Authors: Sonny Barger
Choppers and bobbers may look cool, but they’re better to look at than they are to ride. Some people claim that their custom bikes are reliable, but I’ve been riding a long time with a lot of people, many of whom ride choppers and bobbers, and in my experience these types of bikes are anything but reliable. They’re homemade bikes, and as such they’re prone to all sorts of oddball failures that you never encounter on a well-engineered, mass-produced motorcycle.
The welds on homemade gas and oil tanks seldom seem to stand up to the constant shaking of V-twin engines, and custom bikes spring leaks with such regularity that you can almost count on this happening if you ride any farther than the local bar or café. Their electrical systems are usually homemade, too, and unless the guy who did the wiring was a certified genius, these bikes are more likely to short out and leave you stranded than they are to run reliably. In Arizona during April (when we have our annual bike week), almost every bike you see broken down on the side of the road is a custom that someone thought was reliable enough to ride a lot of miles. They thought wrong.
Even if these bikes were reliable enough to use for everyday transportation, they’re too uncomfortable to ride for more than half-hour to forty-five-minute stretches. The riding position is designed to make you look cool rather than to make you comfortable. As a result, homemade bikes place you in the worst possible riding position for long days in the saddle. After just a few hours, parts of you that you didn’t even know you had will hurt. Your joints will hurt, your internal organs will hurt, and your muscles will feel like you’ve just spent an afternoon being pummeled by a boxer. Some people are into this, but then some people are into pouring hot wax on their privates. To each his own, I suppose, but pain doesn’t do much for me.
Choppers are more uncomfortable than bobbers because a proper bobber will put you in a slight forward lean, taking a little pressure off your lower back. It will handle better, too, because a bobber doesn’t have the long, kicked-out fork that a chopper has. Because of its traditionally shorter fork and relatively conservative rake, a bobber turns a lot tighter than does a long chopper. Even so, a bobber is still a homemade bike and as likely to suffer breakdowns and failures as any other homemade bike. Unless you’re a skilled mechanic and have the patience to spend as much time working on your bike as you do riding it, I’d leave the custom bobbers and choppers to the Hollywood types who can afford to have a mechanic following them around with a complete set of tools and a spare bike.
MANAGING YOUR MACHINE
T
HE TYPE OF BIKE
you choose for your first motorcycle could determine how well you’re ever going to learn to ride. If you start out on a motorcycle that doesn’t allow you to completely control it, it will control you. You’ll develop bad habits for the rest of your riding career. Take, for example, my habit of putting a motorcycle in neutral when I come to a stop, even though I know this is an unsafe practice. I developed this habit early on and I can’t shake it. If you develop enough of these bad habits when you first start riding, you won’t control your own motorcycle. Instead, you’ll be at its mercy.
The most important thing to look for in your first motorcycle is manageability. The biggest mistake people make when buying their first bike is to purchase a bike that’s physically too big or too powerful for them to manage. Riding well is all about being in control of your machine, and when you start out with too much motorcycle, you’ll never master it.
You’ll want to get a ride that is small enough to control, but picking a first bike isn’t as simple as getting the smallest motorcycle you can find. When I traded my first real bike, the 45-cubic-inch Indian Scout I mentioned earlier, for a Harley, I wanted to get a 45-cubic-inch Harley, but a friend talked me into getting a larger 61-cubic-inch Harley. It took a little practice to get used to the bigger bike, but after a few rides, when I was comfortable with it, I was thankful I hadn’t gotten the smaller machine.
You shouldn’t get a 1,000-pound bagger or a 1400-cc crotch rocket that can hit 200 miles per hour, but you also won’t want an underpowered machine that isn’t capable of keeping up with traffic or a motorcycle that’s physically too small for you. You’ll want a bike that is small enough for you to control, but one that is big enough for you to ride comfortably and has enough power so that you won’t get bored with it too soon.
How small a motorcycle you need depends on how big you are. I have a friend named Tiny who’s one big motorcycle rider. What constitutes a small motorcycle for him is a whole lot different from what constitutes a small motorcycle for a woman who stands five feet tall and weighs eighty pounds soaking wet.
