First, this is a tale of custom motorcycle saddles. It's long, and to a non-biker, probably boring. so skip it if you don't ride......
Sometimes a Saddle is More Than Just A Seat
This is a story about building a custom saddle for a motorcycle. And more.
I’ve had the opportunity to talk with and interview a fair number of people about why they ride motorcycles. Many of these stories inevitably wander back to the story of a first bike.
For me, that first bike came when I left Rochester, NY and moved 49 states away to Hawaii in my twenties and bought a brand new Honda CB750F. I gave buying it about no thought having ridden two other bikes. It was black, it looked impossibly cool, and I bought it. Later I found out that it went really fast and I didn’t have the first clue how to make it go around corners. But I was glad to have it and glad to ride it.
Fast forward nearly thirty years and I’m still delighted to have and ride a bike. Except now that unfettered glee is fettered by my aching muscles, creaky joints, and sore backside. Youth is so wasted on the young.
Anyone who has read even two things I’ve written knows that I get strangely mystical about nearly everything related to owning and especially riding motorcycles. I go near a bike and I hear the echoes of Don Quixote and the rumble of everyone who’s ever ridden out of town calling me to get out and go. I’m doubly enthralled when it comes to people who have pushed their chips all in and now spend their days making, bending, cutting, sewing, designing, building, welding, repairing, tuning, and selling anything associated with bikes.
In other countries, bikes are just transportation. Not long ago I visited Vietnam with my family. The streets are nutty. Everyone is either driving or riding a scooter. There’s nothing mystical about it. It’s like waking up inside a chain saw.
But here in the big PX, where the preferred mode of transportation is a car, nearly everyone having anything to do with motorcycles is making a statement.
Enter the Entrepreneur
I’m also spent a lot of time around small business owners over the past thirty years. I’ve been one, I’ve sold to them, and I’ve consulted with people who sell to them. If you don’t know this, small businesses are the engine that drives any vibrant economy. They create all the new jobs. They create most of the wealth. They file an astonishing percentage of all the patents. They export more than you would believe.
People start small businesses for all sorts of reasons. I’m not talking now about someone trying to be the next Google. I’m talking about the man or woman down the street that sells you flowers, fixes your leaky pipes, or makes a new saddle for your bike. A lot of these people can’t really explain why or how they started their business. They kind of had this idea and then all of a sudden, they’re in business. Usually before they’re ready. But particularly in the early going, it’s about the love. They love motorcycles, or cabinets, or coffee makers, or whatever. So they toss it and go for it.
The business of motorcycles seems to be particularly hospitable to crackpots, visionaries, misfits, dreamers, schemers, and true believers. It’s small business heaven. Long after the car business got boring and faceless, at least in the main, motorcycling has happily kept the lights on for people to invent, craft, and make everything to do with making two motorized wheels go, stop, turn, and look better. It’s true for whole bikes. It’s true for parts. It’s true of everything in between. This is where the part about my sore butt comes in.
I met Rich (www.richscustomseats.com)a couple of years ago shortly after I purchased an FJR1300. It’s a marvelous bike, made to gobble entire states in a single bound. It can also show a tail light on a back road to a poorly ridden sport bike. I loved it the moment I rode it. But I’m not that 24 year old any more. I also can’t leave well enough alone. So I hiked my complaining butt and sore limbs down to Rich’s to see about a custom saddle. Problem solved.
Two years later, I find myself in possession of a brand new Aprilia RSV Factory, a stunningly beautiful Italian superbike that goes, stops, and turns like hell won’t have it. It’s also less than a comfortable place to spend a lot of time. So, figuring it worked once, why not again, I called up Rich and made an appointment for me and the Priller to get a new seat.
I should confess at the outset that the whole idea of having something custom made seems completely foreign to me. English gentlemen have had their suits, shirts, ties, pocket squares, shoes, and knickers done in this way forever. All furniture used to be done this way. The hyper wealthy call their naval architects every couple of years to ring up a new mega yacht. The rest of us generally buy retail and make do.
There is a certain logic to the idea of a custom made motorcycle saddle. It’s the single largest point of contact between you and your bike. It plays a big role in how your body is positioned in relationship to the other controls. Depending on the design, it provides comfort, support, and a platform for leveraging your bike . . . or not. Given that our skeletons are fundamentally unhappy sitting, it’s the first and last line of defense between comfort and misery. Yeah, when you put it that way, getting one shaped just for you doesn’t seem like such a bad idea after all.
Rich has been building saddles at his shop in Seattle for a long time. He figures that over the past ten years alone, he’s built something north of 20,000 of them. A lot of them are built for people who spend the day in his shop going through multiple fittings while watching the seat go from what is usually crap foam covered in crap vinyl, to a leather-clad work of art.
The day I showed up Rich was feeling the sting of an unhappy customer.
I built a seat for this guy. He calls me up after I built it. “This thing is beautiful,” he says.” He went on and on about the leather and the stitching and the work. A while later he calls up and says he wants me to lower it in the back. Well the pan is built the way it is. You can only drop it so far.
I said, “I’ll change it as far as I can. You try it and if you don’t like it, send it back.” So I built up the nose and cut down the back as far as I could and sent it to him.
So I get this email today, “Rich is so busy talking about what he knows about seats that he doesn’t listen to what the customer wants.” It’s not that I don’t listen to what people want. I have to work with the parameters of the seat. He probably caught me on a day when I was busy or distracted and I was probably short with him. I know I do that sometimes. And I don’t try to do that. We’re trying to help people. We’re trying to make them happy. He was saying what a beautiful seat it was and now he doesn’t like it.
Then he told me he got a Russell seat. He said he sent them pictures and they got it right the first time. This guy is 1500 miles away. He got lucky. I tell people if they’re here, I can help them a lot better.
So I don’t know. Whenever someone writes to me like this guy I always take it really personally because I really am trying hard. My heart is in this. I want to make great seats everyday. But you’re working with different anatomies, different people, different personalities, and on and on. If I can’t build you a seat, I’ll give you your money back.
It’s a tough way to start the day. It’s the part about being a small business owner. It seems like a silly place to start a story, but to me it speaks to the part that I find so intriguing about the whole enterprise.
Rich has dedicated his life to this one odd thing: making custom motorcycle saddles. Years on, he still gives a rip. I’ve been in his shop probably four times in the past two years. Every day it’s the same. He’s talking to a bunch of middle-aged people about their aching butts and their custom aspirations. He treats them all like they’re the only person in the world when he’s talking to them. He’s got his hands on the critical parts of the process. He’s funny. He’s super knowledgeable. He loves bikes. He tells great stories. He knows more about what you rode in on than you do. Amazingly, he invites you to watch and take part in the process. I can’t think of many other craftsmen who would allow you to sit and watch them work.
Equally as striking is the person with the bike. He or she also gives a rip. They’re passionate enough about bikes and riding to want to make their bike their own. They want it just the way they want it. They don’t want to live with the compromises invented by the factory.
Bringing these two forces together is like watching improvisational theater. It’s just a great show. With all that passion and opinion running around, there are bound to be pinch points. By his own admission, Rich is a control freak. To some extent, so are his customers. Like I said, it’s great show.
I wheel up to Rich’s at 8:30 in the morning. Entry requires honking at a garage door and then a swoop down a concrete driveway to the workshop below. I’ve done this before but remember feeling slightly intimidated by the blind drop the first time. Other men rev and gun their engines to properly announce their arrival. I’m not those guys. I cut my engine at the top and coast to a stop behind a BMW 1150 GS and next to a BMW “Chromehead”. Also on the row ahead of me are Rich’s all-up custom Shovelhead and a spanking Paul Smart Ducati I haven’t seen before. Row one is usually Rich’s, so I assume it’s his bike. It is.
Yeah, I need that like I need a hole in the head. But I just love to look at it. If I could put it on my mantle in the living room I would.
And of course you have to do stuff to make it your own. I made a seat the first day I had it. I removed all the stickers. I modified the license plate. I made a number cover for the front light. I put an exhaust on it before it was ever delivered to me.
It’s fun to ride. It makes a great noise. It’s a bike with a soul.
While we’re gassing on about Aprilias and Ducatis, a guy named Tom rolls in with a nicely done ‘86 VFR 750. He and I, along with the owner of the Chromehead, various members of Rich’s team, and an assortment of Harley owners who come and go during the day –including and especially a couple who show up with a zero mile 105th anniversary edition V-Rod, resplendent in copper and black paint–will be part of today’s performance.
The process begins with the removal of the stock seat coming for stripping. Most seats are stapled together, and consist of a seat pan (molded plastic or metal on older bikes), foam, and either vinyl or leather. My bike is new, so the foam looks like extruded vanilla ice cream. The foam on older saddles is just plain scary looking. With covers off, not one of the donors look even half up to the task of supporting a rider for longer than a run to the donut shop.
I recall seeing all of this for the first time and thinking, “I’ve got a $12,000 bike with a $12 saddle.” Two years on, my opinion of the working end of what I sit on hasn’t changed. “I have a $17,000 bike and a $17 saddle.” I think I may be high on that latter figure. Nothing Rich has to say suggests I’m wrong. Underneath, the Harley saddles are even scarier . . . big blobs of foam that look like they’re ready for rendering, not sitting on.
Rich and the rider talk about the bike, where, how much, and how often he or she rides, what he or she likes and dislikes about the saddle, and where it hurts. Rich gives every impression of listening intently, no mean feat given that he’s had this exact same conversation with five to ten riders a day for the last decade at least.
My bike doesn’t have a center stand so one of the cast members comes over to support the bike while I perch in my best go-fast position. He looks desperately for something to hang onto, settling in on the parts of the clip-ons I’m not gripping.
Rich has me move around and change positions until I’m settled into what passes for normal on a sport bike. There aren’t a lot of options so this part of the process is pretty straightforward. With a touring oriented rig, there is much more to talk about . . . angle of the spine, angle of the knees, angle of your elbows, length or reach . . . Rich wants you to focus on all of it as, within limits, he can build you something that can move you up, forward, back, or down with front to back angling to match.
The truth is, most riders don’t really have a clue what they really want, which is probably best. Others have very distinct ideas. That doesn’t always work out.
I make the same seat day after day in a thousand different configurations. Some guys will come in here and say something like, “20 years ago I had a Honda with a flat seat and I could ride it all day long.”Well first of all, you’re twenty years older. Second, it was a crappy seat. Your body is not the same. Just because your memory reminds you of that doesn’t mean that’s the way it was. I know that I used to do the same thing. I was just happy to be riding a motorcycle.
Whenever people want me to build things that are different than what I do every day, they rarely or never work. But sometimes I’ll try it. I don’t do this to do them as fast as I can. I do it to make them as good as I can. I try to perfectly fit each individual to the best of my abilities. When I start building something completely different from something that is successful every day, it just doesn’t work.
In the case of building a seat for a sport bike, the range of choices is pretty small.
It’s like other seats. The difference is like other bikes, it’s a compromise. The seat is shaped like this (concave). We want to get it like this (convex). The contact area was like this (small). We want to make it more like this (larger). It will never be a luxury-touring bike. We just want to take some of the sin out. We want to make it as good as we can. It will be better. But it won’t be perfect.
Sport bikes are designed to be race bikes with lights. You have to build a seat you can hang off on and lean into the turns, but you want to make a little bit of pocket so it’s not taking your body and beating you to death. But it’s not the difference you find when you take a stock Harley seat and make a custom. The stock one is nasty. Then it’s perfect.
When you get on a sport bike you get on it and think, “what was I thinking?” When we’re done, you’ll think, “That’s a little better.”
Let the games begin
The initial fitting ends with Rich drawing all over the stock saddle. I’ve looked at a bunch of these at this point and they all look like the line of march for the Siege of Tobruk. There are lines, arrows, and arcs everywhere. I think I was sitting on top of Rommel’s feinting maneuver, but I could have also been the British 8th Army. I couldn’t really tell.
Rich waives and points and says things about ten-pound foam, or maybe it was seven, and off the seat goes for the first round of modifications. While that’s happening, Rich launches into another story, or if there is another bike and rider, another fitting. The rest of the shop whirs away, with people working on saddles in all states of repair, rebuild, and recovering.
The next time I see the saddle it’s been glued up with a layer of muscular looking foam. Rich has at it with a wicked looking saw-thing, I’m sure it has a name. He wields it like I might use a spoon in pudding. He’s done this a zillion times, at least one time at the cost of part of a finger.
Brrrrrrrrgrrrrp. The blobby looking thing that used to be my saddle is once again looking ready to ride, but now with some contours where my butt goes.
The seat goes on and off the bike a couple more times, interspersed with me sitting on it, Rich drawing on it, and then him sending it off for more of this and less of that. Each time it makes the circuit, he’s inspecting it and shaping and reshaping it himself, not trusting the really critical parts of the process to anyone else.
Ready to Ride, Sort of
“Okay, go take it for a spin. If you hate it immediately, just come on back. If not, ride it for ten or fifteen minutes.”
