Been mucking around with other projects and lost time to work on the 400F.
However today I got back in the shed and started something I’ve been avoiding for a long time... seat v2.0
First up a refresher of where the bike sits:
Had to remove the wiring harness because it’s hardly needed at this stage.
Many people have been hinting to use the rear end shape of the tank as a guide, so I grabbed some welding rod and set about copying the shape:
Next I took the tank and thought to copy the main centre strip and 2 side strips:
Glued the welding rod to the underside to hold the shape:
I’m still a fan of the seat area so I copied that in cardboard as the front half of the seat:
Combined the two (loosely) and discovered two things:
1. Getting the straight panels to merge nicely in a seat will require some artistic licence, eg I’ll need to shrink the width of the panels down a lot or merge it much nicer, at the moment it looks like shit and I don’t think it will improve much with the current idea. I don’t want a square seat either, just don’t like the look.
2. The added length of the seat does look better balanced on the rear end.
So that’s where I’m up to so far. Unfortunately I’ve run out of argon, otherwise I’d start to cut some steel and tack some stuff up, so much easier to get these angles and curves in steel than cardboard.
My next move will be to make the frame so I can get the length I want. I think it will be about 1” less than the cardboard version (1” longer than the current steel seat). Then I’ll play around with a few more cardboard options before committing in steel. I think it’ll end up being another compound curve seat unless anyone has some ideas on how to merge the flatter shape of the rear of the tank with the rounded seat I prefer.