Over time the seat on the CB250 had started to degrade. For a long time I didn't mind, but eventually I got fed up of the foam being constantly wet/cold, it was starting to break up/disappear and people were starting to comment on the appearance to the point where it was becoming embarrassing. After a trifling 88675 miles the poor seat looked like this:
I looked up professional services but they all seem to want triple figure sums to staple a new bit of cloth on the top, so that was disregarded with the contempt it deserves. A classic car place suggested £90 which was better, and a furniture repair shop (man) suggested £65 or £40 if I supplied the cover. I would have gone with this if he wasn't constantly stacked out with work - I never managed to get him to do it. So sod it, I'll do it myself! How hard can it be..?
Firstly, there is a foam and material shop in Leicester on Silver Street. It is magnificent. After sitting on a few different kinds of foam I decided a harder/denser layer underneath for support and a nice soft layer on top was the way to go. The helpful girl dutifully glued the layers together and sawed it into the size I wanted (err, maybe yay big?). They also supplied some tough, plastic backed material which they considered an off cut. The foam was £3.70 even after all the work she had to do and the material was £2.50 - this is more my kind of money.
Looking over the seat I saw the staples were quite meaty, clearly I would need the biggest baddest staple gun I could bare to pay out for. I eventually ended up with a used Arrow T50-M, bought off gumtree. As if I'd shell out for a new one?
Sadly I had to buy some 6mm (as in the legs are 6mm long) staples. These were £2.99 for a pack of 1000, a nasty expense but I was in too far to back out now.
I felt armed and ready. Time to whip the seat off and undo the nuts that hold the silly pillion strap in place. A slight twist and..
Ahh bugger. What are these made of, chocolate?? I even slathered some Plus Gas all over it. Oh well, the other one will surely..
Ugh. Forget the strap then. Bloody Honda.
With the seat ruined in all possible ways, it is time to pluck the staples out and peel off the cover.
It just might, you know. Not bad for a guess.
At this point I grabbed a bread knife and got straight to it. I consoled myself with the thought that it doesn't need to look too pretty because it will be covered anyway, and it might even be more comfortable than stock.. First, I traced around the new block:
This worked quite well, and I only sliced my thumb twice.
I snuggled the new pad into the hole..
And luckily found some spray adhesive in the garage. This helped ease the new pad into place as well as secure it, though I did get quite a lot of it over myself somehow.
The old foam was moulded to the seat base while the new foam was obviously flat underneath, but I ignored this. The new foam will probably try to mould itself into the base over time anyway.. Maybe.
This was all going rather swimmingly, so I went and hacked at it some more to make it a bit more seat-shaped. Sculpt seems too strong a word for this, hack is definitely more like.
I used a finer knife for this as the bread knife was just dragging the foam around rather than slicing it. I used some of the off cuts to fill in the spot which had melted away where the other smaller hole was a bit further back, again it doesn't have to be pretty..
One unexpected obstacle was that the new foam was now in the way of where the seat fits the frame at the front.
So I just hacked away at it until it wasn't in the way any more. I found drawing round the area with a pen helped mark it as the foam was distorting so much while I stabbed it into pieces.
That was the foam done, a wonderfully easy job if you manage to guess the size of the foam correctly! Next was the cover, this turned out to be an utter nightmare - just as everyone says it is! I made a slight error here as the material I'd purchased wasn't at all stretchy, so I expected some hassle and a few wrinkles. But Gordon Bennett..
I had watched a couple of youtube videos on how to recover a seat, some recommended spraying some adhesive on the cover while others did not. The ones who didn't said it would make the cover tear quickly as it was stuck in place, which sounded plausible, but not sticking it to the foam obviously was not working for me. So I sprayed it, stuck the material to the foam as best I could while keeping it wrapped tight..
..And set to work stapling the cover on with my super duper Arrow T50-M. This didn't work.
I had the right staples, the ones I'd pulled out earlier were also 6mm, but the gun I was using was lacking the oomph to shove them right into the plastic of the seat base. Eventually, after many wasted staples, I got enough in (or nearly in) and called it a day.
Still not super, and I immediately realised my light blue/grey with dark blue/grey colour scheme didn't work as well as I thought it would, but I'd recovered my seat by myself for a grand total of £24.19, I now have a staple gun and my seat won't constantly try to wet my bum. Good enough! I also ignored the pillion strap and, since it was no longer present, there was just enough thread to fit two new nuts to hold the brackets in place so that was no disaster.
One bloke at work suggested it looked as if I'd used a pillow case, you have to laugh it off..
No comments:
Post a Comment