MotorcycleSeatBlog.com

This is the second chapter in our ongoing “Motorcycle Seats 101” blog series.  “Assessing Your Needs” (no pun intended) is intended to help motorcyclists who are thinking about buying a replacement seat.

There has been a huge influx of motorcycle seats available for bike models in the past decade or so — available in a range of styles and prices. Take the time to think about the type of riding you do, the style you want for your bike and what it is specifically that you hope to achieve by making the investment in a new seat.

The type of seat you purchase usually depends on the type of riding you do or a certain look you are trying to achieve. Ask yourself the following questions:
• Do you mostly ride around town or do you take long trips?
• Honestly assess your height vis-à-vis your bike model.  Does your seat help you to put your feet flat on the ground for safety and control at stops?
• What percentage of the time do you carry a passenger?
• Is your bike stored outside during the riding season or is it always under cover?
• Are you looking for a comfortable touring seat or a one-of-a-kind custom seat for your show bike?
• Will you need a sissy bar for either passenger back support or to secure luggage on long trips?

With few exceptions, we ride for the fun and thrill of it.  Before purchasing a replacement seat, spend some time to select perfect seat that will enhance the look of your bike while making riding enjoyable for both the driver and passenger.

We just added a new line of seats and we’ve documented the design and creation on video.

No matter how you pronounce it, Mustang has the final word when it comes to comfort for the Kawasaki Vaquero.

The deeply pocketed driver seat on the one-piece Wide Touring style with Driver Backrest is a full 16.5” wide and sits you at the ideal cruising angle.  The 13” wide passenger seat utilizes Mustang’s unique internal steel support wings.  The optional driver backrest provides superb back support for those longer rides and is fully adjustable and easily removable.

The Vintage style seat is sold as a three-piece set including solo, removable driver backrest and passenger seat with a backrest receiver for $739; the optional passenger backrest (shown) is $200.  Also available with studs and conchos.

Mustang seats for Metric Cruisers and H-D® models are proudly handcrafted in the USA.  For more info, visit MustangSeats.com or call 800-243-1392.

Click to watch the how Mustang designed and built their new line of seats for Vaquero!

It was a perfect New England fall day a couple months ago when a 1961 Mustang Pony was very carefully loaded into the Mustang truck. Confused? Well, over the last three decades, while Mustang was growing to become the world leader in replacement seats for Harley, Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, Kawasaki and Victory, Mustang Seats’ founder, Al Simmons, was simultaneously working on another type of “stable” of Mustangs.

Tucked away in our Connecticut warehouse is Al’s collection of dozens of vintage Mustang motorcycles (those half scooters/half motorcycles built in Glendale, CA, after WWII). When Ted Doering, founder and owner of Tedd Cycle and V-Twin Manufacturing  opened the doors of his huge “Motorcyclepedia Museum” in Newburgh, NY, Al offered to donate a special Mustang—a single cylinder, 319 cc, 3-speed transmission Pony that could run over 60 mph!

Al and Ted had spent a lot of time together about 35 years ago in the late 1970’s and Al credits Ted for playing an important role in the start of Mustang. Despite taking separate paths, Al and Ted would see each other at the annual trade show in Cincinnati. With such a history and a shared love of motorcycles, Al says it was really nice to be able to spend some time together.

 Ted very kindly gave Al a personal guided tour of the incredible 85,000 square foot museum. Al was particularly fascinated to learn about the large displacement motorcycles that were used for bicycle pacer races throughout the early half of the 20th century—but that’s a subject for a later blog.

For now, Al is proud that his little Mustang Pony has found a suitable home in Motorcyclepedia among over 300 bikes that span the history of motorcycling.

Now that the wrapping paper is all picked up and the gifts are put away, we have time to take a breath and look back at 2011.  We have survived the holidays, seen ups and downs of the economy and experienced the wrath of Mother Nature.

The economy has been on a roller coaster ride, and we are happy to be still strapped in our seats at the end of the year.  We hope the 2012 brings much needed boosts to the economy for all concerned.

