SuperBrightLEDs.com model WFLB24 (I used 3 of these, I suppose you could use 1 96 piece instead if it fits, i.e. if you go on the outside rim instead of the inside, read on for details). Also, you’ll need a vehicle. Mine is a 2002 Honda VTX 1800C

The Build:

I put my lining the inside of my passenger backrest, it turned out pretty well because it’s discrete, was relatively easy to epoxy and shoots directly back a VERY eye catching brake light. I’m thoroughly satisfied. Anyways, the goods:

The raw setup

I used clear epoxy to adhere the LEDs to the inside chrome backrest, the lip was almost the perfect size for good adhesion, and if you’re like me you can push out the LEDs a little bit so they’re also visible at an angle.

I routed the wires underneath the passenger seat to the right side cover where the brake light positive wire is, and the negative you can ground where ever you like:

Wire Routing

I ended up having three LED strips, one on the left, one on the right, and one in the upper round. The upper round was kind of difficult because i had to route the wire along the chrome bar and make it stick to the curve so it was as invisible as possible, I ended up going down the left side and if you can’t see it that means I did my job

This is where you want to splice it

It’s the green wire with the white stripe. I have already done lots of mods here and there so your box might not look exactly like this, but the green wire with the white stripe is the one you need. I did not wire my LEDs to the ignition, just to the brake so they’re completely off unless i’m hitting the brake, as you’ll see in the coming pics. I would have liked to do the always on and super bright when braking setup, but LEDs are so sensitive that when i connected them to the half-brightness of the regular running lights, they were on full brightness anyways and I’m just too lazy to deal with the right resistance and wasting the precious little amperage we have on these bikes.

Now for the juice:

Regular Running Lights

I’m Braking!!!

The pictures don’t do this thing justice, I assure you. It’s a huge improvement in looks and in safety. I’m very proud of this one

As some of you know my mom had leukemia. She went into remission but that did not last very long. She recently relapsed and after her first round of chemo got an infection. They think it was fungal in nature and mostly contained in her blood, unfortunately due to her being a human her blood is everywhere in her body.

She’s in critical condition currently and her prognosis is not very positive. She had been intubated and pretty much everything is going in and out her through a tube. This is really the first time I’ve had to deal with someone I’m close with in any state remotely like my mom is. She was still herself even though she was mostly sedated. I thought she was completely out but when she was first intubated i sat next to her for a couple hours, she opened her eyes and realized i was there and reached out to me. I held her hand and wept. I think this was the most emotional distress i have ever felt in a single moment. This was when I knew it might be over. When I left her that day I cried, I cried almost as much as I cried today.

I can’t tell if she was starting to look better or if I was getting used to seeing her this way, but I went from giving up to regaining a little hope. She’d been in ICU for 6 days and while we’ve been battling cancer for over a year now, it’s finally dawned on me that my parents are mortal…and not a moment too soon. I think she was ready to go, there were indications but I won’t divulge them here. She passed away this morning.

If any of you make wishes or say prayers i ask humbly that you make room for my mother in them.

Holi, 2008

Iron Man 3 – 2012 – Robert Downey Jr.
Green Hornet – 2011 – Seth Rogen
Captain America – 2011 – Chris Evans
Thor – 2011 – Chris Hemsworth (Also worth noting, the beautiful Natalie will be co-starring)
THE AVENGERS – 2012 – Joss Whedon

And from the much better, and sadly lesser utilized universe, DC:

The Green Lantern – 2011 – Ryan Reynolds
Jonah Hex – June 18th, 2010 – Josh Brolin, but seriously you need to look at the whole cast list:

• Megan Fox
• John Malkovich
• Will Arnett
• and that’s enough for me to go see it. Also, I love modernized westerns (read: firefly)

And finally, the next batman. Enough said.

Did I miss anything? Comment below….

 
  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!)

 

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.

 


Getting the gel all in, plus the final naked shot!

  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.

What do you say instead of me blabbing about it, we just get right into it?

