At long last I've found the promised land!  After riding a Savage for a year and a half, I finally found a forum for it.  Good things do come to people who wait, I suppose.

Well, I've asked this question in the FSSNOC forum, and I had my dad ask a similar question in his Shadow VLX forum, but I'm still looking for advice.  I don't suppose anyone here happens to have had any experience building their own seat?  I've raised the front of my seat a while back, but thanks to a tight budget, I lack the cash to buy so much as a gel pad, let alone a gel seat.  Besides, I like doing things myself.  I have an old seat pan that I found on ebay for $10 or so, plenty of sheet metal of verious types, vinyl, and the other odd hardware needed.  but I lack any experience with foams.  Any suggestions as to what types of foam might work best?  Anyone fall in love with a shape for their seat?  Any suggestions or ideas would be appreciated!

Hadn't thought about bicycle gel pads.  That sounds like it's worth a try.

Fortunately, I know some people who use leather and vinyl quite a lot, so they were willing to donate some to a worthy cause (or at least to stop my non-stop begging).

I found a guy works part-time out of his garage and re-did my whole seat for $40.  Maybe you can find someone similar near you?

I know what you mean about making your own, though.  I've been thinking of doing the same thing for quite a while...I'm big and the seat is too low so I raised it and moved it back but I'm still not happy - I think what I want is a suzuki banana seat from the 70s gs550
or some such thing so i will be higher but i can move back and forth when i get restless.

best of luck with yours and i'll let you know if i do anything with a totally new seat.

btw, welcome to the site - this really is the greatest!
Cheers.

Jim

I made a seat out of 1/8" aluminum.  I love the shape of the "seat."  I no longer sit on my tailbone!  do a search for "metal seat"

What about some dense 'memory' foam? I have this 3M chair which I think was called "pound cake" that I picked up at a job many moons ago.  I've never found another office chair like this one. The seat is all memory foam, and it kicks serious arse! If I could rework this seat into a seat for the ls650/s40, I'd really have something! There are some foam suppliers on ebay. I would use a combo of dense regular foam with a layer of heavy duty memory foam on top of that. That would be sweet.

Check out this site for hi density foam and "pudgee" (gel)[url]http://www.sunmatecushions.com/index.htm  [/url]
I reshaped my seat, the passenger's seat and the back rest using the above materials and am recovering them with carbon fibre vinyl which I purchased from this outfit
[url= http://www.glfi.com/index.html] http://www.glfi.com/index.html[/url]
Hope this helps you out a bit

woodworker wrote on 12/31/69 at 16:00:11:

Dang, that's exactly what I need! I didn't see it before I posted. Gonna order one of those & move forward on the seat redo. Thanks.  

I always HATED the seat on the Savage ('96). I'm not too little and the seat just murdered me. I'm not so much a fat a$$, but a flat a$$. The hump on the back of the seat was one annoyance, the lack of padding another. I raised the front of the seat and that helped.  I used an electric knife to cut part of the hump away, and added two layers of this fiber padding...




that I bought at wal-mart. The hardest part was getting the seat cover back on. Wish I had taken some pictures, and will when I recover in leather.  Now I have more room to move back, and with my hwy pegs, I can cruise 'til the tank is dry!!