Powerbronze mini indicators

One of my pet hates are those awful mini-indicators. Not only are they poorly made (I bought a set years ago and the electrical connectors corroded to pieces within a year) and use ludicrously expensive replacement mini 21w bulbs which last about 10 minutes, but they are invisible in bright sun which constitutes a danger to the user when you’re slowing for a turn with a vehicle behind.

However, there’s no excuse for sticking these tacky “styling” additions on your bike now.

On the Powerbronze stand at the Ally Pally Bike Show (see below), they were showing LED mini-indicators. And I have to say they were bright and wide enough angle to be seen from 45 degrees away from direct line of sight, something other LED indicators I’ve seen haven’t been that good for.

At the show, they were selling them for £25 a pair, which is a pretty damn good price, as it includes the plug-in resistor you’ll need to slow the flash rate down.

I would have included a URL for you to go check them out but the Powerbronze website www.powerbronze.co.uk is such a mess from the point of view of search and navigation, I couldn’t find them. If I get a reply to my email with a link, I’ll update this entry.

Bikes back at Ally Pally

You’ve still just got time to pop along to the Alexandra Palace and visit the Ally Pally Bike Show; it’s on today (28 February 2008) and tomorrow.

As I had a day off, I took a trip up there yesterday. To be honest, it was a bit disappointing for the £15 on the door charge. Advanced bookings were only available by post which was a bit of a pain. Still at least with the attendance being a bit thin, the queue wasn’t too long.

None of the manufacturers were there except for KTM, there was nothing “new for ‘09″ that I spotted, and if you want to clamber all over bikes you can forget it as virtually all the models on display had “keep off” signs on them.

There was a reasonable selection of stands offering discounted kit, with some good deals being offered on end of range helmets. One had an Airoh flip like the one I’ve been using for the last few years for under £50, unfortunately it was a size too big or I’d have snapped it up!

Aside from a tub of bolts, I did pick up some Akito gloves for £15. Not brilliant quality but hard wearing enough for lightweight summer jobs, and identical to ones I’ve been wearing for the last couple of years.

Group Riding – the caterpillar vs the leapfrog system

We’ve recently had an interesting discussion about group riding on TRC. It spun off from a post about fatal accident circumstances for Durham, and someone remarked on the fact that group runs seem to be accident prone.

I’ve led a fair few ride outs myself, from groups of friends who all know each other to groups of riders who just turn up for the crack, from 3-4 riders to 50+ and I have to say that after years of running them for Compuserve members without a hitch, I was extremely surprised when half a dozen runs I organised over on VD were virtually all disrupted by crashes!

These spills happened despite plenty of precautions – pre-ride briefings, keeping the speed down at the front, ensuring everyone understood the marking system at junctions, factoring in regular rest and refuelling stops, even providing maps of the route on a couple of the longer rides.

The Compuserve crowd were generally… ahem… more mature in terms of years (though not necessarily more restrained in terms of speed!), with far more experience of group riding and varied riding conditions. The VD crowd were younger and less experienced, and the accidents happened in places they could have easily been avoided.

Four obvious factors struck me:

- group runs tend to mean riders ride beyond their limits in terms of fatigue simply to stay with the group. That Compuserve crowd all regularly rode long distances, a lot of the VD riders were weekend riders. We also rode out from a hotel on the Compuserve tours, whereas on the VD runs riders were getting up early and riding to the meet point (maybe not a LONG distance, but it all adds up). Even though I kept the mileage on the rides down around the 100 mile mark, many of those VD riders were simply not used to doing 100 mile rides. By contrast a lot of those Compuserve riders were 250/300 mile per day blokes!

- familiarity meant the Compuserve crowd were mostly used to riding with each other, and used a “team riding” approach. This would be in a staggered formation on wider roads or in urban areas, compacting the group and maximising forward view whilst avoiding riding in wheel tracks, whilst dropping back into wider spaced single file on twistier, narrow roads. Riders on the VD group runs followed far too close and in single file in urban areas because they didn’t understand the staggering system (in retrospect slowing down only made things worse), and in the twisties spent far more time worrying about their individual ‘lines’ than the mechanics of group riding.