I remember the first time he told me that two years ago. I get why it’s necessary, but there’s a part of your brain that says, “It looks like a sofa that met a Pit Bull in heat.” There are different colors, shapes, and densities of foam all stuck on with the occasional scribble still showing through.
For a sport bike, it’s a pretty straightforward process. I’m never going to be on the bike for longer than an hour at a stretch, and anything will be an improvement. For the sport touring, adventure touring, and touring set, it’s a whole other thing. One guy, Gary Eagan, took off with his saddle still uncovered and test rode it from Seattle to Alaska and back. When he returned, Rich covered the saddle and Gary went and broke a bunch of records.
Gary Eagan went 250,000 on his and set five world records. I just redid that seat for him. But all I did was recover it. I didn’t even change the shape or the padding or the gel pad. He had it on three different bikes. I forgot to have him sign it. That’s the seat right there. Short little guy. That’s not actually wear. It’s where he drug his boots across it getting off. He’s a hell of a guy.
The rest of us don’t make it three exits up the road.
My new seat is huge improvement but I find myself crowding the tank more than I want. So Rich adds more foam to the nose and does a bit of reshaping. The difference is remarkable. Sold!
One of Rich’s guy takes the seat to a table where he’ll install a gel pad and cover the whole assembly with some sort of miracle cloth. Rich and I head over to the rack to pick out a covering.
Rich likes color and he’s done some wild applications on some wild looking bikes. There is a pair of mesmerizing choppers at the back of the shop that are getting fitted out with crazy-shaped saddles. I didn’t want to ask the name or cost of the material being used for the covering.
“Your bike is just screaming for a carbon fiber look.” Good call as that’s a big part of the up-charge for the Factory addition of my bike.
“Normally I’d say go for some color, but your bike has so much going on visually, we don’t want to fight it. So how about an accent in gray, like your bike?”
The rest of the customers are inching closer at this point to see what Rich has in mind. Mine is the first seat to get done today and people want to see. We’re all smiling and nodding at the pairing Rich has come up with. I’m feeling right now like the guy who just selected the Amorone to go with the entre because it brings out the richness of the flavors.
The combination is fabulous and the two leathers and the saddle head to the upholstery bench. There, they’ll make a pattern, cut the materials, stitch them, fit them, attach them, and treat them in the next 90 minutes or so.
By this point in the play, everyone in for a custom saddle is deep into the process. People are coming and going, roaring more confidently up and down the steep ramp now that they’re in the club. Hanging around in Rich’s shop has that affect. Where the stories tended to flow one way at 8:30, by noon the air is thick with bench racing, tall tales, recollections of epic rides gone by, and secret confidings like, “If my wife knew how much I have in this bike, she’d kill me.” We all nod knowingly.
The customers have also settled into a routine that intersperses messing around with their bikes and either talking on the phone or typing on a laptop. By and large it’s an entrepreneurial bunch. All of us tell ourselves that we’re masters of our own destiny and “taking a day off” is no big deal. But it clearly is. The world outside is calling and we’re calling back. It’s understandable but sad in a way. I think if the bikes could talk, they’d be pissed. As it is, they just sit and sigh. “You just don’t get it, do you!”
Leaving the Club House
Finally my custom saddle is done. It’s stunning. And now I don’t really want to leave. I just want to sit and look at it. I want to see the rest of the saddles as they’re done. I want to keep talking about bikes. I want to know more about these people.
“Why do you ride?”
“Why this bike?”
“What do you do?”
“What do you wish you did?”
There’s more to this than a custom seat. There’s more to this than bikes and riding. There’s a story attached to all of us and these stories are just bursting to be told. Not at home with your significant other. Not even with the people you ride with on weekends.
But here in the clubhouse, people freely admit that they’re no longer tough enough to just shrug and grind it out another couple of miles. There’s an unexpected level of vulnerability. The souls are stripped as naked as the saddles.
“Am I sitting on my bike right?”“
“Should I be feeling that pain right there?”
“Tell me it’s okay to be spending all this money on a saddle!”
“What do you think about this gray? Is it too blue? What about a warmer tone?”
“The leather is $100 more than the vinyl? Do I deserve it?”
It’s almost sweet. That word may grate, but it’s the right one I think. The adults have left the building. It’s just us kids now. Kids with their new bikes all over again. The ones our dad’s gave us. The ones we’re now clipping playing cards to so that we can make them sound like a real motorcycle. A great circle is closing, if only for a couple of hours.
And then the phone rings and the spell is broken. I’m geared up and shaking hands with Rich who tells me, “I hope you ride it a million miles.” What a wonderful way to part company.
