Re: '81 kz440: bobber --> cafe
ABS drum for seat pan is an awesome tip! Here I've gone with fibreglas time and time again. But hey, are you sure you don't mean POLYETHYLENE? If you DO mean ABS, you should be able to glue it with pipe cement from the hardware store. My DOHC Honda seat-pan I have made a replacement from Bondo as the original - it's DELRIN, which is Nylon with glass fibres in it. Nylon you can heat weld, but not with the glass strands, it creates weak spots where the strands don't go back in. I've tried it. But yeah, if you do indeed have ABS you should be able to heat it in the oven to get the curl out - actually that'd work better on the polyethylene, only they'll both smell that's for sure. I figure fibreglas might just work fine with the staples anyway, what with the complex shapes I wanna make. Still, you get top points for recycling, I just LOVE that kinda thing. It's just that ... 50 gal barrels are such a good thing for rain-water catchment, "grey-water" recycling into the garden, etc etc - I don't think I'll cut up any of my own. I was a really hard-core aquarium geek for a long time, import warehouse staff to gov't lab worker, I did a LOT of fish-geek stuff, and I was a hard-core gardener too - I just can't wrap my head around not hanging onto a good barrel. Oh, and if you're into Zombie Survivalism too, that's your water resovoir VERY important! I always wanted to plumb one in direct to my toilet, to fill up the tank with every flush, plumbed such that the fresh line water going through the barrel refreshes it. Then, in event of water supply failure, you've got a barrel - maybe barrelS - of fresh water, or pretty damned fresh, seeing as you flush often enough to recirculate and replace it. It could just go on the supply line straight out of the wall, then it would replace with ALL of the water going into your house. At which point, you could put several of 'em in line, due to the overall larger rate of replenishment. Put a couple good ones in a crawl space like that and hell, you could have that and your cases of baked beans, just hole up with your ammunition and sip away on your barrels of water - then there's no panic where you fill your tub and drink traces of shampoo and exfoliated skin, etc etc etc. Far better to have that already done, and to be able to stress about the PROPER things in event of an emergency. Fish tanks make a great water reserve, but without recirculation they can foul pretty quickly. Anyway, obviously I've just "outed" myself as a nut-job. But hell, I live in Mormon territory here in Southern Alberta. Living here as a kid, ALL of the kids I played with had huge truck sized stacks of cans in their basements -and being a really poor kid (no exaggeration, lived in a car briefly then moved into a house with fire damage and black walls, nothing but peaches and creme flavoured instant oatmeal for two weeks straight, etc etc) I think that's the one thing that gave me the impression that those friends came from wealthy families, 'cause they had FOOD. Ha ha ha. They all had guns too, that's what made me jealous, what with my hippie pacifist feminist matriarch at home I was lucky to get a sling-shot. Ha ha ha. Still, when everybody in your class ... I almost said neighborhood but the neighborhood was just like my place - when all of your classmates are from survivalist nut-job families it rubs off in strange ways. Or maybe it was their religious intolerance and conservative extremism that made me feel like boarding up the house and protecting it with a gun.... Whatever. Just don't wreck your barrels people! I'd give you top points if you could make it out of used drinking water bottles - but only if you didn't BUY the stupid things in the first place ha ha - maybe using a seat foam made up of chopped up kids' stuffie toys that were made from recycled pop bottles? I'm gonna use wheel-chair cushions, they make 'em out of the same blue gel as Dr Scholl's shoe insoles. Should feel good on the hiney. I also thought about silicone breast implants, or better still silicone BUTT implants. I mean, on my BIKE SEAT ha ha NOT on my BODY - I wanna go with the low profile slim-line seat and everything, but I want OEM seat covers - not neccessarily from the exact same bike - same make at least - but yeah, I also want the good cushioning. The yellow foam is old school. They don't make children's mattresses out of that stuff anymore. The nice thing about having a crappy old used one was that you could tear holes in it to make terrain for your plastic army men, trenches and shit. Yeah, anyway I've thought about roll up camping mattresses, yoga foam blocks, etc etc - but I think the gel stuff is the best idea so far. And they make auto seat cushions using knock-off versions of the same stuff. I bought some clearance items at Crappy Tire (oh if you don't live in Canada that means "Canadian Tire") with black waffle pattern gel, I'm gonna try 'em out on the seats, and if they work out great but I think I'll seek out some solid block type gel for wheel-chairs. What would be nice, in the summer, a zipper around the seat and you could slip in a pad from the freezer or fridge. In spring/falll - winter for you Southern folk, some kind barley neck bag thing that you could stick in the nuker. Conversely, just in case of opportunity to wire it into the bike down the road, it might be nice to put some kinda heater into the seat cushioning, built in. Yanno?
-S.