Getting the right training for struggling new riders

Picture this…

• You’re a late 30-something female… passed the test on a 125 in 1995.
• You rode a 125, then a 250 for a couple of years, and were then involved as pillion in an accident with a U-turning driver in France, which resulted in a leg injury and a hospital stay.
• A year on and you have to give up biking – everyone is out to get you.
• 10 years on, you finally pluck up courage and buy a ‘99 CBR 600, to find you can’t ride it.
• You spend time and money doing refresher training with a couple of training schools.
• Even after that, you find you can’t ride your bike.
• Six months down the line, your confidence shot, you post a plea for help on an internet forum, just someone to ride with and help as a last resort before you sell the bike and give up biking.

At which point I spot the thread on www.kentandsussexbikers.com.

There are several well-intentioned “come for a ride with us and we’ll look after you” posts, but as she isn’t far away, I suggest a short ride, with radios, so I can look over her riding. She jumps at the chance and we meet up the next evening.

Before we even get onto the bikes, she mentions that one of the big problems is that she finds it very difficult to operate the clutch. It is something I’m planning to look at in any case, but I take the invitation. I see she’s tried to do something about the problem – she’s gone to the trouble of fitting a rather trick dogleg clutch lever, but the essential problem remains; with small hands, she simply can’t reach the lever to operate the clutch cleanly.

Why? There’s no free play. I spin the cable adjuster round, and wind in some slack and invite her to try. With a couple of cm’s free movement at the end of the lever, we check that mod works when she starts the bike up. Suddenly she finds she has more control over a slipping clutch.

Just before we set off, she reminds me: “I can’t do right turns and I’m really slow” she said. “OK”, I thought to myself, “we’ll start with some easy left turns, an open road and see what you CAN do.”

Off we go. The first thing I notice is that even though we’re stopped and tucked into a quiet corner of a petrol station, her foot goes straight up onto the rear brake. Once the motor is running and in gear, because the clutch isn’t biting quite where she expects, she hops along few paces like a one legged bird to maintain balance.

Hmmm. Memo to self – remember that for the debrief.

Once we get to the exit, she manages the pull-away (left!) reasonably well, given the clutch wasn’t biting where she expected it. Out through the town and off down a nice road towards Rye. She negotiates the junction quite cleanly if a little bit hurriedly in the foot and handwork department as she decelerates and turns, then surprises me with a fair turn of speed out on the open road; on one or two bends she knows she’s little quicker than me, but on the awkward downhill bends she doesn’t know so well, I have to click the radio on and suggest using the rear brake to control the speed and to keep hands off the front.

We arrive at Rye, with me reasonably happy with what I’ve seen so far, and set off on a lap of the town, which involves two right turns at mini-roundabouts and another couple where bits of the one way system merge. She runs very wide on each and is clearly tense. “Ah yes… I see what you mean.” Her take-offs from a standing start are also awkward and unbalanced; she’s keeping her left foot rigidly on the peg at all times.

So we stop and have a chat. First of all, I ask her about the ‘Safety Position’. “You mean, when you keep your foot on the brake at all times? I try to make myself do that.” Uh, right, thought so. That’s been drummed in so hard on basic training – and on her refreshers it turns out -that it’s seen as a ‘RULE’ and more important that balance and sensible control of the machine.

I tell her, to her palpable relief, that she can put both feet down if she wants!

I explain that the ideal use of the rear brake round town is to stop the bike smooth and level after you’ve used both brakes to slow down; but once stopped it’s of limited use except on a hill. We have a further chat about the brakes in general. She’s happy about the use of front and rear brakes, but it seems no-one had mentioned that particular use of the rear brake, nor that it’s a useful brake when going down (as opposed to pulling away on) hills.

Second, I explain that moving all the decision-making about brakes and gears can be moved back 10 or 15 metres giving her the chance to get the bike balanced in plenty of time and freeing up her concentration away from the controls, so that when she arrives at a junction or a bend, all she has to do is negotiate it. That makes sense to her.

Third, I suggest if she’s having trouble with right turns, angling a pull-away from a side turning slightly towards the direction you want to go will help – there’s no need to stop at 90 degrees to the white line.

Then I mention counterweighting. Blank look. I remember she did her test on a 125, and we didn’t talk about that much back then. But what about on her refresher training; “did you practice tight turns?”. It appears so but with no mention of counterweighting, and she had lots of problems with them.

I’m not surprised if they didn’t mention or use counterweighting.

Given that we’re just out on a ride, and not doing my course, we’re not near a handy carpark, but I briefly explain the theory and make the best use of a wide factory entrance to demonstrate.

Anyway, I then suggest we try that on another lap of Rye, as she’s now got enough new stuff to think about; feet, rear brake, getting the gears/brakes sorted earlier, angling stops and counterweighting. Thank heavens for the radio!

Off we go back to the town and she practices the counterweighting on the way in, then with prompting over the radio gets all the gears and braking sorted early so she can concentrate on a bit of counterweighting on the tight corners.

Qualified success. Not perfect but much tidier turns, not running nearly so wide. Not bad for ten minutes discussion and five minutes riding!! We stop briefly and she’s happier.

We leave Rye behind and enjoy one of the roads across Romney Marsh, at which point the only car that caught us up passes us. So not too shabby in the speed department either.

Though her steering has been pretty tidy, I felt there was an underlying hint of nervousness about getting round unknown corners, translating itself into a slightly hesitant approach. Nothing awful, but not very positive at times.

So I mention countersteering. Blank look. This is getting predictable unfortunately. Not her fault at all, she can only repeat what she knows. And clearly she doesn’t know about countersteering.

Again, as we’re at the side of the road, I don’t have my diagrams, models or videos, but I do my best to explain, and although she struggles a bit to follow, she’s prepared to put it on trust and give it a go. I also mention the differences between dropped bars and the flat ones on her training bikes and the need not to lean on them when trying to steer.

The first attempts to use countersteering on the move only elicit a tiny wiggle from the bike, but by careful use of an analogy of sliding a drawer in, she gets the idea and suddenly the bike’s turning faster and zipping across the road. A mile or so down the road and there’s quite a nasty little S bend over a blind crest. She whizzes round and with no problems deals with another sharp bend at the top of a long straight road where there had been a fatal bike accident only days earlier. That had clearly worried her. The little bunch of flowers at the side of the road are mute testimony to a rider who didn’t survive his ride.

A few more awkward bends, including a nasty decreasing radius turn that caught me out years ago are put behind us and we’re almost back at our meeting point. We pull in, doing a “dreaded” right turn nice and smoothly onto the forecourt, and pull up.

Almost her first question is “do you think I should sell the bike?”

I reassure her that she’s ridden quite well, and that her speed is quite OK – she’s not a mobile chicane by an stretch of the imagination. The ride wasn’t perfect, there are faults to sort out, and skills to build, but she’s safe enough and now knows what the worst of her problems are and what to do to fix them.

