Posted by DDD on July 20, 2000 at 15:55:57:
After 6,000 miles of bottom fatigue, rebuilding the seat finally achieved top priority. I did so using a specialty open cell foam called "Pudgee". It's a little difficult to describe. Imagine a very dense doughy foam. You can press and release it, and it will take several seconds to recover the indentation. The energy absorption ability is amazing! To give you an idea, it was designed to be used in aircraft ejection seats.
In doing the rebuild, I reused the old cover ... stretching it over three one inch layers of medium density foam ("Sunmate", from the same company) and one inch of Pudgee. All of this was trimmed to fit the old seat frame. The old seat cover was a tight fit and will be replaced, eventually, but for now it works well enough.
I've only put about 50 miles on the bike since the change, but the change is very noticeable. Your bottom kind of sinks into the seat as the foam surrounds you. Bottom shock from the many pot-holes in the streets around here has been minimized. As I return home tomorrow I'll be riding about 2.5 hours and will get a better idea of how it works in reducing overall fatigue.
The whole project took about 2 hours and required a tool to remove the staples from the seat (a screwdriver), scissors, a staple gun (I recommend an electric model), spray adhesive to laminate the layers, and some elastomeric polyethylene to cover the foam to make it waterproof.
My next project is to make a Pudgee pad that will fit on top of the seat of my wife's Sportster. I'll let you know how it comes out.