Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
I took a longer ride on the seat today, and it's pretty good.
There's some pressure on the forward end, but a few quick passes with
the grinding wheel will take care of that. I suspect I'm close to
being done. Woo!
Now, I just have to find my old materials and see what I have left. I suspect I have enough headliner material, but that I'll need to acquire more vinyl. In any case, there's probably a surface finish of vinyl that I'd like better than the one I used for the Ninja's seat.
I was in Bellevue Kawasaki today, and saw that they had a 2003 Ninja 250 for sale. There was a moment of temptation, but I resisted. It's amazing how much physically smaller those bikes are than the Z.
I was actually in there looking for these pads which adhere to the sides of the tank, and afford a grippy surface. It apparently quite improves overall control, being another point where you're "attached" to the bike. They had some generic pads, with big knobs on the surface, but I wasn't that convinced. I thought I remembered MCN rating some other brand higher, so I wanted to do some research before spending my $40. I'm sure any of them would work fine, and be a huge improvement, but I can't just plonk down money like that on what amounts to a whim at this point.
Posted at 14:48 permanent link category: /motorcycle
Today started well enough, but quickly went downhill. I had just
ripped the seat cover off the Z's seat, when I discovered I couldn't
find the electric knife I was going to use to cut the seat foam. Hmm.
Nope, not there. Nor there. Nor there! Damn! Where the devil could
the thing be!?
After about 20 minutes of fruitless searching, I finally had a vague recollection of loaning the knife and a set of sanding discs to my friend Jesse. I called him, let a message, checked into irc, but he wasn't responding. Finally, I got hold of him, and he confirmed that he did, in fact, have the electric knife and sanding discs. Hallelujah! We arranged the pickup, and I was soon happily cutting foam.
So, in the last five hours, I've got the seat almost completely formed. It's going much more quickly this time, now that I have the Ninja's seat under my belt. I just got the pillion section glued down, and am waiting for the glue to dry so it doesn't gum up the electric knife's blade too much.
Surprisingly, I managed to get the shape just about right before my first test ride. I had thought it was sloped too far forward (which is the problem I was trying to fix -- argh), but when I rode it, it was actually pretty well spot-on. There was some pressure on the forward part of the seat under my legs, but that's easy to fix.
Posted at 14:42 permanent link category: /motorcycle
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater