I dream of Greenie

This is the most recent saddle to be completed, an old diamond back Velo MTB saddle. I trekked out to Archerfield to check out vinyl samples only to be very disappointed! $28/metre for the wrong colour, and too thick! I also looked around for 4mm shoe tacks with not luck. I decided to check out Reverse Garbage just in case their selection of vinyls had improved.
Going to RG proved to be a good move! I found some soft mid green leather look vinyl and grape purple vinyl. Later I discovered that I had a little jar of shoe tacks hidden among my collected bits and pieces.
I had been reading recently about the elastic qualities of upholstery vinyl and how most are mono elastic having much more stretch along the weft of the backing fabric. I aligned the warp along the length of the saddle when cutting out the vinyl. This allowed me to use the elasticity in the weft to stretch around the most difficult part of the saddle shell around the back near the rail fixing points. I was able to work with the difficult curves of this saddle by fixing the vinyl to the most recessed corners of the shell first with shoe tacks before stapling the open sections.
I now have some more clues as to how to work around the rectangular cut-out at the back of the 2 turbo's I have to recover.
I took this saddle down to Erik at Gear Brisbane the next day and he said he'd had a dream about a green saddle and bought it on the spot.

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