From: Datesfat Chicks on 4 Jun 2010 07:28 Kind of a newbie question ..., Honda Shadow 600 ... From time to time I'll hit a freeway exit curve or something similar carrying too much speed. Because I'm not 16 and riding a sportbike, it might be 60 when 40 is appropriate rather than 140 when 40 is appropriate. 99.9% of the time, I don't do it. And when I do do it, 99.9% of the time as soon as I realize what I'm about to do, I'll brake aggressively before I'm forced to turn ... problem solved, but inelegantly. However, once in a while I do really carry too much speed. Once when I did it I didn't quite scrape the pegs, but I was leaned over quite far enough and the exit ramp was paved in blacktop and I had my mental fingers crossed that the tires were going to hold. Anyway, here are my questions: a)How far can I go over before the tires let go? On dry concrete can I scrape the pegs reliably? b)If it happens, how does it happen? (My guess is that the rear end slides out and you low-side onto the ground. I also would guess there is no warning. But I'm perhaps wrong.) Thanks, Datesfat
From: ? on 4 Jun 2010 08:51 On Jun 4, 4:28 am, "Datesfat Chicks" <datesfat.chi...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > a)How far can I go over before the tires let go? You can probably lean your cruiser over to about 35 to 38 degrees from the vertical, but the only way to be sure is to set up some kind of angle measuring device and sit on the bike and lean it to see what you get. > On dry concrete can I scrape the pegs reliably? Probably, but be aware of the traction differences between concrete, blacktop, and asphalt. Asphalt is just tar, without any gravel in the mix, but some ignorant types will confuse asphalt and blacktop, which is also known as macadam. Asphalt offers about 1/3rd the tire grip as concrete. > > b)If it happens, how does it happen? (My guess is that the rear end slides > out and you low-side onto the ground. The reason for loss of grip varies. Like, you might drag a foot peg against the ground so hard that it jacks the rear tire off the ground momentarily, in which case you go into a violent speed weave. Speed weaves *start* with the loss of grip at the rear wheel, but they can turn into violent highside crashes in which the rider goes over the handlebars. OTOH, you might lean far enough or brake too hard and lose front grip and low side into the ground. Steve Rapp overbraked at Infineon raceway last month while leading the race, lost front grip and wound up in a heap in front of the pack... > I also would guess there is no warning. But I'm perhaps wrong.) Original equipment tires usually do not give as much warning that they are going to let go as premium sportbike tires, that's for sure. There's no sense in experimenting with sportier tires on your cruiser though, because you cannot lean it far enough to test more extreme lean angles. And you don't fit on small sportbikes that could be fitted with sticky tires. So you're just going to have to be satisfied with an intellectual knowledge of the subject...
From: TOG on 4 Jun 2010 08:53 On 4 June, 12:28, "Datesfat Chicks" <datesfat.chi...(a)gmail.com> wrote: <snip> > > b)If it happens, how does it happen? (My guess is that the rear end slides > out and you low-side onto the ground. I also would guess there is no > warning. But I'm perhaps wrong.) > How long is a piece of string? So many variables - just how much ground clearance you've got, how sticky the tyres are, how grippy the road surface is, etc etc. As a rough rule of thumb, cruisers have much less ground clearance than sports bikes or even traditional-style naked roadsters. Some have quite a bit and handle really well - Moto-Guzzi's California[1] can give quite a few sports bikes a bit of a shock - but them's the general facts. Next, it depends on what touches down first. Sports and other bikes have 'hero blobs' on the footrests which are designed to touch down before anything else, and they can be worn down a lot, and the footrests will fold anyway, so not much danger there. Cruisers often have footboards, and those fold up: really, you do get a lot of warning. Where it gets tricky is when something more solid touches down. In days of yore, it would be things like sidestand and centre stand tangs. Again, there's a surprising amount of flexibility there. But if you start touching down anything hard that's rigidly mounted to the chassis, you can get in deep trouble. Push it too hard and you will indeed crash. Also in answer to your question: it's generally the rear wheel that gets levered off the ground first. DAMHIKIJK,OK? But not always. Decades ago, I ran an early Yamaha XS650 twin. The sidestand lug on the frame was located very far forward, in line with the front of the crankcases, and when that grounded hard it kicked out the *front* wheel. A few years after that fright, I was chasing a colleague in France, off an autoroute exit. I was on a fuel-injected Kawasaki Z1300 and on the right-hander, something hit the deck so hard that the bang was audible even to my colleague up in front, and he looked round saying (later) that he thought I'd dropped the bike. When we stopped for fuel, we looked to see what had hit the deck and couldn't find anything. Mystified, we looked again, and then noticed the flattened-off Number Six header pipe.... About the same time, I used to follow a Brit endurance race team. One of their riders had a Yamaha FJ1100 - brand new at the time. He was able to scrape the bloody lower frame rails. At the other end of the spectrum, I remember a small soggy Honda commuter bike I ran which was the only bike I've ever ridden that could scrape in a straight line, if you hung off the thing and sort of tacked it, on a bumpy road. The ignorant will tell you that to be scraping something you've got to be going really fast. That's bollocks.Or they'll tell you that it's perfectly safe. That can be bollocks or truth, depending on the above. Ultimately, you'll only find the point of no return when you, erm, find it. Call us from your hospital bed and let us know what it was ;-) [1] I still hanker after one.
From: ? on 4 Jun 2010 09:09 On Jun 4, 5:53 am, "Neil [the English Mental Patient] Murray" <totallydeadmail...(a)yahoo.co.uk> wrote: > That's bollocks. Neil [the English Mental Patient] Murray is an expert on "bollocks". He's been tea bagged many, many, many times...
From: TOG on 4 Jun 2010 09:50 On 4 June, 13:51, "?" <breoganmacbr...(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > On Jun 4, 4:28 am, "Datesfat Chicks" <datesfat.chi...(a)gmail.com> > wrote: > > > a)How far can I go over before the tires let go? > > You can probably lean your cruiser over to about 35 to 38 degrees from > the vertical, but the only way to be sure is to set up some kind of > angle measuring device and sit on the bike and lean it to see what you > get. > No, Dates, *don't* do this, because he's talking bollocks again. Suspension compresses in a turn, and the available angle of lean will be markedly different from what you can achieve by just leaning the bike over while sitting on it.
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