This is a story about building a custom saddle for a motorcycle. And more.
I’ve had the opportunity to talk with and interview a fair number of people about why they ride motorcycles. Many of these stories inevitably wander back to the story of a first bike.
For me, that first bike came when I left Rochester, NY and moved 49 states away to Hawaii in my twenties and bought a brand new Honda CB750F. I gave buying it about no thought having ridden two other bikes. It was black, it looked impossibly cool, and I bought it. Later I found out that it went really fast and I didn’t have the first clue how to make it go around corners. But I was glad to have it and glad to ride it.
Fast forward nearly thirty years and I’m still delighted to have and ride a bike. Except now that unfettered glee is fettered by my aching muscles, creaky joints, and sore backside. Youth is so wasted on the young.
Anyone who has read even two things I’ve written knows that I get strangely mystical about nearly everything related to owning and especially riding motorcycles. I go near a bike and I hear the echoes of Don Quixote and the rumble of everyone who’s ever ridden out of town calling me to get out and go. I’m doubly enthralled when it comes to people who have pushed their chips all in and now spend their days making, bending, cutting, sewing, designing, building, welding, repairing, tuning, and selling anything associated with bikes.
In other countries, bikes are just transportation. Not long ago I visited Vietnam with my family. The streets are nutty. Everyone is either driving or riding a scooter. There’s nothing mystical about it. It’s like waking up inside a chain saw.
But here in the big PX, where the preferred mode of transportation is a car, nearly everyone having anything to do with motorcycles is making a statement.
Enter the Entrepreneur
I’m also spent a lot of time around small business owners over the past thirty years. I’ve been one, I’ve sold to them, and I’ve consulted with people who sell to them. If you don’t know this, small businesses are the engine that drives any vibrant economy. They create all the new jobs. They create most of the wealth. They file an astonishing percentage of all the patents. They export more than you would believe.
People start small businesses for all sorts of reasons. I’m not talking now about someone trying to be the next Google. I’m talking about the man or woman down the street that sells you flowers, fixes your leaky pipes, or makes a new saddle for your bike. A lot of these people can’t really explain why or how they started their business. They kind of had this idea and then all of a sudden, they’re in business. Usually before they’re ready. But particularly in the early going, it’s about the love. They love motorcycles, or cabinets, or coffee makers, or whatever. So they toss it and go for it.
The business of motorcycles seems to be particularly hospitable to crackpots, visionaries, misfits, dreamers, schemers, and true believers. It’s small business heaven. Long after the car business got boring and faceless, at least in the main, motorcycling has happily kept the lights on for people to invent, craft, and make everything to do with making two motorized wheels go, stop, turn, and look better. It’s true for whole bikes. It’s true for parts. It’s true of everything in between. This is where the part about my sore butt comes in.
I met Rich (www.richscustomseats.com)a couple of years ago shortly after I purchased an FJR1300. It’s a marvelous bike, made to gobble entire states in a single bound. It can also show a tail light on a back road to a poorly ridden sport bike. I loved it the moment I rode it. But I’m not that 24 year old any more. I also can’t leave well enough alone. So I hiked my complaining butt and sore limbs down to Rich’s to see about a custom saddle. Problem solved.
Two years later, I find myself in possession of a brand new Aprilia RSV Factory, a stunningly beautiful Italian superbike that goes, stops, and turns like hell won’t have it. It’s also less than a comfortable place to spend a lot of time. So, figuring it worked once, why not again, I called up Rich and made an appointment for me and the Priller to get a new seat.
I should confess at the outset that the whole idea of having something custom made seems completely foreign to me. English gentlemen have had their suits, shirts, ties, pocket squares, shoes, and knickers done in this way forever. All furniture used to be done this way. The hyper wealthy call their naval architects every couple of years to ring up a new mega yacht. The rest of us generally buy retail and make do.
There is a certain logic to the idea of a custom made motorcycle saddle. It’s the single largest point of contact between you and your bike. It plays a big role in how your body is positioned in relationship to the other controls. Depending on the design, it provides comfort, support, and a platform for leveraging your bike . . . or not. Given that our skeletons are fundamentally unhappy sitting, it’s the first and last line of defense between comfort and misery. Yeah, when you put it that way, getting one shaped just for you doesn’t seem like such a bad idea after all.