I point out that “too slow” is relative. Relative to being able to stop in an emergency. Just because some riders are faster, it doesn’t mean they’re making the right choice about speed.

By now it’s 9pm, and getting dark, so we head off in our own directions, she with a big grin on her face, me with an impromptu gift of a chocolate bar!

I ride back, having on the one hand a good feeling about having helped keep an aspiring rider on the road, and on the other I’m having an internal rant about the “training” schools that took her money for “refresher” training and failed to fix her problems.

Neither took her out on her bike, as I understand it.

One of them stuck her out with a bunch of learners, I think on 125s, so I very much suspect that will have been with a CBT-only qualified instructor, and quite obviously his main job would have been to look after the new riders.

But she’d also been on a 500cc school bike, presumably with a DAS-qualified instructor.

And… not to mention counterweighting when she can’t do even moderately tight turns? Appalling.

And countersteering? I know it’s not officially sanctioned by the DSA but it’s a key technique for DAS and a “must know” in my book, particularly when someone is having steering issues. Unbelievable.

I’ve always defended CBT/DAS instructors when the argument has cropped up about who is best qualified to fix what are actually fundamental and basic riding faults in riders with a full licence – some advanced instructors certainly aren’t!

But I have to say this experience has left me wondering about the quality of training from the local schools. It quite clearly failed this particular rider badly. It’s likely the school simply making a fast buck by bunging her on a part-filled 125 course, but the wider question is whether the instructors were up to the job. It doesn’t look like it. And if not, why not?

None of the faults were obscure – they would be something a DAS instructor would see virtually every course – and a hangover from learning on a 125.

Rather more worryingly, both schools are offereing instructor training. Are they simply churning out clones of their existing instructors?

And the really scary thing? DAS instructors from these schools will no doubt use their DAS card to get onto the advanced instructors register (RPMT) at some point, probably persuaded to do so by the school itself so they can offer advanced training. So much for the DSA’s claims of quality control.

The worst of all possible worlds.

Somerset Road Safety Partnership ‘Rider Performance’ Day

Last Wednesday (May 13) I gave a presentation on behalf of Somerset Road Safety Partnership at their ‘Rider Performance’ Day at Castle Combe race circuit.

For me personally, it was a very interesting day; a chance to meet fellow professionals in the field of riding skills and to interact in a classroom format with a large group of mixed abilities, a rather different day from my normal 1:1 training out on the road!

The 40-odd attendees were split into two groups, based on their riding experience, so as to make better use of the facilities and to allow for the Avon tyre guy to do his two sessions back to back in his lunch break! That meant I got to do the first session of the day at around 9:30 after the initial briefing, and then the final “graveyard shift” at around 4pm!

The basic brief I’d been given was to run a “workshop” about defensive riding and try to show that many motorcycle accidents are avoidable by the rider; in other words to approach riding with a defensive mindset.

It’s not the easiest topic to approach, not least because biking is about having fun and defensive riding doesn’t sound fun, but also because many riders firmly believe that they had nothing to do with an accident involving another vehicle, because it “wasn’t their fault”. Legally that might be the case but it takes two to tangle – do they have to drive into the accident that someone else is about to cause?

The answer is “no” of course – with the right knowledge of where accidents happen, and a basic understanding of why they happen, it’s possible to put in place relatively simple strategies to avoid dangerous situations.

Slowing down in hazardous places is the most obvious – with more time, you can look around and spot the issues more easily, as well as having a better chance of dealing with them. The key point to get over here is that “slowing down” doesn’t mean slowing your whole ride – it means being more selective about where you add your speed.

Seeing and being seen is another key strategy. It should be obvious that if you can’t see something, you don’t know it’s there. A good rider will consider what they can see, and from that work out the areas they can’t see and take a long hard think about what might be hidden out of sight. But for many road users if you can’t be seen, you’re likely to be out of mind. So positioning is as much about allowing others to know you are there as gathering your own information.

Some instructors hate the expression “expecting the unexpected”; they suggest that if you expect it, it’s not unexpected any more, and they have a point. Thus perhaps a better way of thinking is to look at any situation and ask “what can go wrong here?” Planning for disaster rather than for everything to pan out exactly as you hoped means you’re far less likely to be surprised when you DO have to take evasive action. I firmly believe a pragmatic approach to understanding why other road users and ourselves get entangled with each other is a far better solution to improving rider safety than teaching them the “Holy Grail” of the zero error Perfect Ride!

Now, I could have approached all this in a 1960’s “chalk and talk” classroom session or worse still “Death by Powerpoint”, a style of presentation for which I personally have an attention span very slightly longer than an extremely bored goldfish.

On the other hand, I didn’t want to go the equally dire “team building” approach to my session!

So I used a mixture of approaches, based around the rather excellent “Perfect Day” video. It’s a short two minute video showing a rider avoiding a number of hazards along the way, and as such it’s an excellent teaching tool for illustrating that common accidents that have potentially nasty consequences.

What the video demonstrates nicely is that not only are the potential problems the result of easily avoidable errors, but the rider also has plenty of clues that the things are about to go pear shaped, and has simple solutions to staying out of trouble.

I took out three of the scenarios the video painted for further study. I split the group up into teams and then asked each team to look at various aspects of each situation – what the problem was, what the clues were, where the rider could expect to find the potential hazard and what they could do about it. Each scenario asked the same questions but gave them a different way to approach it.

Final conclusion? If I’m not scaring myself witless as I ride, I have more fun! Defensive riding works!

With only 50-odd minutes for the entire session, it was quickfire stuff, but watching the body language of some of the attendees I’m confident I got the point over to some that didn’t show much interest initially, and I got some good feedback from some of the people sitting in, particularly after the first session when people had a moment to talk to me over a much-needed cuppa!

Certainly, there were some teething problems. Jim the organiser had brought along a projector but it took a while to find the screen to show the movie, and I was expecting a whiteboard or flip chart, neither of which materialised, but on the whole I think it went well for a first run of a new format presentation.

In between times of course, I was free to wander round and see what else was going on.

Martin Hopp and his team of instructors from Hopp Rider Training were out on the track doing a subset of their normal training from up at Cadwell Park, with a “machine preparation” session, a frank talk about crashing and the consequences, slow riding and braking exercises, and plenty of track time.

I was interested to see that Martin got the trainees to actually lock the front brake in a straight line.

This “lock and slide the front” thing is something I’ve been demo’ing for years on the “urban” section of my Survival Skills 2 day course and the City Riding / Collision Avoidance courses but perhaps I need to do it on the Bends course too. For the time being I’ll stick to demos rather than getting trainees to do it but hard braking is clearly an area that many riders with cornering problems are weak on, not least because many riders never practice emergency stops.