Lots and lots of bondo. Yummy! This stuff hardens pretty quick, and is startlingly easy to work with. Maybe it’s normal, and we’re just used to how much of a pain fiberglass is to work with, but bondo was a very nice change of pace. As you can see, we were very liberal with it (and we had to be, better safe than sorry). We figured we’d just start thick and sand down. So here we are. We used some graters to do the really rough and excess ridges, but for the most part we used various sanding instruments and eventually moved to sponges with finer grits.

Progress…
 

More Progress!!
 

Almost done with the grater
 

First coat of bondo relatively complete.
 

As you can see, there are lots of bubbles, and the spine is very faint.
 

 
 

Honestly, who needs a DSLR when you have floodlights? This dramatic lighting was unintentional but it definitely shows how much more drastic the spine has become. This experience has really changed how I see bodywork. I no longer see something like this as ugly, it’s simply not beautiful yet. You also might notice the whole fender is a bit messy. We attempted to fill in a lot of bigger bubbles with the heavyweight bondo. Something I recommend doing only once, but since we didn’t learn about light weight bondo for bubbles we ended up doing this several times as you will see in the pictures to come.

Initial Bondo is nearly complete!
 

I fucking hate this channel. Let’s count the number of AMAZING shows, some of which developed cult like followings, that FOX has canceled over the years. First and foremost, Firefly. Easily in my opinion the greatest show to ever exist, and I think the IMDB ratings agree at a 9.5/10 with 32,000+ votes. I am a huge Joss Whedon nut, so maybe I’m biased a bit, but this show is what made me a Joss Whedon nut. I liked Buffy and I loved Angel but Firefly is really what did me in. Anyways, this carries on to the next problem: Dollhouse. Again, one of my favorite TV shows currently running, and just got canned. Another one of Joss’s masterpieces, and there’s but a few episodes left. Why Whedon stays with fox, nobody will ever know.

Let’s look at some others:
Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles – Why? It’s not like the show had bad ratings.
Titus – Considered by me to be one of the best comedies ever to air.
Dark Angel – Jessica Alba, I don’t need to say more. But it was actually a good show too.
Drive – Lasted 4 episodes, only aired 2 more ONLINE. What a fucking rip, I wanted to see this season SO bad.
Family Guy – While I’m not a fan, it’s easy to see how popular this show became. Why this show was canceled is beyond me.
Futurama – This show filled the void that was being left behind by the Simpsons continuing WAY past their prime and South Park only having a few gems a season.
Arrested Development – Come on FOX, why do you hate the world?

In conclusion, fuck FOX and their stupid ratings driven boner.

We skipped a few steps without photographing, but basically we trimmed all the excess fiberglass strands to clean it up and then cut all the edges, and sanded them to make it crisper, otherwise it would be more like a case for the current fender. This still isn’t the final shape, but it’s getting closer.

The entire inside was sanded to remove bubbles, soft spots, unevenness etc. and then we cut fiberglass matting exact to fit. On top of the fiberglass you can kind of see it in the image, we used an aluminum screen door sheet to create a mesh support matrix, and when it dried it really, REALLY strengthened the fender.

Now, to apply even pressure to the entire inside of the fender while it was curing (because it kept peeling off) we use a trash bag filled with water, like a gigantic water balloon. If I were to do it again, I’d find a different way to do it, this was NOT desirable. If you decide to pursue this method, know that we use THREE contractor grade bags to make absolutely certain it didn’t break and ruin the entire thing.

You’ll note in the picture below that there are lots of clamps around the fender. They served two purposes, one was to line the edge and make sure the edges adhered perfectly, and the longer ones going across the width of the fender…well, this is why I’d try to find a different way to do this next time. When we put the super-water-balloon inside the fender, it bowed out the shape quite a bit. We used the long pipe clamps to compress the sides and return it back to it’s normal size while curing. It worked out okay for us, but I don’t think I’d risk it, because there’s a LOT of places to screw up, and frankly we did mess up a large portion of it. Luckily, the portion we messed up was being cut off anyway.

Rise and shine! After siphoning out the water VERY carefully (there were several GALLONS of water inside, and lifting was too risky) we used a blow drier to get out the last little bits of moisture and then let it cure for a bit longer.

Bondo time!