A few months back I decided, in what only be considered a moment of weakness, to purchase a Honda 919. For those of you that aren't familiar with the 919, it's what passes for a standard these days. I.E.: it's unfaired, has lowish bars and a fairly upright seating position. It's what you might call a sports-roadster and all in all a very nice motorcycle, except for one glaring fault. The seat-which might work fine if you're a skinny, 20-something, hot-rod-is excruciatingly painful when you're a stocky mid 50s type. In fact the seat was so painful that after 100 miles I had to get off the bike and regroup for at least 15 minutes. As you might imagine that gets real old, real fast. Before the thing had 600 miles on it I knew it was either find a better seat or park the thing, it was that simple.
Fortunately Sargent seats had a solution; because the 919 isn't a particularly big seller they didn't have a seat in stock, nor did they plan on tooling up to produce any. But what they could do was take my stock seat, strip it down and build me a new forward section, using a better grade of foam, and some judicious contouring to produce what they claimed would be a much more comfortable seat. While they were in there they'd also add a snazzy new seat cover. It sounded like the hot tip; since they have a damn good reputation and I couldn't ride the bike the way it was, I popped off the seat and away it went.
A few weeks later I had it back, after about 30 seconds in the saddle I knew I'd made the right decision. First off, because the seat was built on the OEM pan there were absolutely no installation issues, it dropped on, and latched just like it was supposed to and even retained the OEM cargo hooks.
Secondly, as you might expect if you're familiar with Sargent's work, the reshaped and recovered seat vastly improved the bikes appearance, especially when compared to the rather cheap looking stock job. But most importantly the Sargent upgrades transformed the seat from something that was only slightly more comfortable than an edgewise plank to one that was far more comfortable and provided much better support. So not only can I now ride the bike through a full tank of fuel without suffering terminal butt burn, but I can ride with more confidence and control. It's a win-win all the way, and because I'd opted to only have the rider's portion of the seat rebuilt the price was a very reasonable $319.95
The only drawback was that I did have to ship them the seat, which tied up the bike for a couple of weeks, but obviously a less desperate man would have planned things out a bit better.
Understandably, there's probably not a whole lot of you reading this that own 919 Hondas, so a specific review of that bikes seat is of little import. But my point here is that if they can make that medieval torture device comfortable; imagine what they can do for the seat on your cruiser.--MZ