The Rough Road Less Travelled

I am going to leave Mark Steyn alone for now and do a motorcycling blog. Anyhow, Mark is busy giving Rush Limbaugh a much needed break from spewing bile on radio.

Before I get back to great motorcycling roads, I want to explain that there are some negative aspects of great roads, such as rough pavement and absence of passing opportunities. Great roads are often somewhat forgotten by other drivers, road crews, and radar patrols. I have already done a blog partially covering how to overtake. Now I'm going to do a blog about rough roads, and with that covered I should be able to get back to blogging about some of the best roads you can go motorcycling on. In my picture I am actually illustrating a "washed out" road, not a rough road. I am going to assume there are no techniques for dealing with a washout except to stay out of it.

But there are things you can do on a rough road. Motorcycles are more uncomfortable than cars on rough roads due to several factors in their design. For one thing, the motorcycle has a more pronounced pitching motion than a car. A pitching motion can be called "bucking" or kicking felt mainly in the seat. The pitching is faster and more pronounced than a car because the motorcycle does not have a big moment of inertia. Because it is lighter than a car, but also because the mass is centralized, the bike pitches more violently.

A motorcycle is so light that merely adding a passenger can sometimes more than double the weight on the back springs. Those springs need to be strong enough to support a medium weight passenger, which makes them far too stiff for a single rider. And those mickey-mouse preload adjusters don't do anything to increase or decrease spring stiffness, all motorcycling mythology to the contrary.

So if you ride over a rough road alone on a motorcycle you may not enjoy the ride very much, unless you know how to deal with it.

If you have a rigid tail chopper, or even a bike with a rear suspension but lowered as far as possible to make you look cool, you should take the smooth road. A motorcycle designed for rough roads will be fairly tall with suspension travel of over four inches. Preferably 6 inches. Motocross bikes have even more than that, but let's not get ridiculous, you still need to reach the ground with your toes, and if you are flying 30 feet in the air on a public road, you are going too fast.

If you have a backrest, you may want to fold it out of the way, as the pitching motion of the bike will be hammering your kidneys with it.

The best type of footpegs are directly below your seat, because combined with high handlebars it is quite easy to stand up over the bumps. This is the ideal way to absorb the big ones, but make sure you do not have a huge load trapped to a junky luggage rack sticking out over the back of the bike. The rack may break and next time you look back there, it's gone. And you may never find it again.

Even if you have floorboards stuck way out in front, it is still possible to lift your ass off the seat a little. If your handlebars are high enough, a pull on the bars while simultaneously pushing with your feet may do it just enough to keep you comfortable. It's even easier to lift up if you add some foam on top of the seat (strapped on of course).

One more trick is to move your rear end forward on the seat. Surprisingly, there is actually less pitching at the front of the seat than the rear. I'm sure I could prove this in a diagram or something, but it's just so easy to do that you might as well experiment for yourself and see. Even two inches forward can make a difference.

Of course I should not have to explain weaving around the potholes and washouts, but there's not much you can do about frost heaves which tend to be the full width of the road. In a car you can concentrate on the road way up ahead, but on a motorcycle you should always pay partial attention to the surface of the road 10 meters in front.