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

 
  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!
 

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!

The next step is to trim up the shell and start reinforcing it, after all it was still going to be functional as a fully supportive bracket for a passenger seat and a passenger.

On to reinforcing!

As it turns out, the sleeves got REALLY hot, resulting in my shutting off the clothing before the rest of me was warm, but that wasn’t too big of a problem. The biggest problem I incurred were the connections. Connecting the heated wire to the jacks were VERY finicky, even when I RTV’ed them sealed. The gloves resulted in a broken connection which made the whole setup invalid, so I eventually got rid of them and just used the jacket. The jacket worked really well, but I had to fix the sleeves.

What I replaced the jacket with was the jacket liner, essentially a vest. I did the liner itself so when I didn’t need the warming stuff, i wouldn’t have wires running up and down my jacket bothering me. I didn’t weave it through the jacket though, I went the extra long way and stitched it on the inside, this way you can’t see it except for the wires running to my accessory plug. I like this better, so I suppose I did eventually improve on the method slightly. Some more pics!

Here’s my jacket with the liner installed, see how it’s almost unnoticeable? =)

and here’s the inside of the liner exposed for all the world to see:

You’ll notice I skipped the area by the small of my back. Everyone else says this part gets the coldest, but I have a backrest on my bike for touring and comfort, so for me it doesn’t actually get cold at all. If you give it a go, however I recommend giving that a shot.

So I stripped out all the wire, which took a little while but it wasn’t all that bad. I’ve managed to pull out the wire, go out to radio shack and buy 1/4″ Mono phono jacks (3 males, 3 females), and get cheap black weave gloves from K-mart.

So far total price of this project is $37, and I’m nearly done. Here’s all the cable woven through the glove:

and here’s the jacket:

and here’s all of it hooked up:

I did a quick test, and man does it get HOT!!! Currently I have no system of control besides unplugging it. I’m going to install a switch or something, a rheostat/pot resistor that’s high wattage is ridiculously expensive. I found an electronic controller online, but it’s $20, and I don’t have the time to wait for it. I’ll probably buy a switch and put something in my jacket or on the line itself.

So i bought a heated blanket off amazon for $25.00, (used filler items to reach 25 for free shipping). The heated blanket I picked out is a travel blanket, so it uses the 12v car socket instead of an AC outlet. I have high hopes for this project.

This is my proposed plan, and please let me know me if you have any suggestions or ideas. First, obviously, is getting the wire out of the blanket. The wire is woven through the blanket and surrounded the whole way by stitching. I haven’t decided yet, but I think I’m going to cut OUTSIDE of the stitching for the wire so the entire length of heated wire has a cotton/polyester sheath.

This is going to be my wiring pattern. The plug is going to be on the left side cover, and the power cord is going through my left leg in my chaps up to my waist. It comes with a 6 ft power cord, so that’s more than enough. From my waist, it will go up my left side, through my left sleeve, then covering my gloves, I’m going to do each fingertip if I can, then run it all the way back through the sleeve to my chest. Go across the chest, through the right sleeve, over the right glove, back to my chest, and then down my right side.

since I have almost no way of knowing how much wiring I have, this is really all I’m hoping to get out of it. if I have extra, I suppose I’ll cover the crotch area, and if I have even more still, I’ll go down the legs.

After letting the shape dry on some beer bottles and toothpicks, we went to work on reinforcing it, making it into something usable. Our goal was another coat of long strand matting and resin on the inside, followed by a metal mesh matrix to add support, with a very thing coat of long strand matting to weave the mesh into the fender and then resin. After the whole supporting and main fender would be done. We’d move on to bondo.

Pics coming soon!

The next step

First we went with a dyna style fender simply because the fender rails were set up as such. We really had no idea what we were doing at this point, and that was my fault. I know how to do this kind of stuff but sometimes you just get too excited and start fiberglassing too soon. We had not done the proper preparation, and we suffered later for it. Anyways, the fender rail supports:

We covered the fender rail supports with a metal mesh made of Gutter Guard (available at any home depot). By fiberglassing over the metal mesh, we’d be able to create a truly rigid, supportive fender:


For the initial fiberglassing, we did it on the bike itself. We use some very heavyweight plastic sheeting to mask off the whole thing, and then put the fender skeleton back on the bike. We skinned the metal mesh with a white T shirt and did a light coat of resin, then some long strand fiberglass matting, and a thick coat of resin. After a bit, we removed it from the bike and let it dry for a day. We ripped off the plastic dropcloth from the inside of the new fender and then put some long strand fiberglass inside with some more resin. All in all we made a decent shape, and incredibly strong fender.

Here we tried adding a spine to the fender to match the spine that the jackpot has over the tank. Obviously this isn’t indicative of the final look, this just makes the bondo easier to do later if we have something to build on. In any case, as you know this was a mess up so on with the pictures:

Some post trimming test fits:

The end result was a fender that looked kinda cool, but mostly because it was unique and we made it, but would not fit properly, was asymmetrical, and would have ended up causing way too many problems. After evaluating it, Joe and I looked at each other both ready to admit we had to start over but afraid to admit it. Eventually after much time of sitting and staring at it under the floodlight, we agreed that starting over would produce a much, much better fender. So start over we did, and thus begins Part II…