Seat reupholstery recommendations?

Nobody seems to make a prefab cover for my first-gen Kawasaki EX-500. Saddlemen does a second-gen, but... well, that's second-gen. I guess I mention it to prove I've done some research

I sent a query to an EX-500 mailing list I'm on. It gets almost no volume, though I did get one pretty quick response, pointing me toward a Spencer in Florida. Google turned that up pretty quickly, but he appears to specialize in some other seat mods. He may be able to do it, but I'm hoping to find a more solid recommendation.

I don't know off the top of my head whether it's even possible to recover a factory molded-style seamless cover in the same fashion...

Any info much appreciated.

I should also add: price is most definitely an object.

I harbor thoughts of repainting it over the winter, but presently it's the (original?) pearl white with metallic blue tank, with a giant oval of nasty crazed/peeling paint around the filler and a bunch of sticker residue where it used to have stripes on the side.

I think it'd look spiffy in Kawasaki green, but fundamentally it's an '88 beginner-bike in sound but not awesome condition. Blowing a couple hundred bucks on a seat recovering probably isn't in the cards.

I wonder whether a second-gen cover could be made to work...

If you have an upholstery and/or convertible top shop nearby, they should be able to do it pretty easily.

Even more Grassroots, see if you can buy (but suggest they may just want to give away) a remnant, and you can do it yourself. Really, all you need is a good staple gun (air powered is especially handy) and some patience. If any of the curves give you trouble, you can always use a heat gun to get a little more pliability out of the material.

Stretch cover tight, staple, try to avoid creases. That's pretty much all there is to it.

I recovered my TL seats with the back of an old leather jacket I had around, and the passenger seat I covered with a closely-matching bit from an old Naugahyde hanging bag.

In reply to alex:

Thanks! Maybe I've been too defeatist about the compound curves... I've never worked with vinyl, so I don't have a feel for how much I can bend it to my will...

Try these guys in Texas: http://www.motorcycleseatcovers.com/ I bought a couple covers from them for old Suzukis and was happy with their quality.

Try Scott Gile at "Happy Ass seats" Crack a smile... 978-875-6228 He'll do what ever you want with what ever type of cover you want. He got a Guzzi with a nice red incert on a gray seat on his Norge.

I'm facing the same problem with my SV650 seat. Exposure to the elements have caused the front and rear seats to tear pretty badly.

I have considered getting them restored, but it just dawned upon me that I could possibly glue a new layer of vinyl on top of the old stuff. Will it look pretty? Probably not, but I have already had to replace the rear seat once. How bad can it be?

stuart in mn wrote: Try these guys in Texas: http://www.motorcycleseatcovers.com/ I bought a couple covers from them for old Suzukis and was happy with their quality.

Ha, followed the link, was stoked to see they do a first-get EX-500 seat, then said, "hey, this site looks familiar..."

Yep, I'd already bookmarked it from previous research.

Mind like a steel sieve, me.

A little bummed it'll have seams, but good fit and not relying on my own workmanship while still getting it cheap is a pretty good-sounding combo...

ransom wrote: A little bummed it'll have seams, but good fit and not relying on my own workmanship while still getting it cheap is a pretty good-sounding combo...

Low price, high quality, low effort...pick two, as the saying goes.

In reply to SlickDizzy:

Yep, and the existence of a couple of seams isn't even necessarily "low quality"... Overall I think I'll be pretty happy...

If you just want a replacement cover, sew it up yourself using the old one as a template. BTDT, it's not that hard.

In reply to foxtrapper:

The old one has no seams. I'm guessing it's some sort of heat-molding process...

If I were clever, I could probably figure out where to put seams to get the shape into the ballpark for a little heat-gun stretching.

Maybe the question at this point is whether I'm in the mood to spend a weekend afternoon trying to develop any sort of upholstery skill...

http://diymotorcycleseat.com/

Ended up buying one of the covers from B and H, as recommended by stuart in mn.

Not too shabby... One main piece, with two section sewn in to handle the countour at the transition to the area that wraps around the back of the tank.

My upholstery installation skills are not great, but I'm pretty happy with how it looks. I wound up with a couple of very small wrinkles, and of course they may immediately get awful, or the whole thing may become a baggy mess... At least if I have to re-do it, I could use this one as a template as it was made from flat vinyl, unlike the factory piece. I was getting better at the application as I went, so I'm sure I could do it even better if I did it over...

I also ended up buying a pneumatic staple gun. I had a basic one, but it was getting nowhere with the plastic seat base. For $25 or so, the pneumatic was night and day better for the job.

I don't think I dread my next upholstery job now that I've done one. One more job I don't feel I'd necessarily have to farm out for decent results

The result, as a crappy cell phone pic: