Last time, I mentioned that some sort of workshop tidy up was in order. The agenda also turned out to contain some "crashy" FJ1200 forks and another heavy cold. Marvellous.

However, driven by a deep seated guilt at having failed to do anything of note last week, I did batter away at it and make quite a lot of progress on Friday and Saturday. I say quite a lot of progress, but to the casual, or even interested, observer, with it parked in the workshop the motorcycle appears not to have changed very much. That sadly, is the nature of having a concealed seat release mechanism, very few, if any, observers are going to spot it if it's any good. People queueing up next to the motorcycle and exclaiming, "I say, take a look at this chap's cunningly contrived concealed seat release..." tends to indicate that the level of concealment, may leave something to be desired. 

Having cut a couple of pieces of 1" by 1/4" strap steel to make the hooks for the front of the seat base, I drilled a series of holes n the seat hump, which I suppose would be more accurately referred to as the seat base base, but I feel calling it the seat hump, is a little clearer. After I'd drilled the series of pilot holes out to something like six and a half millimetres, I filed the resulting gash it it more nearly resembled a hole. The idea being the the pieces I'd cut that were going to form the hooks for the front of the seat base would be drilled and tapped with an M6 x 1.0mm thread, and the seat hump drilled to allow them to be bolted to the seat humps inner face. With the three holes drilled in each of the "hooks" (two for the fixing screws, on for the "hook") I transfer drilled the seat hump, and then opened everything out to the right size, and tapped the threads in the hooks. That let me assemble the whole thing, and with the seat base fitted to the hump, I could turn whole assembly upside down, and drill through the holes that were going to form the eyes of the hooks into the seat base and locate the holes for the pins that were going to attach to that and locate it on the hooks.

 That all worked out according to plan, except for the bit where I was meant to take some photographs of it all to illustrate this ramble with. I blame the head cold for that. As a consequence, this last picture is of a block of aluminium I drilled to make a mould for casting the nipples for the seat release cable, directly onto the cable. The round thing at the right of the picture is a ferrule I machined from stainless steel for the cable I was thinking of using. I've decided that the job requires something a little less heavy duty though, so I'm thinking of acquiring a bicycle brake cable to do the job.

Rather than just have the seat release cable dangling under the hump, I think it makes more sense to incorporate some sort of a handle into the number plate mounting bracket. Between my desire for the bracket to incorporate a handle, and the Construction and Use Regulations requiring the number plate itself to be illuminated by a white light that isn't visible from the rear of the vehicle, that's starting to look like quite a complicated bracket.