CG125 from crap to class

[Symon260z]

This a great thread. I have an old Japanese Honda CG125 that needs a little TLC :-)

[Serpentza]

Part 2 - The seat

My new expensive seat arrived today, I put it onto the bike and took a few photos, let's see the pictures then talk about the issues:

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As you can see it has a really nice side profile

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The quality of the seat design is great, but the material is that really cheap pleather crap and is easily damaged (I paid 500RMB for about 15RMB worth of materials :P )

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Once a thicker rear tyre is on this bike, the seat will really look fantastic from behind..

Okay, now let's talk about the problems:

1) This thing is bloody expensive (I'll link the Taobao shop later in the build report).
2) The quality of the material is rubbish... seriously... one good scrape of a boot or zipper or something will tear this crap
3) It's too short for the frame... now this isn't a problem if you want to build a project bike as you could just grind off the end of the frame.. let's look closer at what I'm talking about:

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As you can see, the two end bits of the frame stick out about an inch and a half, they can easily be ground off, but remember this is supposed to be a bolt on kit that can be reversed at any time (in other words, you should be able to revert your bike pretty much back to stock if you wanted to)... so there are a few options here
1) make the seat longer... this is probably the best idea, if it's a little longer then you could probably still fit a passenger on there, at the moment it's a one man machine only.
2) Design some sort of rear light/ indicator assembly that disguises that part of the frame.
3) Ride around with two poles sticking out the back and hope nobody notices
4) Grind them off and then make custom brackets for the old indicators to be able to be re-attached

Either way, the next step is to try and get this seat reverse engineered and remade, I'll ask them to make a longer one (we can see what it looks like), make a completely flat one (without the hump at the back... then you could carry a passenger) and get them to make one the same as this... firstly we'll be able to see if they're any good at making seats, secondly we can try a few options and perhaps have different kits depending on what a person wants.

What do you guys think about all this?

- SerpentZA

[bikerdoc]

So long as it doesn't depart substantially from the original photos etc. otherwise you might find it an issue at reinspection time depending on your plans at keeping the bike plated etc. Just sayin...