The Seat. Rust Be Gone.

Buying a 29 yr old bike definitely has got me a bit overwhelmed at times when I think about all that I have to do to make it safe and presentable. I keep telling myself that I have to take it one day, one weekend at a time.

Most of the things I'm running into is basically cosmetic parts that need to be redone. One of them is the seat. I thought about buying a cafe racer seat online, it would cost any where between $100 to $200. I thought that rather than risking ordering something online that might not fit on my bike, I could try and fix what's there already.

The seat's vinyl wrapping was pretty bad. It was torn at the seams, it had holes and cracks every where. When I took off the seat from the bike I turned it over to inspect the seat pan, and here's what I found...


The part of the seat that sits on top of the battery was rusty and corroded and was far from being saved. So I made a call to my friend Steve, who is a wizard with metal work to inspect my seat pan and see if it could be salvaged. (Check out his website at http://lonestarwelding.com/Home_Page.php.) I met Steve at THE Starbucks a while back. After many nights of hanging out drinking coffee, you get to make friends with people with all sorts of skills, talents, expertise and backgrounds. Steve just so happened to work with metal.

So I brought it over to him this past Sunday, he took one look at it and thought it could be salvaged. So we got to work. After taking the vinyl cover off, we got a better look at the condition of the foam. It wasn't in bad shape, but you can see where it had fused with some rust on the bottom and where water had gotten to it and made the foam crusty and moldy.

Steve had me sandblast the entire seat pan to get most of the rust particles and old paint off so that we could have bare metal to weld on. After much measuring, cutting, bending, shaping, and welding, this is what we ended up with...

The bottom...


The top...


Steve gave me a spray bottle of rust inhibitor to spray the seat pan down with. This will protect the bare metal from rust forming, and it neutralizes the rust that was left in the metal. After it dried I put it back on the bike.


This was the same day that I worked on the brakes. So I worked on the brakes while the seat pan was drying from the rust inhibitor.


I am fully committed to doing as much as I can with the GS. I'm taking it as an opportunity to learn new skills. So I tossed the old foam so that I will be forced to learn how to upholster a seat. So that I can be proud to say, "I made that." Thanks to Steve, I'm another step closer to finishing the GS.

I can't wait to get back at it this coming weekend.

GZ