- the Compuserve group stayed in order using what’s described over here as the police “caterpillar” system of marking junctions which minimises overtaking within the group. Each rider waits for the group member behind, who stops in turn and waits for the rider behind him. The slower riders end up at the back very quickly and from then on, there’s virtually no overtaking in the group, and because you know the rider ahead and behind, you can ride as fast or slow as you like between sections. I tried to apply this on the VD runs, but those riders who had ridden in groups before weren’t used to the system and got confused, so after that I used the usual UK “leapfrog” or “drop-off” system where the marker waits from the sweeper at the back of the group, so the marker is passed by every other rider in the group, and the faster riders then overtake everyone to get back to the front.

- with the Compuserve group, the peer pressure was to conform to the group riding ethos, so new riders quickly picked up the “style” and fitted in. The VD riders were “every man for himself” and even where that didn’t lead to aggressive or fast riding (we lost a few of the ‘quick’ guys who professed themselves bored at intermediate stops), the constant overtaking by the markers meant riders did not have a ‘participant’ mentality of enjoying the ride as a team.

My own preference is for the caterpillar over the leapfrog system. By allowing overtaking rather than insisting on a rigid order, you can quickly sort out the faster riders to the front, and from that point on they stay there, assuming they are happy riding at the pace they are, because they only need to wait for the rider behind! That means there’s no quick guys riding repeatedly through the entire group and everyone sets their own pace in their own “bubble” of space.

By contrast, the leapfrog system means a constant stream of bikes passing the slower riders. Whilst that might be acceptable for riders who are used to each other’s company, my own experience is that this is far more likely to make a novice group rider feel they aren’t going fast enough; I believe the caterpillar makes for a much more relaxed and safer ride for all riders, particularly the less experienced who don’t have to worry about where the next bike will overtake them, but can simply get on with riding their own ride.

Downsides to the caterpillar system? Well, some were suggested, which are worth considering.

One possibility is that the rest stops for the lead group get extended unnecessarily because the caterpillar means the group strung out too far and the front guys are itching to go whilst the tail enders are only just arriving. True, it can happen if there are very slow riders at the back and you allow long rides between breaks, but quite honestly, if that’s the case, I think you’re better off running two groups with different paced riders each under their own leader, or breaking the ride up into shorter sections; you’re not likely to have to wait more than 7 or 8 minutes if you keep the sections to an hour or so.

Because of the build up of bigger gaps, another argument is that riders will feel under greater pressure to keep up for fear of getting left behind. If you can make it very clear in the briefing that riders don’t need to worry about being left behind, the pressure to keep up isn’t really an issue. And what often happens is that riders tend to form mini-groups anyway.

Another possible problem was the risk of someone moving away from a marking position before really checking that the next rider is the next in the group. Again, a good briefing should prevent that, but if the rider is the kind who’ll abandon the marking point, it can happen on either style of ride.

By contrast, an advantage of the caterpillar marking system is that you soon get to know who’s ahead and behind, whereas with a big group using the leapfrog system, you never know who is part of your group and that can lead to some mishaps. A couple of years back I was out with a few mates using the caterpillar, one of us stopped to mark a turn behind me, and another group (Thames Valley Advanced Motorcycles I suspect ) mistook him for one of THEIR riders and all took the turn to follow me instead of their own group, and then overtook the rest of my group and tucked in behind me!! When I realised what they were doing, I stopped and told ‘em they’d followed the wrong group! They seemed to think it was my fault too! That wouldn’t have happened with the caterpillar, as they would have spotted the unfamiliar rider waiting ahead and ignored them.

A final criticism was that the faster riders at the front have to follow caterpillar leader and can’t go any quicker, whereas in the leapfrog they can ride as fast as they like. In my experience, big bike runs are a bit like a wolf pack, with the riders staying bunched up, so the only way to “ride faster” is often on the wrong side of the centre line! Not my idea of a relaxed ride, and the caterpillar actually gives the leader a chance to ride a bit quicker too if you think about it! But ultimately, if someone wants to ride a lot quicker than the group leader, then the individual should question if group riding is the “thing” for them?

