Custom Seats Take Your Ride to Another Level

Old School Artisans Making their Mark in Leather

You’ve seen them before, on a bike leaning slyly to the left on its kick stand. You recognize what they are by the shape of the solo seat and the distressed leather.  If you dare to get closer for a better look, you can see the unmistakable artistry of a custom, hand-tooled leather seat.

Works of Art

Hand-tooled, leather motorcycle seats are all unique.  Each piece is meticulously crafted and made by hand using a traditional process. Matthew Hurtado, the owner of Working Man’s Customs in Austin, TX has been crafting hand-tooled leather seats, tool rolls, wallets, and other handcrafted products for over a decade. What started out as a hobby back in 2008 has built Hurtado a reputation in the motorcycle community.  “It’s been going on for eleven-years-now.  It started out as a hobby.  A friend of mine had a chopper shop here in Austin.  I made a couple of seats for her and started selling them,” Hurtado said. 

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It Starts Like a Tattoo

Hurtado explains the process as starting out like a tattoo in the beginning.  “It all starts with a basic idea.  I come up with a line drawing and then cut out a pattern.  I use a ballpoint pen to trace the pattern and make an impression on the leather.”   Hurtado makes his seats with a traditional process that involves molding the leather to the shape of the seat and then a method of cutting, tooling, and stitching.  When we asked Hurtado if he had ever worked as a tattoo artist, he elaborated on his experience.  “I tried my hand at tattooing a couple of times but I didn’t have much luck with it. It’s a lot different putting a design on leather than it is on a living human being.  Live skin reacts a lot differently than a dead cow.  But I’ve always been an artist.  I’ve been drawing and making art since I was four-years-old.” 

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Killing It

Hurtado, who is a full-time electrician explained that his passion for leather work is something that he does to help pay the bills and make ends meet.  “I’ve been a full-time electrician for the last twenty-eight-years. Unless you’re on a TV show or you’ve had a show in the past it can be pretty hard to make a living at this. This is kind of something I do so I can buy motorcycle parts.”

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Artistry

In North Carolina, Jason Fogelman of Bird Man’s Motorcycle Seat Company has been making hand-tooled leather seats as a full-time business since 2007.  Located in Winston-Salem, Bird Man’s Motorcycle Seat Company is primarily an online business that produces custom leatherwork for motorcycles. Fogelman explained that his background in leatherwork started out differently than most artisans in the business today.  “We are located near High Point N.C. which is the furniture capital of the world and near Winston-Salem NC which is the cigarette capital of the world. So, most families were either in the furniture business or tobacco. My family had ties to the furniture and upholstery industries and I grew up around some unique craftsman. In the seventies, they offered shop classes in schools and most boys took them and they taught everything from welding to drafting. One whole month was dedicated to leatherwork. I probably enjoyed this month of school more than any other. I made every project offered. So, I was always surrounded by craftsman and artists and talented people. My grandfather actually mixed paint by eye and made the color charts for large paint makers. There were a lot of interior designers and artists in my family, so people were always being creative. My grandparents lived across from an MC hangout and my uncle rode a nice Harley. You could hear his bike from miles away. We had trail bikes, the classic Honda 50s and the death machine three-wheelers with knobby tires. So, Motorcycle culture of the 70s including the fighting and drinking were close to home,” Fogelman said.

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Craftsmanship

Before crafting leather, Fogelman worked for a retail business. During this time, he met a friend that would influence him to realize his love of motorcycles and craftsmanship. “My career was in inventory with a large retailer where I made friends with some characters and many great people. One of these characters was a true '70s spirit named Randy Stultz. He became a close and fast friend and we had the same interest in bikes and music and art and philosophy. Randy had gotten away from motorcycles because of an accident. And after working together for several years, he informed me that he had decided to reconnect with his father after a falling out. When they met again, his father shared with him that he had kept Randy’s Honda Dream Motorcycles and his collection of bikes. At that moment it all changed. Randy began to only ride motorcycles again. He was a true 50k miles a year guy. Within six months, I was helping him build motorcycles. I would help Randy and a great fabricator and bike builder Mike Stewart build motorcycles. Unfortunately for me, I have no mechanical abilities. One night, Randy recommended that we do a hand-tooled leather seat for a bike. I looked up a seat on the internet and discovered a small solo custom seat was nearly a thousand dollars, would take six months to make it, and you could not customize the leather with color. So, I decided to make the seat. The finished product would be described today as not that great. But it was our seat and it worked,” Fogelman said.

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How it All Starts

Like Hurtado, Fogelman started out making seats as a hobby of sorts.  “For a few years, I made seats for local guys and friends and other builders mostly at no charge. I also began to design some seat products that were unique and began fabrication of these parts. This was the early 2000s. I look back now and wonder how anyone was making any money messing with bikes. We all had full-time jobs but we all did stuff for one another and didn’t charge anything,” Fogelman said.

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Passion

Hurtado and Fogelman are taking their artistry to new levels. Hurtado explained that he’s getting to the time where he wants to create a piece that truly reflects his art. “I’m getting to the point where I want to take my time and really choose what I want to work on.  I want to have more creative freedom in what I do,” Hurtado said.  Fogelman displays a similar creative passion.  “My personal opinion is that for years, Leatherwork was basically the same. The same western look, the same industrial look of stamped images and letters. Everyone had learned the same technique for leatherwork. This isn’t a comment on talent or what’s cool or not cool, you just didn’t see certain images hand tooled on leather or lettering done without stamps. So, you know that a lot of custom leather guys stamp their images and call them hand tooling. You can buy a press, dye to stamp your image into leather and that is not hand tooled.”

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Keeping the spirit alive

Much like tattooing, Fogelman explains that leatherwork can be a difficult field to break into without the right connections.  “When I started into the leather business and community, there was very little cooperation or support or people teaching. I was surprised how secretive and closed off of a group the leather community was.  I also realized that there are many people who want to learn and do leatherwork. Companies like Tandy do a great job promoting the craft, which is great. Hobby stores all carry leathercraft and leather kits for customers, which shows how popular the craft is and how much interest there is. What kid doesn’t want to make a knife sheath or Tom Thumb wallet? So, over the past twelve years, we have mentored, taught and apprenticed a dozen or more people who wanted to learn leather and the craft. I recently had a friend who I showed some techniques to several years ago share with me a picture of a custom leather seat that someone he had mentored made. That probably has made me feel better than anything I’ve experienced doing leatherwork. Second only to my kids sitting with me in my shop and talking to me about life while I tool leather,” Fogelman said.

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For help with routine maintenance and repairs, visit the HD Forums How-To section.