I wish you wouldn’t put words in my mouth. I am not saying that I am above getting in a wreck. All I am saying is that safety is the rider’s responsibility. I have had close calls and I have had a wreck. I didn’t, however, blame my pipes for them. I learned from these incidents. I am not suggesting that I am more skilled than anyone else. I am just saying that I take responsibility for my own safety. I don’t blame others for my decision to ride a motorcycle instead of driving a car. I choose to take that risk. I choose to operate a motorcycle legally. If I ever need loud pipes to ensure my safety, I too will stop riding.
I’m pretty much a paranoid rider and figure everyone is out to get me, but accidents still happen. My last crash came while going to work one morning on my Harley dresser. Another moron pulled out, whipped over in front the attorney who was driving a near new BMW in front of me, and slammed on the brakes since he could not make a left in front of oncoming traffic.
The BMW locked up and so did my Harley, but since it was raining at the time the HD went down on the crashbar, the footboard folded up on my boot, and off I went. Flat on my back and being dragged by the left foot. Hit the BMW, I came loose, and the bike cartwheeled into the next lane where it took out the rear quarter panel on a lady’s Lumina.
The cops came, and since I was hurtin’ bad but not bleeding, I chose to not go to the hospital. I vaguely remember some guy pulling up and asking the attorney in the BMW I hit if HE was ok. It hit me a few minutes later that this was the guy who caused the entire accident but he was gone by then and I had no tag number to trace him with. If I had been thinking straight at the moment…
This fool pulled over in front of a BMW 740 car with its headlights on in broad daylight so why think that this same guy would pay attention to motorcycle lighting, loud mufflers, orange vest, or a pennant on a 10 foot pole.
Forgive me for asking, but the way you describe this collision leads me to ask. Could you have been tailgating the BMW?
No. I was doing about 50 and was about 7-8 car lengths behind the guy. I don’t tailgate with either the bike or a car.
The roads were wet and when the bike went down the only contact points were the chrome rails around the saddlebags and a chrome ball on a crash bar mounted foot peg.
The protruding chrome ball is what did it. Wet pavement and a heavy bike combined with that tiny contact patch allowed the bike to slide so easily. If the BMW had not been there that bike would have been sliding for a city block. The remaining chrome ball was removed to prevent any future problems.
The only real bike damage came when it hit the BMW and Lumina in the next lane. The original slide barely scuffed the saddlebag rails and did not even tweak the crash bars at all. The bike could almost be rocked on that crash bar ball so that shows just how precarious it was.
I thought when I first went down that I would slide to a stop in time but the bike slid like a hockey puck on oily glass.
I only asked, not to place blame, but to ask if there is anything that could have been done to prevent the collision from happening. It sounds to me like 7-8 car lengths wasn’t enough on wet roads. If you had adjusted your following distance based on conditions, it may not have been necessary to lock the breaks. You might have been confortable applying them more gently.
Did the BMW hit the car in front of it that had recklessly pulled out?
Following distance is supposed to be increased based on conditions and while 7-8 car lengths may have been enough in normal conditions, it sounds to me like it wasn’t enough under these conditions.
Ironically, the wreck that I had happened because I too locked up my rear brake. At first I blamed the wet roads, but in the end, it was I who locked the rear brake and caused the wreck. It was hard for me to take responsibility, but if I was going to get back on the bike, I needed to learn from this experience.
No, the BMW did not hit the guy who caused the wreck. The guy who caused it had pulled out, swerved over in front of the BMW in an attempt to make a left in front of traffic, and decided he could not make it. He slammed on the brakes which caused the BMW to lock his up. The guy who started this heard the BMW’s squealing tires and went ahead and turned in front of traffic which almost caused him to get hit.
It appears that sometime later he must have figured he did something because he obviously circled back around through the now present traffic jam to inquire if the BMW guy was ok.