Martin’s instructors also worked on the exact same approach I suggest for smooth stops – modulate the front off as the speed drops down to walking pace, and finish with just the rear, stopping left foot down, something an IAM rider commented was the way he used to do it before he joined the IAM!

I have to say the ability to do braking exercises on a track is useful, but I do have slight concerns about the difference in grip between a wet track and a wet road; the only surface on the road that is equivalent to a wet track is the ‘Shellgrip’ anti-skid surfaces. You need to go away and practice on the surfaces you normally ride on, not rely on what you think you have learned on a track!

To my mind possibly the most interesting presentation of the day was by a chap from Avon (tyres, not beauty products!).

He was obviously extremely knowledgable about tyres – I got a chance to chat over tea and he was off to talk to a government committee on bike safety about bike tyres the following day, so clearly knew his rubber.

The most thought provoking observation he made was that in the conditions (13c, and wet) the tyres that would work best on the track would be the high silica sports touring tyres, NOT the supersports tyres.

Yes, I said on the TRACK, not just the road.

He said the sports touring tyres would offer just as much outright grip as the softer tyres under the wet conditions, and furthermore wouldn’t need warming up but would work from cold. The supersports tyres would need to be worked hard to get them up to temperature, and worked hard to keep them there!

The obvious conclusion is that for anything but dry, warm roads on a sunny mid-summer day, you’re better off on a sports touring tyre! Go back to this “Don’t crash on the gas” post just a few days ago and see the relevance of this expert opinion, and the danger of running too sporty tyres in the wrong weather conditions.

There’s another one scheduled for September. Contact:

Jim Newman – Road Safety Coordinator (motorcycles)
Somerset Road Safety Partnership, Somerset County Council, County Hall, The Crescent, Taunton, TA1 4DY
Tel: 0844 980 00 28 Fax: 01823 423439
e-mail roadsafety@somerset.gov.uk

Personally, I’m available for available for talks to clubs and groups throughout the year! Drop me a mail.

Don’t crash on the gas!

The ‘Winter Riding Season’ usually kicks off with a series of spills at junctions, where riders usually report that “the back end just came round on me” or something similar.

The accident is particularly likely where riders are turning right out of a side road – the distance you travel encourages trying to power through the turn, plus the fact you’re crossing two lanes of traffic (so generally fewer gaps on a busy roads) leads to riders who are in a hurry.

In this case, it was coming off a roundabout late at night in spring on a wet surface. The back end came round and the rider went down on the low side. It seems it’s a roundabout the rider uses all the time so why did it happen?

First of all, let’s get the usual excuses out the way.

Cold Tyres. Do motorcycle tyres need to be warmed up? There are all sorts of stories going round about how you need to warm up tyres before they’ll offer proper grip, some riders are even resorting to using tyre warmers in the garage before they go out for a ride!

Is this likely? If street tyres needed warming up before use to the point where they offered dangerously low levels of grip when cold, the riders all over the place would be crashing and able to point the finger directly at the tyre. Where would be the first place they would be running to?

It wouldn’t be the tyre warmer shop, it would be the compensation courts, particularly in the USA! Think about it. Even road legal trackday tyres have to produce a reasonable level of grip on the road from cold; it’ll just be a lot less than they would on a sun-warmed race track!

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[EDIT] 23 May – I’m going to change my opinion on this somewhat.

At the recent Rider Performance day at Castle Combe where I was giving one of the presentations, I got to listen to a tyre expert who’d come along from Avon Tyres. The most thought provoking observation he made was that in the conditions (13c, and wet) the tyres that would work best on the track would be the high silica sports touring tyres, NOT the supersports tyres.

Yes, he said on the TRACK, not just the road.

He said the sports touring tyres would offer just as much outright grip as the softer tyres under the wet conditions, and furthermore wouldn’t need warming up but would work from cold. The supersports tyres would need to be worked hard to get them up to temperature, and worked hard to keep them there!

The obvious conclusion is that for anything but dry, warm roads on a sunny mid-summer day, you’re better off on a sports touring tyre!

I still think a rider with reasonable feel and understanding of how the bike is performing under them could ride round the issue, and tyre warmers are clearly a fantasy, but if you’re a bit ham-fisted it does throw some light on the annual rash of cold-weather crashes! [/EDIT]

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Diesel. Fuel spills do happen. But generally they’re thin streaks or drips, and you might slide as you hit it, but you’re soon off onto clean tarmac and the tyre grips again, after a twitch and a wobble.

Very occasionally there is a BIG spill you can’t avoid – I have had to negotiate a couple over the years, including one that caused three other riders ahead of me to crash. But a spill that size you can see and even smell. Police accident analyses do not point to diesel and petrol spills as a major cause of crashes in the UK.

So what does cause slides that the bike can’t recover from? Simple; it’s lean angle and throttle! At the same time. To excess.

I have lost count of how many times I’ve explained this on the bike forums I contribute to, yet people still read magazine articles which bang on about feeding the power on as you start to pick the bike up out of the turn. What they discover is that if you feed in TOO much power, you end up picking the bike up out of the ditch instead!

The short answer. Get the bike upright THEN feed the power in. That way if you exceed the available grip, you get upright wheelspin – no big deal.

The long answer. Why is this “feed the power in” technique a poor one? It’s basically down to road surfaces. We’re not on a track. For starters roads don’t grip like a track, but in the wet they get much worse. A GOOD CONDITION wet road (shellgrip excepted) will deliver around 15% less grip than it will in the dry, a worn surface considerably less.

The tyre can deliver a certain amount of grip, depending on
a) how grippy the tyre is
b) how grippy the surface is

Let’s look at the first part – tyre grip. If you’re leaning over, you’re asking the tyre to grip to keep it turning. If you’re adding throttle, you’re asking the rear tyre to deliver grip to drive the bike forward.

Now, let’s factor in what happens as you feed in the throttle and the bike speeds up whilst you’re leant over in the middle of a corner – you need increase your lean to keep the bike on the same line. So you’re now asking the tyre for MORE grip to keep the bike turning at the same time as you’re asking for MORE grip to keep it driving! This split of grip between acceleration and cornering is sometimes known as the “Traction Pie”.

It’s not rocket science to see that by twisting the throttle mid-corner it’s easy to try to carve off a bigger slice of the Traction Pie than is available – the grip the tyre was delivering quite happily a moment earlier suddenly isn’t there any more. In essence, it’s the reverse of the problem of applying brakes mid-turn, and riders are quite aware of the danger of that.

The second issue is road surface – it’s half the deal – if the surface can’t deliver its half of the grip, then the tyre won’t stick to it if you try to bite off a big chunk of the traction pie!

Just like a soft compound tyre will allow more throttle and lean angle than a hard compound tyre, so a high friction road surface like ‘Shellgrip’ will offer more than worn out and slick surface; you can brake and lean almost as hard in the wet as you can in the dry on Shellgrip.

