A new seat for my bike

The first owner of my bike had fitted her with a Corbin gunfighter seat. That was in '96. He imported the bike himself from California after living there or a while. He hardly rode her (1500 miles on the clock when I bought her :-) The combination of a dry warm climate and then years in a cold shed made the artifical leather hard and very inflexible. And when I started riding her after all those years, the seat cracked and deteriorated fast.

Before I leaped into the IT business I had my own car/yacht upholstery shop so it will probably not surprise you that I decided to make a new seat cover myself instead of buying a new one. Besides, once you know how, it is not that difficult.

So, I crawled up the attic and got my old sewing-machine downstairs. It is and old Industrial Singer I once got from a retired shoe-maker and I just hadn't had the heart to sell it when I switched careers.

It still is a beautiful piece of machinery from the days of steam trains and all parts work together with the precision of a swiss watch, only the steam engine is missing. In fact it has no motor at all ha! But after carefully oiling it's bits and pieces it ran fine right away (with my legs being the engine :-).


You can use your average household sewing machine but you have to be very carefull not to burn out the electric motor while sewing multiple layers of artificial leather. The other hand tools I used are quite basic.

Luckily for me I also have a lot of other materials (fabrics and stuff) left and after rummaging through it I found just what I was looking for in order to make a new cover: A plain black artificial leather and one with a "woven" texture. The only thing I had to buy was the spray adhesive.
With some small pieces of the artifical leather I made a little testpiece in order to see how it would match the original, as you can see, this will do just fine :-)

The seat itself is hold in place on the bike by just one screw. The cover is glued and riveted to the base of the seat. I used a flat srewdriver and a pick to break the rivets in order to release the cover from the seat. While removing the seat from the base some foam "stuck" to the cover and ripped.
I will have to fix that later.

I separated the original pieces of the cover with a pair of scissors. I cut the fabric just along the seams. I will use the cut off pieces as a mould to outline the new pieces on the back of the new artificial leather. Keep in mind that you need more material along the cut-off edges in order to sew it together. I cut around roughly 1 a 2 centimeters extra space around the outline. It doesn't come that precise.

The precision is in the pinning the pieces together on the cut lines. make sure all the pins point in the same direction or you'll have troubles removing them as you are sewing the pieces together. It is also a great test to see if the pieces have the right size before things get definite.

Something that always gives me a warm feeling, is when things get 3 dimensional. You start with flat pieces of fabric and all of sudden form appears.
After sewing the pieces together you fold them (look carefully at the old pieces for the right direction!) and stitch another seam just a little away from the edge. It does not only look good but it is also for strenght. You can use a bigger stitch for this seam then the first one. After that you just cut away the superfluous material at the "inside".

Turn the whole inside-out and voila: there you have it, a new seat cover!

Now it is time to prepare the base for the new cover. First I used the pick again to drive the remains of the rivets through the base and deeper in the foam. That is a lot easier then drilling them out one by one.
Because the foam on the top side was damaged during the removal of the old cover I glued a thin layer of foam on top of it and then cut it to size.

Next thing was to glue the new cover on top of the base with some spray adhesive. I did it in two steps. First I positioned the cover in the right position and secured it with some pins in the middle. I lifted one half of the cover, sprayed the glue, pressed the first half in the glue and after hardening I repeated that process for the second half. This glueing is necessary to avoid too much pressure of the fabric on the rivets at the bottom of the seat.

After that I riveted the cover to the base. Make sure you fasten the cover evenly and watch out for much tension on the fabric. It rippes easily. It is not necessary but I sealed everything of with black ductape. To me, it just feels better ;-)

And this is the result, click on the images for a bigger picture, not bad for just a few hours work huh ?