In normal circumstances the bike would have stopped in plenty of time even on wet pavement. The ball on the crash bar is something I had never considered as being a potential problem. When the bike went down on that ball the bike actually sped up; very noticeably. I suppose it would be similar to walking slowly on ice and having your feet go out from under you.
Actually, I noticed the ball causing the problem while I was being dragged by my left boot. Kind of an odd thing to think about when you pretty much figure you’re going to smack someone, but I watched that ball skidding for a couple or three seconds and thinking to myself, “Those things have got to go.” The one that was not ground down was also removed and thrown away.
The funniest one I ever did was (partially) due to equipment failure. I was riding a BMW with a bad master cylinder (unknown to me) that kept tightening up the front brake as it heated up. I thought I was losing power so I pulled off the road into a parking lot. Unfortunately, there was a bunch of sand on the parking lot entrance, so as soon as I turned in, the front wheel locked and the bike squirted out from under me. I looked pretty silly laying on my back on the side of the road.
True in my area. 80% of bikes going by are illegally loud, and about 99% of them are HD’s. About 0.1% of cars going by are anywhere near as loud. On weekends, we are talking hundreds of bikes a day. One or two a day I wouldn’t mind. It would break the monotony of our sleepy little village, but by the hundreds it is intolerable. My house is probably worth half what I paid for it, in real dollars, thanks to the scum riding HD’s here. The moronic cops do nothing, presumably because they are afraid of ticketing some VIP.
So I have been fantasizing about running a neck-high wire across the street to pull up on when one of these guys is on a run, but then who wants to look at a severed head lying in the street? Yuck. So I am trying to think of something just to give them something to think about but no real chance of harm. I wonder what a 3 ft wide swath of vaseline across the road would do, since they are always hard on the throttle coming away from the stop-light down the street? It should be entertaining to find out. Nobody is likely to get hurt since they are only doing about 45 when they hit my place. Anyone got any better ideas?
I don’t know any state or insurance company that WOULDN’T find you at fault. You were the one in the rear and you are suppose to keep the PROPER distance behind the car in front of you…Proper distance changes depending on conditions…like rain. You weren’t responsible for the accident…just any damage you caused to the car you hit and all damage to your bike.
With all due respect, if the BMW was able to stop without hitting the car in front of it, you should have been able to stop in time if you had left the right amount of space in front of you. What if the BMW had hit his brakes for some other reason, like a dog running out in the street in front of him? Would you blame the dog for causing the accident? I am afraid it doesn’t work that way. The BMW driver’s reason for stopping, whether it was because someone pulling out, or amy other reason, is immaterial. Any time you hit a car from behind, unless it pulled out in front of you, you are at fault. Even if you are sitting at a red light and you are pushed from a rear end collision into the car in front of you, you are at fault. Your insurance company will be the one to pay for the damage to the car in front of you. in this case your insurance agent will tell you that you should have left more room between you and the car in front of you. Let’s be fair, the ball didn’t operate your motorcycle, you did. Laying down a motorcycle isn’t a way to avoid a wreck. Laying down a motorcycle is a wreck, even if you don’t collide with anything afterwards. To be fair, you might have made the right decision to lay it down. I don’t know. I also don’t know who is really liable in the incident you described. Based on how you have described it though, it sounds to me like it was preventable. The wreck that I had definitely could have been prevented too. I don’t claim to be perfect.
There’s a difference between the BMW and me. The BMW had all 4 tires locked so the rubber was meeting the pavement. With the bike, only metal (and very little of it) was meeting the asphalt.
The light rain had only been going on for about 20 minutes and I did NOT lay the bike down on purpose. I hit the brakes and it instantly skidded sideways and went down on me.
It was out of my control at that point and I was just along for the ride since my foot would not come loose and I was also running 10 MPH UNDER the speed limit at the time.
The analogy I would use would be throwing a tire sideways across the parking lot and doing the same thing with a set of barbells. Which one is going to go further? It’s not the tire.
The cops did cite me for “too fast for conditions” (at 10 MPH under when both the BMW and myself were being passed by other people?) and even the attorney in the BMW I hit told the officer at the scene it was a total crock and I was not to blame.