Rich has been building saddles at his shop in Seattle for a long time. He figures that over the past ten years alone, he’s built something north of 20,000 of them. A lot of them are built for people who spend the day in his shop going through multiple fittings while watching the seat go from what is usually crap foam covered in crap vinyl, to a leather-clad work of art.
The day I showed up Rich was feeling the sting of an unhappy customer.
I built a seat for this guy. He calls me up after I built it. “This thing is beautiful,” he says.” He went on and on about the leather and the stitching and the work. A while later he calls up and says he wants me to lower it in the back. Well the pan is built the way it is. You can only drop it so far.
I said, “I’ll change it as far as I can. You try it and if you don’t like it, send it back.” So I built up the nose and cut down the back as far as I could and sent it to him.
So I get this email today, “Rich is so busy talking about what he knows about seats that he doesn’t listen to what the customer wants.” It’s not that I don’t listen to what people want. I have to work with the parameters of the seat. He probably caught me on a day when I was busy or distracted and I was probably short with him. I know I do that sometimes. And I don’t try to do that. We’re trying to help people. We’re trying to make them happy. He was saying what a beautiful seat it was and now he doesn’t like it.
Then he told me he got a Russell seat. He said he sent them pictures and they got it right the first time. This guy is 1500 miles away. He got lucky. I tell people if they’re here, I can help them a lot better.
So I don’t know. Whenever someone writes to me like this guy I always take it really personally because I really am trying hard. My heart is in this. I want to make great seats everyday. But you’re working with different anatomies, different people, different personalities, and on and on. If I can’t build you a seat, I’ll give you your money back.
It’s a tough way to start the day. It’s the part about being a small business owner. It seems like a silly place to start a story, but to me it speaks to the part that I find so intriguing about the whole enterprise.
Rich has dedicated his life to this one odd thing: making custom motorcycle saddles. Years on, he still gives a rip. I’ve been in his shop probably four times in the past two years. Every day it’s the same. He’s talking to a bunch of middle-aged people about their aching butts and their custom aspirations. He treats them all like they’re the only person in the world when he’s talking to them. He’s got his hands on the critical parts of the process. He’s funny. He’s super knowledgeable. He loves bikes. He tells great stories. He knows more about what you rode in on than you do. Amazingly, he invites you to watch and take part in the process. I can’t think of many other craftsmen who would allow you to sit and watch them work.
Equally as striking is the person with the bike. He or she also gives a rip. They’re passionate enough about bikes and riding to want to make their bike their own. They want it just the way they want it. They don’t want to live with the compromises invented by the factory.
Bringing these two forces together is like watching improvisational theater. It’s just a great show. With all that passion and opinion running around, there are bound to be pinch points. By his own admission, Rich is a control freak. To some extent, so are his customers. Like I said, it’s great show.
I wheel up to Rich’s at 8:30 in the morning. Entry requires honking at a garage door and then a swoop down a concrete driveway to the workshop below. I’ve done this before but remember feeling slightly intimidated by the blind drop the first time. Other men rev and gun their engines to properly announce their arrival. I’m not those guys. I cut my engine at the top and coast to a stop behind a BMW 1150 GS and next to a BMW “Chromehead”. Also on the row ahead of me are Rich’s all-up custom Shovelhead and a spanking Paul Smart Ducati I haven’t seen before. Row one is usually Rich’s, so I assume it’s his bike. It is.
Yeah, I need that like I need a hole in the head. But I just love to look at it. If I could put it on my mantle in the living room I would.
And of course you have to do stuff to make it your own. I made a seat the first day I had it. I removed all the stickers. I modified the license plate. I made a number cover for the front light. I put an exhaust on it before it was ever delivered to me.
It’s fun to ride. It makes a great noise. It’s a bike with a soul.
While we’re gassing on about Aprilias and Ducatis, a guy named Tom rolls in with a nicely done ‘86 VFR 750. He and I, along with the owner of the Chromehead, various members of Rich’s team, and an assortment of Harley owners who come and go during the day –including and especially a couple who show up with a zero mile 105th anniversary edition V-Rod, resplendent in copper and black paint–will be part of today’s performance.
The process begins with the removal of the stock seat coming for stripping. Most seats are stapled together, and consist of a seat pan (molded plastic or metal on older bikes), foam, and either vinyl or leather. My bike is new, so the foam looks like extruded vanilla ice cream. The foam on older saddles is just plain scary looking. With covers off, not one of the donors look even half up to the task of supporting a rider for longer than a run to the donut shop.
