Moto?

Well 1st off you’ll need to decide how you want the seat to look.  I picked an image that I thought would look good with my bike(because it is a vintage bike) and one that is pretty basic because my sewing and fiberglass skills aren’t too advanced.

After you find a design and have basic dimensions of the seat you are trying to build.  mine were:  17” long.  7” wide in front and 9” in the rear. max height I chose to be 5”(I wish I made it a little lower, as it would have looked better at like 3-3.5”).

Next you’ll have to build a basic frame to wrap the fiberglass around.

After I built the basic seat-bottom shape out of foam-core board(you can use wood or even like a wire mesh) I added foam that I picked up at Michaels to make a general shape to wrap the fiberglass around.

(sorry about the phot quality of some of these as I took them with my webcam).

After building the basic shape I started to wrap the seat with fiberglass.  Make sure you reinforce portion that you are actually going to sit on(whether you use steel or apply extra fiberglass is entirely up to you).

At this step I decided I wanted the whole thing to be padded but you can decide to pad only the portion you are going to sit on but just remember that this will require a ton of sanding and perhaps filling in uneven portions with bondo. (I would recommend doing it this way as it would look nicer on the bike.  I didn’t use this method because I am a student and don’t have alot of time or extra money for bondo or more fiberglass).  If you DO decide to go this route, make sure you apply a ton of extra fiberglass because you will be doing ALOT of sanding(don’t forget a respirator mask if you do).
So I went on to pad it…

I used 1/2” padding that I picked up at Joann Fabrics along with 1/2 yard of Marine Vinyl.  I went on to upholster the seat with the marine vinyl.  This step took the longest because it had to be cleanly done and it required a TON of planning.  If you decided to just sand down the fiberglass you could just use like a 1/4” black self-stick padding and it would look very clean. 

Here is my final result.  (I drilled a hole in the back and through the bottom of the seat to wire the light in).

It definitely doesn’t look like a professional seat but it’s not half bad for spending $30 and cleaning up the brake light mounting bracket.

So I built the cafe seat for my bike…

…AND IT TURNED OUT GREAT!!!

There will be step by step intstructions and I’ll show you how it was done on my next blog.  I spent about $30 on it and you have to admit it looks good for the price.  I don’t have time right now to put the ‘how-to’ blog together but here is a final pic.

My 1971 Honda SL175