When I started riding, there weren’t a lot of options for beginner motorcycles. If you had a lot of money, you bought a Mustang, which was a very cool little minibike styled to look like a full-sized motorcycle. There were a few other options for a kid with too much money, but not many. Back then Harley made some small bikes based on a 125-cc two-stroke engine from German maker DKW. Harley got the tooling for that engine as part of Germany’s wartime reparation. In 1948 Harley put the little two-stroke engine into the Model S, a fun little bike with a girder-type front suspension, rigid rear, and a little “peanut” tank that later turned up on the XLCH Sportster. A lot of kids must have had the $325 that Harley charged for the Model S because the company sold more than ten thousand of the little two-stroke machines.
If you didn’t have a lot of money, you did what I did and bought a Cushman scooter. I was just a kid, about thirteen or fourteen years old, when I got my Cushman. At that time you could get a Cushman for $25 to $50. That was a lot of money for a kid like me, making just $7 per week working at a part-time job. I worked a lot of hours to earn the $25 I needed to buy the Cushman, but I didn’t really have a choice because I knew I had to ride, even in my early teens.
HOW SMALL IS TOO SMALL?
G
ENERALLY SPEAKING, YOU SHOULD
probably consider buying a 400-cc or larger motorcycle, even as your first bike. Some of the Japanese companies make street-legal motorcycles that are as small as 125 cc, but even if these bikes are capable of hitting a safe freeway speed, they’ll likely be running at or near redline to do so. A 250-cc bike might hit 70 or even 80 miles per hour, but at that speed the engine will be revving so high that running at freeway speeds for an extended period will quickly wear out both the rider and the bike. That same bike might cruise comfortably at 60 miles per hour and be able to hold that speed all day long, but consider that traffic on metropolitan freeways often moves at 70 or 75 miles per hour, even when the posted limit is 55 or 65.
Although it might be technically illegal to ride at speeds five to ten miles per hour higher than the posted speed limit, it can be dangerous not to do so. Study after study has shown that what causes accidents is not speed itself, but rather disparities in speed. If you are moving at a different speed from the other vehicles on the road, whether you are going faster or slower, you are at much greater risk of having an accident than if you travel at the same speed as the other traffic, within reason. It might seem obvious that if you ride much faster than the other vehicles on the road you are at greater risk, but a less obvious fact is that you are at a much greater risk if you ride slower than other vehicles.
Think of traffic as a flowing stream of water. If the water is flowing unimpeded, its movement is almost invisible, but if you put an impediment like a rock or log in the stream, the moving water starts swirling in all kinds of chaotic directions. When you ride slower than the surrounding traffic is moving, you become that impediment, and the drivers swerving around you will continuously create potentially life-threatening situations for the duration of the trip.
RISING FATALITIES
I
N RECENT YEARS, UNFORTUNATELY,
there’s been a tremendous increase in the number of motorcycle fatalities. In 2008 motorcycle fatalities increased for the eleventh year in a row. A lot of reasons account for this, notably the fact that in 2008 motorcycle registrations also increased for the eleventh year in a row. More motorcycles on the road mean more accidents. But that’s not the whole story.
I blame at least part of the increase in motorcycle fatalities to the rise in cell-phone use. Recent studies have shown that drivers yapping on their cell phones are impaired even more than they would be if they were drunk. This means bikers have to concentrate even harder to prevent accidents. I always tell new riders, “It doesn’t matter who is at fault in a collision with a car because you are the one who will get hurt.”
Sometimes preventing accidents is impossible, but some ways of preventing wrecks are in our control. For example, you always should avoid riding while drinking alcohol; even if you’ve just had a beer or two and don’t feel like you have a buzz, your reaction times are slowed down enough to put you in danger. We can control whether or not we ride at the same speed as traffic, at least if our bikes are fast enough to keep up with the rest of the vehicles on the road. How fast that is depends on the road. If you live in a western state with lots of open space, traffic moves a lot faster than it does in the congested and heavily patrolled urban areas in the East. If you live in New Jersey or New York City, you might never need to go more than 70 miles per hour, but if you live in Aspen, Colorado, you may find traffic moving at 90 miles per hour on the freeway into Denver.