With the exception of the initial sort out of positioning, the caterpillar is the same police system I trained on for the National Motorcycle Escort group – you get allotted a position on the escort, and you stay there.

Many groups run perfectly happily using the leapfrog system, and I’m not suggesting that you change systems if the leapfrog works for you and you’re used to it. But if you’re organising a run for riders you’re not familiar with or who are largely new to group riding, then I’d go for the caterpillar every time.

As regards what group riding should be about, there is an excellent pair of articles from 91, written by Nick Ienatsch, and still highly relevant to group riding today: “The Pace” and “The Pace Pt 2″. You can find them easily enough with a Google.

A summary of his principles are:

1. Set cornering speed early. Blow the entrance and you’ll never recover.
2. Look down the road. Maintaining a high visual horizon will reduce perceived speed and help you to avoid panic situations.
3. Steer the bike quickly. There’s a reason Wayne Rainey works out – turning a fast-moving motorcycle takes muscle.
4. Use your brakes smoothly but firmly. Get on and then off the brakes; don’t drag ‘em.
5. Get the throttle on early. Starting the drive settles the chassis, especially through a bumpy corner.
6. Never cross the centreline except to pass. Crossing the centreline in a corner is an instant ticket and an admittance that you can’t really steer your bike. In racing terms, your lane is the course; staying right of the line adds a significant challenge to most roads and is mandatory for sport riding’s future.
7. Don’t crowd the centreline. Always expect an on-coming car with two wheels in your lane.
8. Don’t hang off in the corners or tuck in on the straights. Sitting sedately on the bikes looks safer and reduces unwanted attention. It also provides a built-in safety margin.
9. When leading, ride for the group. Good verbal communication is augmented with hand signals and turn signals; change direction and speed smoothly.
10. When following, ride with the group. If you can’t follow a leader, don’t expect anyone to follow you when you’re setting the Pace.

One last point when thinking about a group ride – does the stream of bikes constantly overtaking each other look “responsible” to the general public?

Fix your cornering – forget the apex!

Rather contrary to what most riders believe about bike accidents, rural roads are actually the place where a significant number of accidents happen, often with serious consequences for the motorcyclist.

The main accident risk on rural roads comes from three manoeuvres:

• cornering
• negotiating junctions
• overtaking

Statistics from all over the UK reinforce the message. Open roads may generate far fewer car/bike accidents than urban areas, but they are usually the ones where the big accidents happen.

Open road accidents tend to be at much higher speeds, where we feel safe but have relatively little chance to scrub off speed when we do spot danger and makes the consequences severe when we get it wrong.

The reason for most bend accidents is running wide on the exit, either off the road on a right hander or into oncoming traffic on a left hander.

Lifted from the Durham Bikewise site:

Tragically 29 people lost their lives on the roads of County Durham and Darlington in 2007 of those six were riding their motorcycle when they died.

The above map shows the locations of the fatal motorcycle accidents and the 14 serious motorcycle accidents throughout the County.

Below is a brief description of how the fatal accidents have occurred.

Please ride safely and do not become one of these statistics in 2008.

1. This collision took place in the Wolsingham area in the evening following an afternoon ride-out. An experience rider miss judged a right hand bend where he has hit the nearside curb and then collided with a metal rail fence. The rider was then thrown over the top of the fencing and died as a result of his injuries. No other vehicles were involved.
   
2. Again following a ride-out, but this time in the Newton Aycliffe area an experienced motorcyclist has misjudged his approach to a roundabout and collided with the signage. He died as a result of his injuries. No other vehicles were involved.
   
3. This accident happened at approximately 9.30pm in the Consett area here the rider has failed to negotiate a slight right hand bend in the road hitting the kerb and colliding with the roadside fencing. He died as a result of his injuries. No other vehicles were involved.
   
4. Whilst completing an over take on the A177 dual carriageway near Sedgefield, for an unknown reason the rider of a CB400 has lost control of the motorcycle whilst overtaking a vehicle. The bike has left the carriageway to the offside throwing the rider from his machine and resulting in fatal injuries.
   
5. A tragic set of circumstances where a rider with over 50 years of experience on an afternoon ride-out has failed to negotiate a left hand bend at Burnhope. He has then collided with the corner of a stone built wall and died from his injuries. No other vehicles were involved.
   