Mustang, for the first time in years, closed for a day due to weather related conditions.  Mother Nature decided to “trick us” with a surprise snow storm before that practically shut down Connecticut.  Once the snow was cleared and the power turned back on, we were up and running with business as usual.  We were one of the lucky ones that did not lose power for a long period of time.  It was quite the ordeal for many others, some being without power for 10 days or more.

Even though it is the end of the year when many businesses are quiet during the holidays, we are just beginning to hustle and bustle with things to do.  This is the time of the year that we begin planning our line of seats, creating new ones and continuing to produce the seats that everyone has come to know.  We are preparing our catalogs for printing and distributing, and planning our attendance at dealer and retail shows during 2012.  We always look forward to seeing old friends and making new ones at these shows.  Our scheduled shows in 2012 are listed on our website, so if you are going to be attending one or more of them, please stop by and say hello.

We hope that 2012 brings good health and prosperity to all.  We also hope that Mother Nature will be kinder to everyone in the weather department.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!  See you in 2012!

Back support is not just for the driver anymore!  Passengers can have the comfort they deserve with Mustang’s new fully adjustable backrest!   The built-in, removable passenger backrest offers all the features of the popular driver backrest for FL Touring models 1997-2012.

The 13.5” wide passenger seat with built-in backrest is available with plain, chrome studs or black pearl-centered studs, with prices starting at $449.  The front of the passenger seat is recessed to allow clearance when installed behind a solo with a built-in driver backrest.  For passengers who prefer more room or want to lean farther back, Mustang offers an optional offset backrest post for only $25.

Riders who have a Mustang solo with a driver backrest and want interchangeable comfort can purchase the passenger seat with a receiver only (without backrest) priced from $249; this passenger seat accepts the driver backrest from the solo for dual versatility.

Mustang can also accommodate riders that have our solo seats without driver backrests, but would like to have a backrest for their passengers.  These passenger seats are not recessed; instead they extend forward over the driver’s solo to give additional back support.

Watch a short demonstration of the full versatility of the passenger backrest.

Visit MustangSeats.com  to view our full line of seats for Harley-Davidson® and Metric Cruisers, all handcrafted in the USA, or call (800) 243-1392 for more information.

Look for our new ads in your favorite motorcycle magazine next month!

Nothing pleases us more than to read a glowing review about our motorcycle seats, especially when they appear on someone else’s website. We’re absolutely thrilled that customers do this all the time without any prodding, pleading or promises from us asking them to do so.

So you can imagine how happy we were when Kyle Bradshaw, community director at CruiserCustoming.com alerted us via our Facebook Wall to a nice write-up about our seats that appeared on CruiserCustomizing.com community pages recently. Cruiser has been selling motorcycle parts online for more than nine years, offering great merchandise at fair prices, as well as comprehensive product reviews on thousands of parts.

The author of the Cruiser Customizing review lives in Richmond, Va., and goes by the handle vasoftball5, and he’s new to the joys of owning a Mustang Motorcycle Seat.

So what did vasoftball5 have to say about Mustang Seats? Seems this rider purchased one of our Wide Touring Seats with a driver backrest and matching passenger sissy bar pad — all decorated with studs and conchos. He said the seat was (more…)

LowDown Seat for FL Touring Models

So here’s the lowdown on our new LowDown seats for all 2009 and up FL Touring models. First off, just looking at these seats tells you that both the driver and passenger are sitting in the lap of luxury. You just as well could be lounging on a couch in the living room (it’s that comfortable).

Secondly, we developed these seats after customers bugged us for years to construct a seating arrangement that put the driver lower to the ground without sacrificing comfort. We’re not going to cite heights here, but face it — if you can’t get your boots flat on the ground while your bike is stopped, you lack control. And the only thing that makes matters worse is the fact that you have a passenger on the back. A dangerous condition has become doubly dangerous.

The new LowDown touring design for the FL Touring models sits the driver 1.5 inches lower than the stock seat to ensure a “both boots on the ground” stance. For even better stability at stops, the seat places the driver slightly forward and the nose of the seat has been narrowed. Our in-house design team retained the deeply pocketed, 16.5-inch-wide front bucket for the driver, while the passenger also rides comfortably on a fully supported 14-inch-wide seat.