I also showed up for court and those charges were tossed inside of 90 seconds. The judge also gave the city attorney who was going to prosecute this charge against me and the officer who wrote the ticket a pretty severe tongue lashing after the charges were dismissed; much to my great amusement.
When the city attorney started protesting the judge threatened to hold him in contempt if he did not shut up. Loved it!
Congrats on getting the ticket thrown out. In Florida or Georgia the ticket would have been for following too closely, not traveling too fast, and it wouldn’t have been as easily dismissed.
I agree. Harley riders with loud pipes want to be heard and seen. “I want Attention”.
Not a pleasant sound.
First of all–and I’m not defending loud pipes, as you’ll soon see–what you folks are calling “Harleys” are in fact, yes, Harleys, but a lot of copycat brands as well, including Polaris, Honda, Kawasaki, Yamaha, Suzuki and others. I am a long-time Harley rider and I am still fooled by the lookalikes until I get up close. These other manufacturers do make bikes that don’t look at all like a Harley, but some of their models are nothing less than clones. All of these bikes are purchased new with stock pipes that are street legal (i.e. pretty quiet). I only offer this bit of semi-useless information to make it clear that this is not just a “Harley” problem. Harley riders are slowly chipping away at the once-common image that we’re all a bunch of degenerate sociopaths, so this is my attempt to show the world that riders of other brands can uncivilized clods too. Come to think of it, lots of people are uncivilized clods. The list of clod types is way, way too long to get started here. In riding circles, the common mantra is “Loud Pipes Save Lives”. As the thinking goes, even if you can’t be seen, you’ve got one more chance to cheat death by being heard. I think there is some small amount of validity to this, but it’s become too much of a defacto “truth”. If you say or hear something so many times, you don’t even question it anymore. Kind of like Democrats believing that Hillary could make a good President (keep it light, my guys are all a bunch of bums too)–it never hurts to step back and think things through from time to time. As for the loud pipes, if most riders truly thought about it, they’d admit that they just liked the sound of the loud pipes. Similar to the moron 8 cars back with the sound system that you can hear (and feel) even though the windows on both cars are rolled up, some people really like loud stuff. What they don’t realize is how much they are damaging their own hearing, and how uncool they really are to the rest of us. Hordes of scantily dressed and nubile young women are NOT gathered curbside, cat-scratching for first rights with the noisy lunkhead. It’s just not happening. But I’ll also tell you this, until EVERYONE gets civil, some riders are going to persist with the loud pipes. Otherwise responsible riders get pretty angry with the utterly idiotic antics of drivers who will cut them off, or who will not yeild the right-of-way, or who seemingly don’t care if the rider returns in one piece to his/her family that night. I have a loving wife, two sweet dogs, and I own a business with 3 employees whose livlihood depends on my health and well-being. What’s wrong with the @#$&^%! who jackrabbits a left turn across my path of travel just so said @#$&^%! gets to the mall 3 seconds faster? I think, rightly or wrongly, that some biker behavior, including his/her use of loud pipes amounts to nothing more than a rebelious response to certain drivers who view biker’s lives as optional. Again, I’m trying to explain a certain mindset, not defend it. I ride with stock pipes (mufflers) and am as offended as anyone else by the obnoxiousness of after-market mufflers, or no mufflers at all. To sum it up, loud pipes are used to save lives (as that brand of thinking goes), because they sound cool (again, as that brand of thinking goes), and as a way of telling all drivers where they can go simply because of the few car-driving jerks who have nearly killed them. None of it’s right, but then there’s a lot of stupidity to go around.
