How We Make A Custom Motorcycle Gel Seat! (With Pictures)

  As some of you may know, I am in the business of taking stock motorcycle seats and making them more comfortable, because anyone that’s ridden for more than 20 minutes know that stock seats suck.

 
  There are two things we do, one is shaving down some of the stock foam and replacing it with memory foam. This has proven to be an improvement, but we’re not satisfied with it. While it is better, it just doesn’t seem like it’s worth the time, effort and money that it requires. Currently we charge $90 for this service, and I’m not going to detail the process because we have moved on to bigger and better things. Gel!

 
  Gel is not revolutionary, but it is expensive. As far as my research indicates, Impact Gel seems to be the cheapest and most effective solution. Just a quick note, that $65 price tag is misleading. Check the picture if you don’t believe me. That $65 option is almost worthless for most motorcycle riders. You will need to buy the Large or Extra Large option to make the best use of it, which is $90-$110 respectively. Even that price tag is a bit much.

 
  We decided to find the most common form of gel and adapt it to our uses. There were two options, foot sole inserts or keyboard wrist rests. Honestly, the foot sole is probably a higher caliber gel but again you have to pay for it. They’re not very thick, and the impact is very condensed. We wanted a broader, softer more plush feel that provided substantial suspension in the rear compartment (your butt). We went with the keyboard wrist rest.

Hopefully three will be enough, let’s see!

 
  This is the Honda VTX stock seat from the side. As you can see it has a decent shape, and it’s fairly comfortable. Compared to some OEM seats I’ve had the pleasure of sitting on, this one is actually not half bad. That’s not to say that it’s good, but it could definitely use an upgrade. That’s where we come in! We bought three of those keyboard wrist rests and stripped them out of their protective fabric shell and rubber bottom. MAN is this stuff sticky, but very pliable and easy to mold.

2 Belkin Wrist Rests stripped naked (gel porn?)

 
 


Here’s the seat naked, as well as the chunk that we excised (with extreme caution!)

 

  The seat chunk that was removed is quite sizable. We will be carving out of both the sliver removed from the seat and the seat itself. The seat itself is relatively simple. We will be shaving the seat down to make a better shaped cushion. We use the roughest sandpaper lying around and shave down some in the middle area to create a bit more of a bucket, and that’s that. The sliver however requires a much more delicate hand. We have to keep the outer edges of the sliver more or less in tact, but we need to remove a fairly large amount of the foam if we want to maintain the stock shape, and that’s one of the primary restraints. If we maintain the OEM shape, then we can use the OEM cover without any loss of style. That was a big hurdle we had to learn for ourselves and it took many tries before we got it into our thick heads to stop tempting the wrinkled-vinyl gods. We carved approximately 1 inch out of the inside of the sliver (and I promise this is the part you will need the most patience for if you attempt this on your own). Delicate maneuvering with a 14″ long reciprocating electric knife takes practice, but we’ve made experts out of this and in case you’re wondering, yes these skills transferring beautifully to a turkey, I cut shapes that you wouldn’t think possible out of my thanksgiving meat…there’s a joke there somewhere.

 

Nothing interesting here, just shaving away…

 

  I assure you, cutting gel is about as easy as cutting your toenails with safety scissors meant for a 3rd grader. As you can see our first cut did not go over so well, but we did err on the side of too large for just that reason. Because this stuff is so easy to mold and shape, any extra pieces we had to cut off after could be very easily used to fill in gaps, and they were. Very little gel actually went to waste.

  Reskinning the seat is always interesting. We have to glue the cover back down or we can never match the OEM shape. We haven’t tried it yet, but I have purchased silicon sealant that I would like to experiment with here, but for this seat we used spray on adhesive. It holds the shape well, but the crap that the manufacturer puts on underneath the cover doesn’t come off cleanly and ends up leaving some kind of lumpiness and it is visible. We used a heat gun to help us stretch the vinyl without putting stress in the wrong places (i.e. the stitching).

 
  Next time I do this I will likely try to strip the inside of the cover completely, as much as I loathe that delicate process that at any given moment could go clear through the cover itself I think it will complete the one thing we’re missing — a professional finish. Our seats are comfortable, they’re shaped great, and priced very competitively, but we’re missing the panache that defines a real professional. You can definitely see our work in the pictures, and I don’t intend to hide it. We are forever learning and improving our methods, so think of it this way: If you like the seat, know that yours will be even better! The next seat I do I will attempt to put an additional layer of gel directly underneath the cover to provide a plusher feel but more importantly that smooth grade I keep talking about. Unfortunately because of the cost of materials the cost of the seats have gone up; the level of comfort however increased by much more so you are still coming out ahead!

 
  I hope this helps you with your project or convinces you to send your business my way
emailavinasharora@gmail.com to get in touch with me.