6. This accident has happened when the motorcyclist has been overtaking a line of traffic on approach to a junction on the right. One of the vehicles in the line was turning right into this junction. The rider has then braked heavily in response to this, lost control and collided with oncoming vehicles. He died as a result of his injuries.

Three bends, two overtakes and one roundabout which I guess you could lump together with bends.

Fortunately there’s a simple solution to avoiding running wide. It’s to avoid any notion of mid-corner apexes. I was reading an article only the other month that was banging on about the importance of getting the apex right…

…but if you get the VIEW and the turn-in point right, any line that stays out of the hedge on the exit means the apex takes care of itself. It’s virtually irrelevant on the road.

This technique will get you round constant radius, increasing radius and even decreasing radius turns that catch many riders out.

Watch out for the new series of "Fix Your…" downloads – available soon!

Speed testing doesn’t come cheap

Seems the DSA aren’t the only people looking to make more money out the new off-road exercises for the riding test.

I’ve just received a mail inviting me to lease the ‘Speedoscope’ speed testing kit, as used by the DSA to ensure minimum speed has been reached, “for those motorcycle schools and tutors wishing to replicate exactly the test conditions”.

Well, I’m sure they don’t provide a clipboard too but we’ll let that go.

What astonishes me is that this piece of precision engineering (german, apparently) will set a training school back up to £39.09 a week if they want to lease it for three years. There’s also a fairly huge annual maintenance charge of £250 for calibrating the device.

And there’s no doubt VAT on top of that, making for a wapping £2000 a year, or more than the trade price of a new CG125 or a low mileage 500!

I think purchasing and fitting a GPS unit to the bikes one at  time to calibrate the speedos with a stick-on arrow is a rather cheaper option!

Heated Waistcoats vs Heated Grips

It seems every year I post something about the benefits of heated clothing in response to a “how do I keep warm” question, and every year someone tells me that the heated vests don’t work because your hands get cold, and that the person who asked the question would be better off layering up with thermals and spending their money on heated grips or gloves that keep the hands warm.

So I’ll try to spell it out once again.

First of all, on a bike, your hands (and to a lesser extent your feet) are stuck out in the breeze. Combine that with the fact they are on the ends of your arms and legs, and they’re bound to suffer a dramatic chilling effect when the weather’s a bit cool.

That doesn’t stop the science behind core temperature maintenance being sound. Your hands are packed with nerves which sense the cold so you feel it more when hands are cold. And they make up a small part of the body’s surface area, even though they are stuck out in the airstream. So heating your hands and insulating your body isn’t really the answer.

Two things are important:

- the temperature gradient between you and the air
- the time you are exposed to the cold air

The body can self-compensate for small upward or downward variations in temperature through the activation of a built-in thermoregulatory system, controlled by temperature sensors in the skin. The response to a downward variation in body temperature is involuntary shivering, which is the body’s attempt to generate heat.

However, the body’s ability to generate enough heat to maintain core temperature is very limited – as anyone who’s been on the beach in a cool breeze when the sun goes behind a cloud will know. Without the input of heat from sunlight, we chill rapidly and need some insulation in the form of clothing.

The problem is that insulation is only effective up to a point. And that point is determined by your exposure time and the temperature gradient, and the effectiveness of your insulation.

It’s just like a house – no matter how good your insulation is, if you turn the heating off whilst you go away for a week when the temperatures are freezing, it’ll be cold when you come back, even though the insulation might be good enough to keep it warm overnight or for longer periods when it’s not so cold.

Likewise, on the bike, if the temperature gradient’s not too steep or you’re not out in the cold for too long, then you can defeat it with insulation by doing all the things riders have been doing for years; layering up, wearing silk liners, thermal clothing. Provided you can slow down heat loss to a rate where your own body will be generating enough heat to replace what’s lost through convection, conduction, radiation, evaporation and respiration, then core temperature will stay at 37c or thereabouts, and the blood will keep flowing to extremities. That doesn’t stop them feeling cold as they suffer chilling from exposure to the air, but the blood keeps flowing and oxygen continues to reach your hands and feet.

