Aprilia designed the seat of the Mille to be held in place by two socket cap bolts at the back of the seat. The bolts are hidden underneath the foam of the seat. This is fine if you don't need to remove the seat frequently, but can be problematic if you find yourself needing to get at the battery or whatever more often. Because you don't get a "straight shot" at the bolts it's easy to find yourself crossthreading them. That would be me.
John King, of SkyKing Products offers a seat quick release for the Triumph Daytona that I bought back when he was starting his business selling to the other members of the T5 mailing list. It's a nice bit of kit. It turns out that it's quite easy and inexpensive to replicate his style of quick release for the Mille. This page documents how to do it.
You can make the post, pin and retention cable for less than $2.50 worth of parts from your local hardware store and a drill, dremel tool and maybe a heat gun. Photographs of the project are here. (Opens in a new window or tab)
What you will need (All of these are available at your local hardware store. Or should be):
In addition, you'll need some tools:
Your first task is going to be to cut the caps off the two M6 bolts you just purchased. This is best done with a Dremel tool with a cutoff disk. Put the bolt in a vise, but don't crank it down so hard you damage the threads! Cut off the caps just where they meet the stem of the bolt.
I cut the heads off a pair of M6x20 bolts to make threaded posts, then I drilled a hole through each post for the hitch pin.
The retaining cable is made from some lengths of small gauge stainless wire with a ring terminal crimped onto each end and the whole thing was covered with shrink tubing. The only place you really need the tubing is over the ring terminal that holds the hitch pin, to prevent the pin from coming loose. I chose to cover the rest because it comes close to painted body work and I wanted to avoid vibration abrasion damage. (And I had the right diameter tubing around ...)
The posts thread into the holes where the seat bolts used to be, with an extra nut on the bottom where the theads poke through. Tighten up those nuts to lock the posts in place. One end of the retaining cable has a ring terminal that's been drilled out to go around the threads and it's clamped between the original nut and the new extra nut; that prevents the hitch pin getting lost.
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