The difference is that surfaces aren’t consistant and constantly change. You don’t change tyres half way through a bend! (Though come to think of it, someone will no doubt mention dual compound tyres, but note these offer more grip at bigger lean angles, not less!)

In particular, high grip surfaces are often laid where cars are turning or braking, but these surfaces are rarely extended far out of the junctions or corners, and motorcycles with their wider lines can run off the Shellgrip onto the ordinary tarmac whilst still leant over. Consider the potential consequences!

OK, having explained at some length why bikes lose traction mid-turn, why do riders continue to do it? Two reasons:

• it’s a track technique – it’ll get you round the lap faster (at the risk of crashing out) so it’s “sexy”.
• it’s in the advanced police riding manual “Motorcycle Roadcraft” – which was written when police were trying to squeeze the highest speeds possible out of 50hp Triumph Saints and BMW R75s.

Neither is a good justification for using the technique when even newly qualified riders are buying 100hp 600s. I’ve wheelspun a CG125 in the wet, so it’s not difficult with a 100hp bike.

So why can’t you shut the throttle and get it back?

You need to understand how tyres deliver traction – unfortunately the sums don’t work the same for losing and regaining traction. It’s just the way tyres work beyond the normal friction rules (which incidentally is why you can lean over more than 45 degrees without falling off) – once you break traction you have to reduce what you’re asking the tyre to do in terms of the traction pie beyond what it was offering when it lost traction.

It’s a bit complicated to explain without resorting to graphs and equations, but trust me that it’s much difficult to regain grip lost during a slide than it was to to lose it in the first place.

If you’re on the throttle, once a tyre has broken traction, you’ll find it difficult to keep it from wheelspinning. And if it’s wheelspinning, it’s delivering next to zero grip. In a straight line, you just shut the throttle and the tyre stops spinning and you regain traction. No big deal

But if it spins up at the same time as you’re leaning, then the tyre slides out sideways at an angle to the front wheel, because of the design of a motorcycle as two wheels with a hinge in the middle.

Now you have a big problem. If you try to reduce the throttle imput to regain grip, the bike is sideways on. When the tyre grips, the next stop is usually an aerial exit from the machine in the form of a highside. If you were watching British Superbikes from Oulton Park on Easter Monday, you’d have seen some excellent examples of bikes losing traction, getting sideways and being unable to regain it, with the riders being thrown off – one of them even crashed behind the pace car!

Alternatively you try to steer the bike upright to take away some of the lean angle. At least, that’s what riding manuals will say; “steer into the slide”. There’s a clear disadvantage there because there’s a reason you’re leaning over – to get round a bend. Steering into the slide takes you off the road or worse into oncoming traffic.

In reality, once the back end has gone mid-turn, it all happens far too fast for the average rider (me included) and if you stay on at this point it’s divine intervention. Those not so blessed will go down lowside if the tyre continues to slide, or highside if the tyre gets broadside enough for the contact patch to “grow” and grip again.

And incidentally, this is why it was very unlikely to be diesel that caused the crash – as soon as he got back on the non-diesel part of the road, the level of grip would have gone right up and the bike would have snapped back into line. As that didn’t happen and the bike continued to slide out and down, it’s far more likely his combination of throttle and lean angle just outrode the wet road surface! Police accident investigations don’t find diesel actually causes many bike crashes – but it’s an easy excuse for the rider!

So, how to avoid?? Two suggestions.

The first one is to use “Point and Squirt” cornering. Rather than try to use big lean angles, sweeping lines and feeding the power on whilst turning, use the Point and Squirt. Slow down upright, get mid-turn speeds down, square turns off by turning tight, get the bike upright again and THEN put the power on.

Second, look at the tyres. Many people fit soft compound tyres that are really designed for trackdays in the belief they’ll give more grip on the road. They do allow bigger lean angles than touring tyres.

Or rather, they do on a CONSISTENT surface.

Just like any tyre, if the surface can’t deliver its half of the grip, then the tyre won’t stick to it – but now because of the confidence offered by the soft compound tyre, the rider is leaning the bike further, feeding the power in harder…

…all the conditions that make recoving a slide more difficult if not downright impossible.

Touring or Sport-touring tyres don’t deliver the outright dry grip (though I’ve got my knee down without too much bother on the old Mk 111 Avon Roadrunners in the past) but they let go more predictably in the wet – you usually get a series of warning “slips” before they slide.

Final point. A slower, squarer turn gets you upright again sooner. And because you’re upright, you can get on the power harder and make a quicker getaway than the rider who’s still leaning getting round the corner!

Sorted!

Yana Da Silva on a Confidence Builder Course

Yana (AKA Quicksilva on Visordown) has done a couple of courses with me over the years. This is her write up of the first course she did with Survival Skills, a Confidence Builder course where we sorted her basic cornering issues out, which had been troubling her for months since passing her test.

“Decided to go and spend the day with Spin before I ended up decorating a lorry!

“First off clearly I knew even less than I thought I knew because the stuff he showed me about hazards and road signs had just never been on my radar before. Road positioning for better visability of the road ahead was also new.

“But here’s where I now have to accept that whilst the good lord blessed me with a face that won’t scare small children or grown men, he clearly forgot to hand out common sense.

“Basically when following a right hand corner and you’re over on the left you gently countersteer right – the KEY BIT is to STOP applying pressure to the countersteer to STOP you CONTINUING to lean further and therefore [crossing] over to the white line.

“If you apply a gentle pressure it will turn the bike enough to do the job – CLEARLY this is common sense to EVERYONE ELSE so WHY OH WHY has it not registered with me in ten months of riding!!!

“You can imagine Kevin’s face when I was describing how in the middle of a right hand bend I was having to countersteer left to keep the bike to the left —- it was at this point that the penny dropped, even if it had taken all day because I couldn’t articulate exactly what I was doing!!

“My only defence is that i have never understood the dynamics of two wheels (pretty poor i know!!)

“Anyways – tried it out again when I got home and am delighted to say I enjoyed a great ride on some twisties that have always scared me due to my poor road positioning – and this time i never once tried to use left countersteering on a right hand bend!

“So many thanks Spin for the advice and training – it was well worth it and I am very glad that I followed the advice of VDErs on Survival Skills about training to get it sorted.”

Yana worked very hard on the day so I was extremely relieved we finally got to the bottom of it!! It was a case of both of us listening to the other – and then asking the right questions!!

After passing her test, Yana had heard all about countersteering from other riders and read up on the technique, and understood the general idea of pushing the bar in the direction you want to turn (push left, go left / push right go right).

Unfortunately because the dynamics are not often fully explained (or recognised by riders for that matter), she hadn’t fully grasped that there are three stages of countersteering:

1. the initial push to generate the lean angle
2. a relaxation of the push but maintaining reduced pressure to hold the line
3. releasing all pressure to let the bike use it’s self-correcting steering to return to the upright

What she was trying to do was to push all the way through the turn – so the bike leaned beyond the angle she wanted and in consequence turned harder than she intended, and part way through the turn, she was countersteering in the opposite direction to correct the oversteer.