But if the temperature gradient is steep and when you’re out in the cold for a long time, then unless you take extreme measures to insulate yourself, you’ll start to chill, and core temperature will start to drop.

What happens next is the important bit. To maintain core temperature as high as possible for as long as possible, blood flow is progressively shut down to the extremities. Initially blood flow to the skin is restricted and skin temperature falls rapidly. It then goes through a phase where you get pulses of blood flowing through the chilled areas, till finally the blood circulation is shut off altogether and muscles go stiff and unresponsive, then ultimately if you don’t get blood flowing again and temperatures are low enough, you’re into eventual freezing of tissue and frostbite.

However, that’s not really the issue on a bike. I’ve never heard of a case of frostbite affecting a rider (though I daresay someone will know of one!).

Long before your fingers and nose start to freeze and drop off, and maybe even before your fingers and toes get cold and numb if you are using heated gloves and socks, you’re losing heat from the core. And now the risk is of hypothermia setting in.

Few riders understand just how close to the edge we are on a bike with regards hypothermia, which is why I’m bothering to write all this. If you’ve reached the stage of uncontrollable shivering and teeth-chattering, then you’re not just cold, you’re already suffering mild hypothermia, and impaired brain function isn’t far off.

I can remember two contrasting rides in bad conditions.

The first was from Mitcham in Surrey back to Maidstone in December 76. I was ill-prepared for a 2 hour ride late at night on my 125 in sub-zero temps, with just a leather jacket, jeans and a one piece waterproof suit, plus winter gloves and boots. By the time I got back I was probably in the mid-stages of hypothermia, shivering uncontrollably, chattering teeth, muscles had stiffened up so I couldn’t use the clutch for the last 7-8 miles, and I was mentally disoriented too – I remember that soon before I got home I forgot which way to move the gearshift to change gear. I was in a seriously bad state. It took me hours to warm up, even after a hot bath (which I know now wasn’t the best thing to do!).

The other was blood-running in early Jan, with the temp around -8c, three hours out on the bike between 2am and 5am. When I got back in I was bloody cold with numb fingers and toes, and shivering but otherwise OK. Without the heated vest I’d have been far, far worse. I changed out of the riding kit, had a cuppa and went back to bed.

So, that’s personal experience, with and without the heated vest I’ve had since 96.

It’s true that some people will feel the cold in their hands more than others. Every one is different in their physiological responses and thresholds to chilling, I’ve never said otherwise – there are physiological issues like how much fat you carry. Another is how often you expose your hands to cold – think fishermen hauling on wet nets in winter! It turns out that constant exposure to cold causes our body to adapt by increasing the flow of blood to the hands.

I ride a lot, in all weathers, for long periods, so there’s a fair chance that compared with people who work in a warm office and commute relatively short distance or just ride at weekends,  I “feel the cold less” than they do.

This possibly explains why in 5-10c winter temps we usually have here, with the ‘leccie vest on I rarely wear anything heavier than my unlined gloves even in mid-winter, and that’s whilst instructing on the bike for hours at a time, not just a short commute to work.

However, in the temps hovering around 0-5 we’ve had recently had, I dug the winter lined gloves out, decided they weren’t quite warm enough and bought some cheapy heated gloves which have added just enough warmth to my fingertips to keep them reasonably warm and free-moving.

But if I wasn’t using the heated vest then past experience despatching tells me I would have got very cold indeed. I know that because I tried heated gloves/grips years ago – I had grips on when I first bought the vest and they weren’t nearly so effective without the vest. I’m not using bar muffs, and I’m not dressed like the Michelin man either, by the way!

The big plus of the heated vest is not that it keeps your hands toasty (though they won’t get as cold with the vest on as relying on layering) but that you don’t have to rely on the body’s ability to heat itself. Purchase the vest first, THEN by all means add the heated gloves or grips if you’re still suffering from cold hands.

It’s hypothermia that is kept at bay by keeping the core temperature up
with a heated vest. Cold fingers and toes are uncomfortable, even bloody painful at times when they get cold, but if you buy heated grips or gloves, you are treating the symptom, not the disease.