy, and scraped the back of my leg every time I got on
the bike. Something needed to be done.
At right is a close-up of the extensions, made with square tubing and a piece
of angle welded together and sticking right out. Just imagine how painful a
scrape from this would hurt.
At right the clamped assembly is fitted to the frame to make certain
everything lines up where it should.
At left the new sliding track assembly is tacked into place. You can also see braces
welded beneath the strips to keep things from sagging. The welds aren't the
prettiest but provided good practice time.
The seat was bolted down for another test fit and passed with flying
colors. I'll have to remove the seat again for the final welding, followed
by deburring the various pieces and a coat of
primer.
Here's the finished assembly. New upholstery is scheduled for the future,
but right now a simple tuck underneath secured with some
hog rings will suffice.It took about five hours to design and fabricate
the new slider, but makes a big difference. It looks better, weighs less, and
hopefully eliminate any more scraped legs.
At left are the sliding tracks clamped to the metal strips. Keeping the
tracks parallel was important to make sure they slid back and forth without
binding.