I recall seeing all of this for the first time and thinking, “I’ve got a $12,000 bike with a $12 saddle.” Two years on, my opinion of the working end of what I sit on hasn’t changed. “I have a $17,000 bike and a $17 saddle.” I think I may be high on that latter figure. Nothing Rich has to say suggests I’m wrong. Underneath, the Harley saddles are even scarier . . . big blobs of foam that look like they’re ready for rendering, not sitting on.
Rich and the rider talk about the bike, where, how much, and how often he or she rides, what he or she likes and dislikes about the saddle, and where it hurts. Rich gives every impression of listening intently, no mean feat given that he’s had this exact same conversation with five to ten riders a day for the last decade at least.
My bike doesn’t have a center stand so one of the cast members comes over to support the bike while I perch in my best go-fast position. He looks desperately for something to hang onto, settling in on the parts of the clip-ons I’m not gripping.
Rich has me move around and change positions until I’m settled into what passes for normal on a sport bike. There aren’t a lot of options so this part of the process is pretty straightforward. With a touring oriented rig, there is much more to talk about . . . angle of the spine, angle of the knees, angle of your elbows, length or reach . . . Rich wants you to focus on all of it as, within limits, he can build you something that can move you up, forward, back, or down with front to back angling to match.
The truth is, most riders don’t really have a clue what they really want, which is probably best. Others have very distinct ideas. That doesn’t always work out.
I make the same seat day after day in a thousand different configurations. Some guys will come in here and say something like, “20 years ago I had a Honda with a flat seat and I could ride it all day long.”Well first of all, you’re twenty years older. Second, it was a crappy seat. Your body is not the same. Just because your memory reminds you of that doesn’t mean that’s the way it was. I know that I used to do the same thing. I was just happy to be riding a motorcycle.
Whenever people want me to build things that are different than what I do every day, they rarely or never work. But sometimes I’ll try it. I don’t do this to do them as fast as I can. I do it to make them as good as I can. I try to perfectly fit each individual to the best of my abilities. When I start building something completely different from something that is successful every day, it just doesn’t work.
In the case of building a seat for a sport bike, the range of choices is pretty small.
It’s like other seats. The difference is like other bikes, it’s a compromise. The seat is shaped like this (concave). We want to get it like this (convex). The contact area was like this (small). We want to make it more like this (larger). It will never be a luxury-touring bike. We just want to take some of the sin out. We want to make it as good as we can. It will be better. But it won’t be perfect.
Sport bikes are designed to be race bikes with lights. You have to build a seat you can hang off on and lean into the turns, but you want to make a little bit of pocket so it’s not taking your body and beating you to death. But it’s not the difference you find when you take a stock Harley seat and make a custom. The stock one is nasty. Then it’s perfect.
When you get on a sport bike you get on it and think, “what was I thinking?” When we’re done, you’ll think, “That’s a little better.”
Let the games begin
The initial fitting ends with Rich drawing all over the stock saddle. I’ve looked at a bunch of these at this point and they all look like the line of march for the Siege of Tobruk. There are lines, arrows, and arcs everywhere. I think I was sitting on top of Rommel’s feinting maneuver, but I could have also been the British 8th Army. I couldn’t really tell.
Rich waives and points and says things about ten-pound foam, or maybe it was seven, and off the seat goes for the first round of modifications. While that’s happening, Rich launches into another story, or if there is another bike and rider, another fitting. The rest of the shop whirs away, with people working on saddles in all states of repair, rebuild, and recovering.
The next time I see the saddle it’s been glued up with a layer of muscular looking foam. Rich has at it with a wicked looking saw-thing, I’m sure it has a name. He wields it like I might use a spoon in pudding. He’s done this a zillion times, at least one time at the cost of part of a finger.
Brrrrrrrrgrrrrp. The blobby looking thing that used to be my saddle is once again looking ready to ride, but now with some contours where my butt goes.
The seat goes on and off the bike a couple more times, interspersed with me sitting on it, Rich drawing on it, and then him sending it off for more of this and less of that. Each time it makes the circuit, he’s inspecting it and shaping and reshaping it himself, not trusting the really critical parts of the process to anyone else.
Ready to Ride, Sort of
“Okay, go take it for a spin. If you hate it immediately, just come on back. If not, ride it for ten or fifteen minutes.”
I remember the first time he told me that two years ago. I get why it’s necessary, but there’s a part of your brain that says, “It looks like a sofa that met a Pit Bull in heat.” There are different colors, shapes, and densities of foam all stuck on with the occasional scribble still showing through.