If you never leave a congested urban area and never ride on a freeway, you might be able to get by with a 250, but then you won’t have the option of leaving town or using the freeway when you need to, and sooner or later that will happen. Even a 400- or a 450-cc motorcycle might be too small to be a practical bike for most people. Your best bet is to get a bike that’s at least 500 cc to 650 cc to start. If you’re a larger person, you might even consider something as big as a 1200 or 1300 for your first bike.
SPECIFIC TYPES OF MOTORCYCLES
A
S I MENTIONED EARLIER,
motorcycles have evolved into highly specialized machines. Instead of that one BSA Gold Star that could do everything, we now have a wide variety of styles of motorcycles from which to choose, each one focused on doing just one thing well. The trick is to decide what you need your bike to do and select the type that best meets your needs.
The main types of street-legal motorcycles include the following:
The first specialized motorcycles were purpose-built race bikes. Companies like Harley-Davidson and Indian engineered bikes purely for racing purposes even before World War I, but since race bikes have always been non-street-legal machines, we won’t go into them here. Besides, purebred racing bikes weren’t available to the general public then, and they’re still hard to find (and very expensive).
Dual Sports
Off-road motorcycles were the first specialized bikes that were widely available. These began to show up in the 1960s. At first they were just street bikes with long-travel suspension and high pipes, but they became increasingly specialized and competition ready. Today you can buy a bike that’s ready to go motocross racing right off the showroom floor. Again, these were (and are) purely racing machines, but as they grew in popularity, manufacturers began to offer dual-purpose motorcycles that had some of the characteristics of these off-road racers in street-legal packages. Back when they first appeared, these were called “enduros,” named after a type of mild off-road racing that was popular at the time. Today these are commonly called “dual sports.”
Dual sports are usually dirt bikes that have been modified with lighting and emissions equipment that make them street legal. While dual sports are heavier than their dirt-only counterparts because of their additional equipment, they retain varying degrees of off-road capabilities. The most extreme examples—like the dual sports from KTM, Husqvarna, and some of the other European manufacturers—really are dirt bikes with headlights and oversized mufflers. They retain most of the off-road capabilities of their dirt-bike brethren.
Part of the reason dirt bikes perform well on dirt is because they have extremely long travel suspensions. A street-bike suspension only has to face potholes and the occasional road debris; in the worst instances, a street-bike shock or fork seldom has to compress more than a few inches. Dirt bikes have to cope with much greater impacts. Motocross and supercross racing has evolved into an extended series of high jumps, with the bikes flying twenty to thirty feet in the air; their shocks and forks compress a foot or more when the bikes land, so they need a lot more travel.
The extreme dual sports, the ones that are practically ready for off-road racing straight off the dealer floors, also have long-travel suspensions. This is great if you plan to do double and triple jumps with your motorcycle, but the drawback is that it makes the bikes ridiculously tall. Try climbing up on a KTM dual sport in a showroom sometime; just make sure you have someone beside you to catch you if you fall, because you’ll be lucky if even the tips of your toes touch the showroom floor.
The extreme dual sports also have many of the same other drawbacks as dirt bikes, right down to the vinyl-covered fender protectors that pass for seats. Since dirt-bike racers usually stand when they ride, the seat, such as it is, exists mainly as a pad to keep the rider from bumping his or her ass on the fender. It was never designed as a place to sit. These dirt-bikes-with-lights are okay if you plan to do serious off-road riding, but they aren’t great choices for practical street bikes.
The extreme examples aren’t very useful for anyone but an off-road racer who has to ride his or her bike from trail to trail on public roads, but the bulk of dual-sport machines available today do make pretty good choices for first bikes, provided your legs are long enough to ride them comfortably—although they aren’t as tall as the extreme versions, they’re still tall enough to pose a problem for a lot of riders. Just throwing a leg over one can be a challenge if your inseam is less than thirty-two inches. Sitting that high gives you a commanding view of traffic, but if the seat is so high that you can’t hold up the bike securely at a stoplight, the height can become a safety issue. I once had a vertically challenged rider fall onto me when he dropped his tall dual sport at a stoplight. He couldn’t get his foot down securely and went tumbling over, almost taking me with him.