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| Looking a little closer, you notice that the raised channel in the Husky's seat pan is just 3 in. wide at the lowest point where a rider usually sits. It's only 1.5 in. wide at the front of the slots where the hooks hold it to the subframe. The foam feels fairly firm if you just walk up and press on it, but softens when it warms up to body temperature, and you're sitting on a narrow triangle of poorly padded plastic. There's no chance of the seat supporting a human's pelvic structure without applying pressure to all the nerves bundled between the bones. In contrast, the YZ250 seat pan drops in the center and is 7 in. wide overall, providing good support for the pelvic bone, just like a mountain bike seat. And for a given seat thickness, there's simply more foam between the rider and the bike. |
Every “custom” seat for the TE610 I've seen is substantially wider than stock, which is probably great for long hours sitting toward the back of the seat on a touring bike. But riding more aggressively means sitting forward a lot and moving all over the place the rest of the time. A slightly wider seat on my mountain bike made it nearly unrideable because I couldn't get off the back when I needed to. On the YZ, I may slide all the way back to the fender on steep, slow descents, and I wanted the Husky to work the same. The goal was to keep the stock seat width, but to gain comfort by improving support.
A call to Guts Racing provided the answer. Many companies make replacement seat foams and covers for dirt bikes, but most serve only the high-volume brands. Guts Racing covers weird stuff like ATK, Beta and GasGas, and has done the R&D on oddball Italian manufacturers that change their seat pans every couple of years while leaving the rest of the bike the same.
Guts Racing foams are available in soft, medium or hard firmness and stock or tall height. Guts' web site says the hard is about the same as stock for a Husqvarna. I was worried it wouldn't be enough for my weight, but it proved to be much firmer and more supportive, a huge improvement. The first 15 minutes of the first ride broke it in, and it's been awesome since. A fresh seat foam could help any bike if the seat seems to have lost something over the years – decay isn't always just a shredded cover.
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| Of course I chose the tall height. The stock seat was 4-5/8 in. from the lower corners to the top of the seat; the Guts seat is 6-1/4 in. The additional foam amounts to a 13.4 oz increase in finished seat weight. The additional thickness between buttocks and seat pan has to be a big part of the comfort. |
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| The new seat looks a little odd on the bike, since it is almost flat, but the flatness makes it easy to get forward for climbing and turning and slightly reduces the effort to transition from sitting to standing. The additional height will probably help my knees by reducing their bend on very long rides, and standover height isn't a problem for me, even off-road. |
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| You could take the seat foam and cover to an upholstery shop, but what fun would that be? I picked up a used industrial-duty Bostich air stapler on a popular auction site, and $6 bought a 20-lifetime-supply of 1/4-in long staples to go with it. Make sure you pick a stapler that uses fine wire, 22-ga staples. Even the 18-ga staples used for crown molding will crack the plastic seat pan. I had to turn the regulator on my air compressor down to 40 or 50 psi to keep the staples from cutting through the cover. |