You can get the LowDown touring seat either plain or with (more…)

When you see a Harley-Davidson FL on a cold night with a rider who’s sitting large and smiling big, chances are his or her butt’s plunked down on a heated motorcycle seat from Mustang. The only way we could possibly improve the comfort of our legendary seats was to install some heat for the cold months and that’s just what we did.

Our new heated Touring seat features illuminated switches on the side for you to conveniently adjust the dual zone and high/low settings for both yourself and the passenger. The seat is constructed of triple-layer fiberglass and installs easily. It comes with a wire harness that hooks to an accessory port in front of the battery. There is no need for OE controllers or switches.

Our one-piece heated Touring seat provides the fullest seat possible — providing comfort both in the front and back. Featuring a 17-inch-wide front bucket and a 14-inch-wide rear seat, our heated Touring seat is also available in a “Super” style that offers a 19-inch-wide front bucket that puts the driver 1.75 of an inch further back than the stock seat.

Both our standard Touring and the Super Touring heated seats fit Road King, FLHT, FLTR and FLHX Street Glide 2008-up models and are (more…)

Mustang Wide Vintage Touring Seat with Driver Backrest

Today we’re pleased to introduce a full line of motorcycle seats for the 2010-2011 Honda VT1300 Interstate, Sabre and Stateline models. The deeply pocketed driver seat on the one-piece Wide Vintage Touring with Driver Backrest style is a full 16 inches wide and puts your body at the ideal cruising angle. The 10.5–inch-wide passenger seat utilizes our unique internal steel-support wings.

The optional driver backrest on this line of seats provides what our designers believe to be the best back support possible for longer rides. Why’s that? Well, in addition to adjusting forward or back, up and down, and pivoting to your back angle, the backrest can be quickly added or removed without tools and easily folds to store in your saddlebag.

The Wide Vintage Touring seat with driver backrest sells for (more…)

Have you heard our latest news? Mustang Motorcycle Seats now has a new line of seats for owners of 2009-2010 Classic, Voyager and Nomad models of Kawasaki Vulcan 1700 motorcycles.

All are one-piece seats in Sport or Wide styles, and all are designed to make your Kawasaki look even more sleek and classy than the day you drove it off the sales lot. These custom seats are solidly molded to our one-piece, marine-grade fiberglass baseplate with rubber bumpers positioned to protect both the frame and the fender of your bike. In addition, our baseplates are a direct replacement to your stock seat, making installation a cakewalk.

Kawasaki 1700 Nomad 2009-2010 & Voyager Studded Sport Touring One Piece

The Sport Touring model features a 16.5-inch wide driver bucket and an 8-inch wide passenger seat, providing long-distance riding comfort to both driver and passenger.  Also adding comfort is the built-in driver backrest, and for beauty, all styles include skirts with braided-edge trim. We offer the Sport Touring seat with studs or as a sport vintage option with no studs and no conchos.

For Nomad models, we’ve taken the passenger into further consideration by offering sissy bar pads that enable the rider to sit 1.5 inches further back in the seat.

Kawasaki Vulcan 1700 Classic 2009-2010 DayTripper Seat

The Mustang collection goes low and lean with the one-piece DayTripper that features a 12-inch front width, tapering to eight inches for the passenger. This model is highlighted by incredibly detailed stitch work that demands close-up inspection.

For those Kawasaki riders who prefer even more comfort, our new Wide Touring seats feature deeply pocketed 16.5-inch wide driver seats situated at an ideal cruise angle. And we don’t scrimp on the passenger’s comfort, either, with a 12.5-inch wide passenger seat that features our one-of-a-kind internal steel support wings.

For those who don’t care for the driver backrest, the Wide Touring seat features a nose on the passenger seat that extends forward, creating a well-supported 8-inch-high backrest. Of course if you’re fond of the driver backrest, we’ve got them for you. That goes for studs and conchos, too. It’s your choice.

For prices and additional information, see our website catalog at www.mustangseats.com.