For a sport bike, it’s a pretty straightforward process. I’m never going to be on the bike for longer than an hour at a stretch, and anything will be an improvement. For the sport touring, adventure touring, and touring set, it’s a whole other thing. One guy, Gary Eagan, took off with his saddle still uncovered and test rode it from Seattle to Alaska and back. When he returned, Rich covered the saddle and Gary went and broke a bunch of records.
Gary Eagan went 250,000 on his and set five world records. I just redid that seat for him. But all I did was recover it. I didn’t even change the shape or the padding or the gel pad. He had it on three different bikes. I forgot to have him sign it. That’s the seat right there. Short little guy. That’s not actually wear. It’s where he drug his boots across it getting off. He’s a hell of a guy.
The rest of us don’t make it three exits up the road.
My new seat is huge improvement but I find myself crowding the tank more than I want. So Rich adds more foam to the nose and does a bit of reshaping. The difference is remarkable. Sold!
One of Rich’s guy takes the seat to a table where he’ll install a gel pad and cover the whole assembly with some sort of miracle cloth. Rich and I head over to the rack to pick out a covering.
Rich likes color and he’s done some wild applications on some wild looking bikes. There is a pair of mesmerizing choppers at the back of the shop that are getting fitted out with crazy-shaped saddles. I didn’t want to ask the name or cost of the material being used for the covering.
“Your bike is just screaming for a carbon fiber look.” Good call as that’s a big part of the up-charge for the Factory addition of my bike.
“Normally I’d say go for some color, but your bike has so much going on visually, we don’t want to fight it. So how about an accent in gray, like your bike?”
The rest of the customers are inching closer at this point to see what Rich has in mind. Mine is the first seat to get done today and people want to see. We’re all smiling and nodding at the pairing Rich has come up with. I’m feeling right now like the guy who just selected the Amorone to go with the entre because it brings out the richness of the flavors.
The combination is fabulous and the two leathers and the saddle head to the upholstery bench. There, they’ll make a pattern, cut the materials, stitch them, fit them, attach them, and treat them in the next 90 minutes or so.
By this point in the play, everyone in for a custom saddle is deep into the process. People are coming and going, roaring more confidently up and down the steep ramp now that they’re in the club. Hanging around in Rich’s shop has that affect. Where the stories tended to flow one way at 8:30, by noon the air is thick with bench racing, tall tales, recollections of epic rides gone by, and secret confidings like, “If my wife knew how much I have in this bike, she’d kill me.” We all nod knowingly.
The customers have also settled into a routine that intersperses messing around with their bikes and either talking on the phone or typing on a laptop. By and large it’s an entrepreneurial bunch. All of us tell ourselves that we’re masters of our own destiny and “taking a day off” is no big deal. But it clearly is. The world outside is calling and we’re calling back. It’s understandable but sad in a way. I think if the bikes could talk, they’d be pissed. As it is, they just sit and sigh. “You just don’t get it, do you!”
Leaving the Club House
Finally my custom saddle is done. It’s stunning. And now I don’t really want to leave. I just want to sit and look at it. I want to see the rest of the saddles as they’re done. I want to keep talking about bikes. I want to know more about these people.
“Why do you ride?”
“Why this bike?”
“What do you do?”
“What do you wish you did?”
There’s more to this than a custom seat. There’s more to this than bikes and riding. There’s a story attached to all of us and these stories are just bursting to be told. Not at home with your significant other. Not even with the people you ride with on weekends.
But here in the clubhouse, people freely admit that they’re no longer tough enough to just shrug and grind it out another couple of miles. There’s an unexpected level of vulnerability. The souls are stripped as naked as the saddles.
“Am I sitting on my bike right?”“
“Should I be feeling that pain right there?”
“Tell me it’s okay to be spending all this money on a saddle!”
“What do you think about this gray? Is it too blue? What about a warmer tone?”
“The leather is $100 more than the vinyl? Do I deserve it?”
It’s almost sweet. That word may grate, but it’s the right one I think. The adults have left the building. It’s just us kids now. Kids with their new bikes all over again. The ones our dad’s gave us. The ones we’re now clipping playing cards to so that we can make them sound like a real motorcycle. A great circle is closing, if only for a couple of hours.
And then the phone rings and the spell is broken. I’m geared up and shaking hands with Rich who tells me, “I hope you ride it a million miles.” What a wonderful way to part company.
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RichsCustomSeats
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posted by Cyemm at 11:38 PM
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