The result was a weird zig-zagging line round the bend that was as disconcerting to watch as it must have been to ride!

And the training paid off – towards the end of the session, she was able to take prompt avoiding action by means of countersteering to dodge a cluckwit rider on a red VFR who was on the wrong side of the road mid-turn… excellent reaction!!

In many ways this was one of the tougher courses I’ve had. It’s the weird problems like this that are really difficult to identify. It reminds me of another woman who’d had an accident on the brakes and lost confidence.

I could see something wasn’t right about her braking, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It took me around 45 minutes of following her and trying to get a view from different positions before I spotted it – she was braking rear first / front second and doing most of the braking on the rear brake. It turned out she’d been braking like that since CBT – she’d clearly mis-heard or mis-understood her CBT instructor and it hadn’t been picked up by either her DAS instructor, or the DSA examiner!

Half an hour’s chat over a cuppa explaining the dynamics of braking half-convinced her she had got the wrong end of the stick, and another 30 minutes spent doing every type of stop from gentle drifts to a halt to full-on emergency stops showed her how to use the brakes effectively in al situations.

It’s incredibly rewarding when a course like those two gives a good result.

In a sling – update!

Right, saw the doc and physiotherapist (as well as some research online).

What I’ve done is a biceps tendon tear at the elbow. Pretty rare injury apparently but the symptoms are classic; a “pop” in the elbow as the injury occurs, initial swelling in the front of the elbow, and weakness when bending the elbow. The bump in the upper arm and the gap I can feel nearer the elbow is caused by the biceps muscle and tendon recoiling and shortening.

Although repair is best effected by an operation within 24 hours, there’s a window of some weeks before the muscle and tendon stiffen up and make a repair difficult or impossible.

The bad news is that as I’m not a top class international sportsman the NHS is likely to say live with it, as there are other muscle groups that pick up the load and so 80% or so of the strength should come back in the next three months or so.

However, I’ve got a referral to the consultant, though that will no doubt be some weeks away, and will make a point of emphasising the need to lift heavy weights (ie motorcycles!) as part of the job. If it can be fixed, I’d rather it was than rely on a partial recovery.

Ho hum!

Still, in the meantime I can at least start taking bookings again!

In a sling!

I’ve just had the unexpected luxury of a fortnight of (relative) leisure.

On the Thursday evening just before Easter I moved a bit awkwardly and felt a “pop” followed by stabbing pain where the bicep abuts the elbow on my left arm.

As it was rather worse on Friday morning, with me unable to flex the arm without a lot of pain, it was off to the local minor injuries unit. A couple of x-rays and hours later, the diagnosis was torn muscle! Which was what I suspected. I was provided with one of those wonderful cheesecloth slings and prescribed rest and anti-inflammatories!

As I was in no state to ride a bike, I had to cancel two days training over the weekend – fortunately I managed to get hold of the trainees to do so before they set off.

The good news was that the weather was pretty good down here in the SE corner, so managed to get out and do a bit of walking (nothing too serious!) at the coast or up on the Downs with the friends that were down for the weekend and got a chance to play with my new “crossover” digital camera (memo to self – read manual!).

The latest update is that I’ve been signed off from the injuries unit and the inflammation has now gone down. Unfortunately that means I can see and feel a very distinct “dip” about the size of a marble in the bicep on the inside of the arm, which is slightly alarming – presumably where the muscle tore.

I’m still struggling to lift or carry anything vaguely heavy where the forearm needs to be flexed (lugging a laptop lefthanded is still painful). I’ve not tried riding the bike yet, I still can’t pull on the handbrake on the car though I can just about change gear.

This could be a longer recovery than I feared. Ho hum.

I’ve got training provisionally planned for the coming weekend… I’ll update people as I can. Watch this space!

What revs should I ride at?

“Apologies that the question is a bit basic, but I’m not quite sure about precisely when I should be upshifting. I’ve been driving for years but I’d normally change gear in my car at much lower revs. I read a tip of Spin’s in a previous thread to the effect that he’d be looking to shift from first to second at about 25mph.

“That makes me think I’m upshifting a bit early as I’d change up probably more about the 20mph mark and ride at 30- 35ish in 3rd gear but Spin’s comments made me think I should probably be in 2nd at that speed. Trouble is I tried that the last couple of days and to me the engine sounds like it’s screaming.

“The bike I have is a Kawasaki ER6f and the redline is at 11k. So far I don’t think I’ve ever had it significantly over 6k so I’m probably being a total wimp about it.”

This question cropped up today on Visordown. It’s an issue I’ve looked at before, but I put a reply together again, then hit the word limit count when I tried to post. So I thought rather than split it, I’ll make a blog entry out of it.

“What revs” used to be simple… no-one worried about it and just got on with the job of riding the bike! Then all of a sudden it became a hot topic thanks to the ‘performance riding’ articles.

First things. You’ve mentioned what kind of machine you’re riding so I can give a reasonably specific answer but for other readers the speed/revs question and also the revs/power delivery equation will depend on the size of your bike and the power output, the overall gearing and the engine configuration.

Second point. The point of shifting from 1st to 2nd at ~25 is based on the need to get the bike moving and away from following traffic more than anything else. The problem is that when you dip the clutch in the car, it doesn’t really slow down, the mass of the car keeps it moving. By contrast, the bike slows quite suddenly. This can mean that if you change gear at the same kind of place as the car driver might, he’ll be running into your tail light – it’s best to get the bike moving and up near the urban speed limit before shifting up.

The third issue is changing gear in the middle of a hazard – revving the engine a little further tends to let you get clear of physical hazards before shifting. If you shift in the middle of a junction, you’ll do it 999 times and it won’t be a problem. On the 1000th time, you’ll miss the gear and the bike will either be unstabilised (missing gear mid tight turn isn’t fun) or you’ll get stuck with no drive in a hazardous position. I remember towing a mate across a staggered junction years ago, I could have just done the whole junction in first, but for some reason I decided to go for 2nd, and naturally I missed the gear (it was a Moto Guzzi!)… the weight of the Guzzi rolled me clear of the junction, and at the same time amusingly towed my mate out of the side road and left him stranded in the middle of the main road! It’s easier just to use the revs available on any bike bigger than a 125 to ride clear THEN change.

So, what’s the “right revs”? Well, all I can say is “where the engine is ‘responsive’ for the situation you’re in at that moment”. You’ll know pretty soon if it isn’t. My rule of thumb is that you should be somewhere in the middle third of the rev range, because this gives you flexibility in both directions. So with a typical four cylinder, the motor smooths out around 2000rpm and hits the red line at 13,000 rpm, that gives a range roughly 5-9k and in that zone is where you should plan to be, towards the bottom of that 1/3rd if you’re in town, towards the upper section if you’re pushing on a bit.

