A sound cushion for the bike seat storage compartment

If you've had metal objects (bike lock, tools, etc.) in the storage compartment of your bike seat while riding around on your bicycle, then you know it makes for a pretty loud riding experience. Depending on how well-paved the road is that you're riding on, people can you hear you coming from a pretty long ways away.

Now that the backrest is almost ready for sale and manufacturing has started with the pannier hooks, I decided to start focusing on a solution for this "sound problem" with the storage compartment of the bike seat. I ordered a variety of different materials of varying thicknesses to test out, and once they arrived, started prototyping (with the help of Blake Johnson of course).

We tested shelf-liner, polyurethane foam, and neoprene to see what the effect on sound-deadening each material had. All of them interestingly enough had a similar effect, and the thickness of the material did not seem to be important at all, which was interesting. During the process of testing each of the materials out, it became apparent that the sound cloth needed to be removable so that it and the storage compartment could be cleaned out in case any liquid was spilled or leaked into it while riding.

Based on this realization of the need for the sound cushion to be removable (and washable), we've pretty much settled on neoprene for the material. We're going to do some further testing with thinner neoprene to make sure we minimize the impact on storage capacity . Once that's concluded, we'll start working with our factory on manufacturing!