Progress on my 750 Maxim

Definitely still a work in progress, but I ride this thing every day in all weather and have recently started up a business with my partner so I don't have much free time to do everything I'd like to it...

Here are some shots of the forward controls all finished and cleaned up. The brake side is pretty much the same.



Here's the current project at hand: New seat. I still want a 2-up seat, but I wanted it as small and low as possible. I'm keeping the old 'booster seat' for long trips (probably riding this bike to Vegas this spring...) so it was a bit of a challenge to combine all the parts I need to put the old seat back on with a new seat setup and not have it look ugly. It's not quite there, yet, but it's getting there.

Here's the old seat off. Fuse-box has been replaced, but the wiring is long and messy. I'll be cleaning up the wiring to that as well as the rest of the wiring for the taillights/turn signals soon.



Masonite 'seat pan' I'll be basing this seat off of... this is how I've been riding the last couple of weeks as it's been in progress, haha.



Here's the foam all glued up and some sketchy ideas of what I wanted this seat to look like. I had to build the foam up quite a bit on the front and back to level out the passenger seat, and to cover the gas tank mount:





Here's the foam all glued up off the bike -- I'm trying to use as much recycled material on this bike as I can... the foam is an old camping bedroll:




Front roughed out -- I started this on the bandsaw, but it ended up being easier to just use the serrated blade of my pocket knife:



Here's the front all finished -- shaped with 60-grit sandpaper and then smoothed off a bit with 220-grit so it didn't have blue fuzzy junk all over it:



Back seat roughed out:



Here's the whole thing completed (mostly) -- I noticed the asymmetry of the back seat after I took this picture and fixed that...




Back all shaped out so it fits snug over the fender:



Here's the "finished" product. I shot some black spray paint on it because it'll probably be a few days before I get a chance to upholster it and I didn't feel like riding around on a bright blue seat and getting blue fuzz all over me. I'll be mounting the 'seat pan' onto the frame rails, but the back is just going to velcro on so it will be easily removable to put the old booster seat back on.





Next up: Smoothing out the removed toolkit, lowering the rear, new side covers, overhauling the front end, and lots of paint... among other things.

 

Did you have to "Cheat" the Shifter Rod attachment forward to 11 O'Clock to gain clearance below the Crank Cover?

That's a "Tough angle" and might be a problem for you when the Engine's Hot.
At that severe an angle, you might encounter "Shift Fight" when things are all warmed-up good and you try to find Neutral.

 

I could have left it in the 12 o'clock position and still had clearance, but I rocked it forward a bit so that the linkage was pushing/pulling directly against the lever rather than at an angle. It hasn't been a problem getting the bike into neutral (or anything else) yet at all. I've put a couple thousand miles on the bike since switching it over and haven't had any problems with the shift side at all, including a 500-mile trip with it like that... I could see how angling it like that would be a problem if it made the linkage push/pull at an angle on the lever.

 

Just making an honest observation.
I'm glad its working-out.
Nice bit of fabrication and engineering ... I must say!

 

Yeah, I had it at the 12 o'clock position at first because I was worried about the same thing, but it made the angle all wrong. I did have to experiment with angles a little bit to get it to work right. I originally just used a piece of threaded rod as linkage, but ended up going with the FZR linkage to keep it one piece and to make the angles work right...

Thanks!