What are the advantages of riding the middle third? If you slow, the engine can still drop some revs without you being forced to change gear immediately – useful if the car ahead doesn’t go as quick as you expected or the bend tightens up a bit. If you speed up, you aren’t forced to change gear immediately either – useful if the overtake you’re in the middle of turns out to be a bit tighter and need a bit more speed than you planned.

Keeping the revs in the middle of the range also allows you to ride the bike more like an automatic – you can find a gear that “fits” most rural roads and just stay in the one or two gears, riding the revs that the bike makes rather than constantly shifting up and down the box. It’s not natural to a car driver for whom the “auto” gear is usually top, but you’ll soon get used to it.

I’ve not ridden an ER6 but the CB500/GS500/ER5 and a few other odd-ball twins I’ve ridden like a Laverda Ghost 650 all preferred to be kept over 2500 to 3000 rpm, and I’ve no reason to suppose that the ER6 will be much different, so with a red line around 11k, that gives you 4-7 or so as your middle third.

It’s really not “buzzy” at 5k, it’s just beginning to get going. That’s just the car owner in you listening. So don’t worry about it.

Though it might appear I’m suggesting precise figures, in reality, it’s not an exact science and needs fine tuning for the bike you’re riding. The 600 Hornet can still hit 60mph in first gear but compared with the GSXR has a more flexible engine and can pull from tickover. This means that I can actually ride it in top in a 30 limit. The engine isn’t turning over much more than 2500, and it’s not stressed, it feels perfectly relaxed and pulls smoothly if I open the throttle. But it’s not got a lot of acceleration there, and so normally I ride in 4th in town, where there’s a bit more response. Out on a reasonably twisty B road, I’ll usually be running with the revs a little higher and swapping between 3rd and 4th.

My GSXR has a flat spot at 4k, which means I have to keep the revs over 4500 for reasonable response. 4500 – 5000rpm is fine in town. True, it goes better over 7 which is good for twisty roads and flies over 9 up to the red line which I occasionally need for overtakes, but I don’t need those revs in urban riding. But if I try to ride with the revs any lower, whilst it’ll pull from 1500rpm, that flat spot is waiting to catch me out if I need to accelerate.

As a contrast to the above machines, I’ll also refer to you to a mid 90s Yamaha Diversion 600. This bike was very low geared in first (which gave it a good turn of speed off the line for its modest power output) but it meant that you hit the redline at about 45mph, so changing gear on this bike at 25 means you’re already nearly 2/3rds of the way round the rev counter. Rural riding would have this bike swapping gear a bit more; third on the slow bits, fourth for most of the other bits and top (fifth) for the faster bits.

Other bikes need yet different solutions. Twins generally rev lower, but the same general “middle third” rules apply. Two strokes tend to need the revs kept up towards the red line to keep moving; if you tried to ride a TZR250 at 1/3 of the way round the rev counter, not much would happen. Big singles take a bit of getting used to -with very restricted rev ranges, they often don’t have much choice of gear! The old BMW Funduro 650 really only liked being in one gear at any particular road speed because it was lumpy under 3k and hit the rev limiter at 6k!

You’ll hear some people saying you should be keeping the bike at peak power for best response. Away from the track on all but the smallest bikes this simply isn’t an issue. It wasn’t even an issue on my 77 Honda 400F which put out about 30hp tops, because the bike is low geared to make the most of the limited power it does produce. Even the TZR would still pull tractibly outside the power band. And in any case, even on the open road, you’re better off being able to pull up and into the peak power band rather than have to shift gear almost immediately to stay in it.

And around town peak power simply isn’t an issue. I don’t need to be wailing along at 9000rpm. I can also keep the noise down by keeping the revs lower – the GSXR bike has a semi-legal system with a race mid-section and a road can so it’s fruity but not ear-splitting, but even so it makes more noise than the stock system on the Hornet.

You’ll also hear that you should keep the engine revs up to deliver good engine braking. If you did CBT, I’ll remind you of what you learned – it’s the FRONT wheel that delivers good traction under braking, not the rear. Neither does closing the throttle illuminate your brake light which would be important for any following traffic to judge your actions – it’s not easy to spot that a bike is slowing from behind. Whilst small reductions in speed can be made by closing the throttle, for anything serious your front brake is your straight line stopper.

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.

Power at any price?

Some weeks ago, I did a bit on the ‘Bike’ eco-Triumph that the magazine converted to run on alcohol and promptly tuned for top speed to the detriment of fuel consumption, which to my mind made the whole exercise daft.

That was in the back of my mind when the topic of fuel consumption came up the other day on one of the forums – a rider had just had one of the performance enhancing kits fitted to his litre-plus sportsbike, had it all dyno-tuned and set up professionally.

And when he came to ride it on the road, he found the fuel consumption had plummeted, something he clearly wasn’t expecting!

I’d come across this little hitch myself some years back, having bought my trusty GSXR750WN proudly sold with a loud system and a jet kit as a performance aid.

Having never ridden an un-tweaked model, I couldn’t tell diddly squat about whether the mods worked in terms of power output or delivery, but the bike swallowed petrol quicker than I swallow real ale. The fuel consumption hovering around the low 30s mark, way off the 40mpg figure I was expecting from magazine tests!

I’ll admit that I was somewhat spoiled by my old (and totally unmodified) 145 mph Yamaha FZ750, as it was blessed with an extremely efficient motor which would happily return fuel figures nudging 60mpg at motorway cruising speeds.

So I found the trade-off to a bike that had about 10hp and 10mph in hand over the FZ at a cost of nearly twice the fuel consumption rather less than appealing in terms of the hit on my wallet… not to mention the fact that the straight line performance was actually poorer, given that I was filling up twice as often and taking longer to get anywhere!!

So why does a bike with a performance enhancing kit actually need more fuel, when a reasonable guess would suggest that if the engine was working more efficiently you’d actually get MORE miles to the gallon after tuning?

Well, the answer is in that word ‘efficiently’.

An engine producing maximum power is NOT working at peak efficiency. Let’s explain a bit of basic chemistry.

Internal combustion engines burn fuel to create kinetic energy, mixing the fuel in the cylinder with oxygen in the air to create carbon dioxide and water.

Without doing the calculations or getting too complicated, a perfect air:fuel ratio for pure gasoline is 14.7:1 – ie, you’re mixing 14.7 parts of air to one part fuel. At this ratio, there is sufficient air in the inlet charge to completely burn all the fuel. Modern fuel has varous additives so the ratio is typically a bit down on this, around 14.1:1 to 14.3:1 according to some figures I’ve seen, but the result is the same – all the fuel injected into the cylinder will be burned leaving no excess of either fuel or oxygen.

