Thursday, April 26, 2012

Please Be Seated

As an update to keep this blog rolling, here is the seat option that I am working on, with much assistance from Brett Rosenthal. Brett had this old seat (made by 'Bertolani' of Italy), which was buried deep under his house. It does have a touch of Laverda SFC about it, although the rear number plate section is a tad different. Who cares, I like it!

I dragged it home and pulled the old upholstery off and cleaned it up a bit. It appears to be a pretty good fit for the bike, and I discovered that it should actually mate quite nicely to my spare original seat/guard base from the LMII. All I will have to do is hack off the mudguard from the original and this one should slip nicely over and mate the remaining part with a minimal amount of fandangling. The advantage of this is that I can use the original rear swivel mount and position lock, which allows the seat to lift for access to the battery etc. Nice!

Here are a few pics. You may also notice the modified / triangulated  LM1 / LM2 sidecover that will be used (thanks again to Brett Rosenthal, who makes/sells these covers). The advantage of this cover is that it will allow the use of the standard mounts and keeps the room to conceal the coils and fuses etc. in their original positions. Nice one Brett!









Side-by side comparison with previous seat shows seating position will be similar
UPDATE

Hacking now completed!


I hacked off the no-longer-required portion of the spare seatbase/guard with the trusty Dremel last night. Pics of the result:

Bye-bye guard!


Tail docked


This just might work!

UPDATE on the frame:
I am back to choosing to powdercoat and am now plugging holes,threads in preparation for blasting and coating. The trade-off is that I will still be doing the painting of the tank/seat/fairing myself.

Stay 'tuned' ...