The only thing I object to is that you call foreign-made cruisers “clones.” I prefer the term “metric cruiser.” My Honda Shadow isn’t a clone of a Harley. It has a smooth-running liquid-cooled 52 degree v-twin engine with a shaft drive that only resembles a Harley in appearance from far away. For the most part, Harley’s cruisers are air-cooled 45 degree v-twins that are belt driven and they don’t run very smooth, especially at idle. There are distinctive differences. If the metric cruisers were nothing more than Harley clones, I would have bought a Harley. The invention of the Honda Shadow in the 1980s helped inspire Harley to get its act together, but if you ride a Harley and a Shadow, you will know that they are very different bikes.
Yeah, I kinda agree with you on my “clone” comment. I was trying to say that loud, aftermarket pipes can be found on all brands, not just Harleys, and that especially to the uninitiated, a lot of bikes look like Harleys. And as for Shadows appearing like Harleys only from far away, maybe it’s just my 53 year old eyes, but I’m fooled all the time. I’ve got to believe that non-riders see a bike that looks like a Harley and they think it is one. But my main point is that any bike can be made to be horribly loud, and that I think it’s unnecessary and does nothing to promote civility, but that many drivers of automobiles do nothing to promote civility either. Ride Safe.
I don’t agree that loud pipes save lives and have been riding regularly since the 1960s with quiet pipes about 99% of that time.
One reason that loud pipes are not effective is that you need the noise in front of you where things are more likely to happen. The noise is mostly behind you.
The most dangerous situation to me is an oncoming vehicle about to turn left into my path. In a situation such as that, it is not prudent to accelerate in order to make noise and you simply do not have time to pull in the clutch so you can goose the throttle for noise. Instead, you will release the throttle to slow while keeping a suspicious eye on the potential left turner and your exhaust will be relatively quiet at that time.
Gold Wing and BMW people keep their bikes quiet and they do not seem to have a problem with safety.
I have ridden since before the manditory daytime headlight on requirement in my state so I have ridden both ways. That is very effective in city traffic; I would not ride again with the headlight off in the city.
I respectfully disagree that BMW riders don’t have a problem with safety. I sold my BMW some years back but have had more close calls on that BMW than I have any other bike I’ve owned, and most of it not related to noise levels.
One evening about sundown (yes, lights on already) I was beside a guy in a pickup (varying his speed) on the Interstate. After being pretty much nose to nose for a couple of miles this jerk looks over and starts slowly changing lanes right on top of me.
This led to me getting somewhat (very) irate and kicking the driver’s door with my boot. This woke the moron out of his stupor and he veered back the other way.
Maybe I should have had loud pipes rather than the .380 semi-auto under the seat.
Yeah, I had that happen too with my R60/5 on a freeway when a lady decided to change lanes into my space. A blast from my Fiamms took care of that. She could not have gotten back into her lane any faster than she did. I wanted that to happen again another time, it was such a tickle, but it never did.
I had a dental appointment one morning and was late going into work on my BMW. The Interstate in this area was strangely deserted except for a guy in a Nissan pickup with a camper shell moseying by me in the fast lane I was doing about 65 and still wearing the Novocaine off and this guy goes by about 70 with what I assumed was his wife.
They’re both looking at the bike as they go by and my thought was the people were BM lovers. A minute later the drivers arm comes out of the window and he’s waving frantically. I had no idea what was wrong and glanced down to see if something was falling off the bike. I glanced back up and the guy makes a right turn from the inside lane right in front of me to hit the offramp.
I locked the brakes, skidded, and missed the back of his truck by about 7 or 8 feet. Heart in throat at first and I look back and this guy is yelling out the window; “I’m sorry!”
(Not as sorry as you’re going to be when I get turned around here.)
Not a soul for a half mile in front of or behind us and he pulls this stunt. Needless to say, I was HOT, and ran the BMW through the weeds to circle back and catch this clown. By the time I got past the fences and trees he was gone; and very lucky for him because I was very prepared to pay a misdemeanor fine for assault and battery.
Hopefully my actions scared some sense into this idiot. I saw his wife’s face as they crossed the overpass and she looked to be terror stricken by my coming after them since I was giving them the one-finger salute and seriously questioning their ancestry. Morons in capital letters.