Obviously, you don’t want too little air in the charge (or too much fuel) as some of the fuel will be unburned. Not only is it wasted, but it’s thrown out of the exhaust port and contributes to pollution, particularly particulates and toxic carbon monoxide. This is known as a rich mixture, and it burns cool and so limits power. This was definitely the case with my GSX-R, judging by the plume of black smoke on full throttle that looked like an F-15 on full boost, and the soot all over the back of the bike at the end of a long run.

On the other hand, you don’t want too much air in the charge either. Although this would effectively burn all the fuel, the combustion can run hot. Whilst in theory this could prduce more power, in practice it can melt pistons and also causes atmospheric nitrogen to oxidize to produce nitrogen oxides, another pollutant and a source of acid rain.

Now, it might sound like the perfect ratio is thus the stoichiometric ratio. In fact, until recently, due to relatively primitive inlet and exhaust design and lack of suitable materials to resist melting and expansion, combustion wasn’t complete and engines ran a bit rich.

Through the 80s, as engine and carburettor design improved, using innovations like four valve heads to improve combustion, so did fuel consumption improve too – or rather more accurately, more power was squeezed out of an engine without significant compromising fuel consumption!

However, motorcycle engines still produced more pollution than the equivalent car engines, so the emission levels were ramped down, leading to the demise of virtually all carburetted models in recent years, and the fitment of catalytic converters on most new bikes.

The latest injection technology allows very precise measuring of the air fuel ratio, with various sensors operating to keep things in tune. The one most riders will have heard of is the lambda sensor. This sits in the exhaust and measures the amount of residual oxygen (for lean mixes) or unburnt hydrocarbons (for rich mixtures) in the exhaust gas. A lambda of 1.0 means there’s a perfect stoichiometric burn, rich mixtures are less than 1.0, and lean mixtures are greater than 1.0. To keep the catalytic converter working properly, it’s important to keep the lambda figure close to 1.0.

So what’s all this got to do with fuel consumption issues after getting the bike tuned?

Well, we’re back to that word efficiency. In short, by throwing a bit more fuel into the motor than that perfect mix, we can get more power out of the engine. Typically, to get maximum power, we’ll want a ratio between 12.5:1 and 13.5:1. To quote one website offering motorcycle tuning:

“All motorcycles have an optimum air/fuel ratio for producing maximum power and torque. Factors such as emissions regulations, after market exhausts and air filters can alter your motorcycles fuel/air ratio resulting in loss of power and poor or
snatchy throttle response.

They go on to say:

“The correct air/fuel ratio number (say 12.9:1 or 13.2:1) depends upon many factors like combustion chamber design but what we want is that figure at every point in the curve (straight line).“

Dyno figures will usually demonstrate that there’s a power increase over stock, but dyno runs are done at full throttle. And
as most of our riding is done at part throttle, clearly we don’t actually need (or even want) all the power that could be delivered by opening the throttle all the way. You could get the same power increase by opening the throttle a bit more! And most of the gains at usually at peak revs.

Think about it, if you own a 600cc bike and up, how often do you have the throttle on the stop at peak revs?

Not very often I’ll suggest.

So what are the gains? Why would we want to do this? What’s the point of remapping if we can just open the throttle a bit further to accelerate at the same rate anyway?

The key point is that their “correct air/fuel ratio” is actually running rich – it’s only “correct” if you want maximum power at any particular throttle opening. On steady-ish part throttle, where we spend most of the time, the same “slug” of air-fuel mix is still doing about the same amount of work to push us the same distance at the same speed.

The problem is that if you remap your engine to run at the “correct” 12.9:1 ratio rather than stoichiometric 14.3:1 we’ll assume for modern fuel, the bottom line is you’re actually burning around 11% more fuel to do that same amount of work. If you were getting 40mpg before the tuning work, you may well find your fuel consumption is now around 35-36mpg! And if the motor’s set to run richer than that, it could be worse!

Are we just throwing fuel down the exhaust pipe? The reasons usually advanced for remapping is that it’s either to sort out the fuelling after fitting a new can, or to sort out power delivery problems that the standard mapping has failed to deal with. And dyno curves show remapping might well cure a hesitancy when opening the throttle, and if the ignition is remapped at the same time that may well smooth out noise regulation flat spots in the power curve.

You have to ask yourself would you really notice the improvement. It seems to depend on the bike, the rider and the usage.

On a race track – if you’re good enough to lap consistantly, I’d suggest you probably would notice the difference – better drive out of corners is often quoted as a benefit.

On the road – it would probably depend on your riding style and the bike. I’ve ridden a couple of the bikes supposedly cursed by flat spots and can’t say I noticed a huge issue with either of them, but another was like having a delayed on-off switch instead of a throttle and I certainly couldn’t have coped with that for long. So it’ll be a very personal decision.

But one thing we can be sure of – like most things in this world, we don’t get something for nothing.

2009 starts with a big freeze – heated kit

At 3pm, I’m sat at home pouring hot water in the bird bowl to try to keep it from freezing and give the poor critters something to drink. The ice here hasn’t begun to melt all day, and the grass and drive have still got the snow on them that fell on Monday night. And the early flowering daffs I bought from the garden centre are looking a bit of an optimistic purchase.

Blimey, it’s just like a proper winter back when I used to be a courier.

Astonishingly, I’ve actually managed to do a bit of training, though the course on the 30th of December was curtailed by the ice, I didn’t even bother to head to the carpark where I normally do slow control and emergency braking exercises. We’ll do that another day.

So, how to keep warm? Well, it seems to take a big freeze for every generation of riders to realise that heated clothing really IS the way to go.

The first problem is to understand why we get cold. The movement of cold air over our bodies carries away heat. If we cannot replace that lost heat via your own metabolism we get cold.

Unfortunately, we’re partly fooled by how we feel the cold. As we start to chill, the body shuts down circulation to the extremities. So, the first bits to feel cold are fingers and toes. But they are only the symptom, not the illness. More on that in a moment.

Nevertheless, most riders choose to treat the symptom. So we obviously try thicker gloves. I rapidly discovered that the thicker the glove, the less I could feel the controls and operate them smoothly. I’m not a fan of overgloves, fingerless mittens or even those split finger gloves we can get now.

Bar muffs are another favourite option to keep hands warm. Every winter, riders try them out and find they are mostly pretty awful as designed and for a couple of pieces of cheap plastic with bit of synthetic fur underneath I always felt that the price was silly expensive. There are some better made neoprene offerings available now, but they are still expensive.

When I was despatching I only tended to use muffs in the depths of the winter on long runs, because round town they interfered too much with the controls; it was hard to reach the indicators, and impossible to get to the kill switch, but the main problem was air pressure pushing the front brake or the clutch levers at speed. I got round this with the same obvious solution others managed – something bolted to the end of the bar that kept the muff from folding back. And the budget courier alternative was a couple of large milk containers, cunningly cut to fit over the bars.

So next stop for me in the quest to keep warm was heated gloves. When I tried inner gloves, the wires dug in the backs of my fingers and burned them, and neither they or the heated leather gloves lasted long before the wiring failed. The quality and design has certainly improved but at a price. And they still only heat the hands.

Then I tried heated grips. They worked nicely on fairly short rides, but on longer trips, the backs of my hands got cold and despite feeling toasty on one side, I could feel them going stiff. And the wiring failed on the throttle side after a couple of months, which got expensive in constant replacements.

But the big problem with gloves, mitts and grips is they only heat our hands. The really important part (and this isn’t anything new, it’s been known about since the 1930s) is the temperature of the blood in the body core. Generate a big enough chill factor, and the blood temperature in the body core starts to fall as cold blood flows back from those cold hands and feet. Once core temperature has dropped far enough, no matter how warm the hands feel, that circulation shuts down, to our hands, our feet, and also our brain! This is the earliest stage of hypothermia, which is never far away on a bike on a cold day. The warmth in the hands is mostly an illusion caused by the nerves sensing the heat.

So if we want to keep our core temperature up, what about insulation? What about layers, what about thermals, I hear you say? On a long run or when it’s really cold we can dress up in all the thermal layers we like but ultimately whether we insulate ourselves with newspaper or spend pots of cash on some fabric that’s supposedly been up Everest, the temperature gradient across our clothing will chill us. The more insulation we apply, the slower the rate of cooling, but eventually we’ll chill. That’s basic physics.

It’s like double glazing and cavity wall insulation in that cold room, yes the room will stay warm longer, but given a long enough cold spell, it’ll still get cold. It doesn’t matter if we put on thermal vests or thermal gloves, or use all the clever microfibre and wicking layers in the world, we simply don’t generate much heat sat motionless on the seat of a bike (it’s about 100w of heat at rest), and in any serious cold weather, on any other than a short run, we’ll start to chill. And the downside of the layering approach is that we can easily end up like the Michelin Man, and seriously compromise our bike control.

The solution is to increase the amount of heat we’re generating, so that we balance the amount of heat being lost. Given there’s a limit to what our own metabolism can achieve, there’s only one way to do that – turn on more bars on that electric fire – almost literally! After freezing to near-death through winter after winter, I got online in ‘95 and started reading about riders in USA and Canada and how they coped with the extreme cold – and they have some REALLY cold weather in the northern US states and in Canada. Heated clothing!

So in 1995, I finally bought a heated waistcoat. WOW! What a difference. I finally felt warm even on long runs in extreme conditions.

The layering principle now came into its own – with the heated vest over a tea shirt but under a fleece, I was toasty warm at ‘normal’ cold winter temps between 0 and 5c, and with a bit more layering survived midnight blood runs when the temps was 5 below. With heat being pumped into my body core by the vest, peripheral circulation kept moving and though cold, my fingers and toes didn’t seize up. In fact, with heated clothing, its only when the temperature drops below 5c that I feel the need for anything thicker than my summer gloves.

So what to buy?? Well, there are plenty of options of heated vests if you look around from £80-odd to approaching £200, and most of this kit is now equal quality to the US brands that I would have recommended a few years ago. Some of it allows ‘daisy-chaining’ of other heated kit like gloves and insoles for the boots, which might be useful if you suffer poor circulation already.

What about the current draw? Many riders are worried about overloading the charging system. I’ve run heated clothing for years on a variety of bikes (GPz500, NX650 Dominator, GS500, ER-5, Hornet, FZ750, GSX-R750) and not had any problem with the heated kit and the lights working at the same time. The only one that can’t cope with the 60/55w headlight AND the heated clothing at the same time is my 1982 CB250RSA which has a fairly puny 100 or 120w alternator.

The Exo2 Stormrider takes 4A at full draw… using the equation “watts = amps x volts”, so 4 x 12 = 48w. If you used one of those, you’d probably find you wouldn’t need the heated grips as well! As our body can produce around 100w, wearing one of these babies adds 50% to the amount of heat we can generate!

If you just go for the heated kidney belt (which as I’ve said is OK for short runs or cool days) you’re looking at under 1A – that’s 12w or so, only just over twice the power taken by the tail light bulb!

Are there any budget options? Well, I’ve already mentioned and reviewed the Exo2 heated kidney belt, which is under £50, here on the blog, but
the reason it’s cheap is because it has limited heating elments. There are also DIY kits where you buy the heating element and sew it into your own clothing.

Still worried that the bike can’t cope? Well, there are battery packs for some of the expensive options mentioned above, though anything which comes with a “rechargable battery pack” means something expensive you’ll be throwing in the bin in a year or two’s time when it’s hit the recharge cycle limit (think laptop battery!), plus yet another charger to lug around and lose.

Alternatively, there are budget powered waistcoats for as little as £20 which run off standard AA rechargable. Whilst I have been rather sceptical about how good such a budget waistcoat would be, I bought one from Maplin when the temps plummeted back in November and I felt my Exo2 kidney belt wasn’t quite offering enough heat for 3 or 4 hour sessions on the bike.

As it happens, the temperatures have got colder still and so I’ve worn it quite a few times over the last 2 months. The first thing to mention is battery life. The Maplin offering runs for about 2 1/2 to 3 hours continuously on a set of 6 (2×3) 2700mAh NiMH rechargables, not the 40 minutes suggested on Maplin’s own website; it was still going after a 2 hour ride from Maidstone to Oxford last month, and was just fizzling out after 3 hours on the road on the 30th. A spare set of similar capacity rechargable batteries would give you upwards of 5 hours continuous heat, which isn’t bad!

The heating element gets hot enough to feel as pleasantly warm through a tee shirt. That’s surprisingly effective if you have insulation over the top. I’ve been wearing mine over a thin sleeved tee shirt, with a microfleece over the heated bodywarmer, an EDZ pertex microshell thingie over that, my ‘Stich riding suit and an unlined nylon jacket as a wind stopper on top of that. Together with my Exo2 heated kidney belt running off the bike’s mains, I’ve have been warm enough on several courses on days when the temps haven’t got above zero.

Downsides:

1) The heating element isn’t very big – covers an area about the size of the palm of your hand on each side of the front of the chest with another around the back of the neck.

2) They’re a bit small in terms of sizing, but they’re not really intended to be worn as a top layer over several shirts and fleeces, but over something like a teeshirt.

Realistically, they’re not nearly as good as expensive heated kit but at £20 in the Maplin January sale they are a steal if all you want is something to add a bit of warmth on a short to medium commute and you can remember to recharge the batteries!

EDIT: since I wrote this, Maplin seem to have sold out but a quick Google turned up some other sellers of similar kit on sites such as

http://www.primrose-london.co.uk
http://www.greenfingers.com
http://www.heated-motorcycle-clothing.co.uk/waistcoat.html

A couple of these are 12v too, so you could wire them into the bike via a fused fly lead.

You don’t have to spend a fortune to turn the heat on.