Jerrycan
Race Dog
We have a few thousand years of riding experience accumulated on this forum considering the membership count. Shall we condense the survival knowledge in one thread for newcomers to biking and the more experienced riders to use as a guide and save some lives?
I have made a point of asking anybody I came into contact with who was in a bike accident, "what happened". Slaved many years as a press photographer and accumulated quite a bit of info as to what caused bike accidents and what course of action might have prevented the mishap we all dread. Example:most gruesome of these that I witnessed was an unknowing biker who stopped at a railway crossing in VTH Pretoria with a plumber's bakkie behind him, those days plumbers used 1" galvanised steel pipes, the bakkie screeched to a halt behind the oke on his XT and a pipe slid loose, sosatie'd the oke on the bike. The newspaper heading said: "Freak accident, biker impaled by water pipe." It was a freak accident until people read about it and knew it could happen. That info was added to my mental data bank and ever since, when I stop I check what's happening behind me and what is ON TOP of what stops behind me. I have even replaced my shiny new TDub mirrors with XT mirrors with longer stems to be able to see right behind me, paranoia? Maybe not, maybe just wisdom.
We all had "close shaves" on bikes, some not close enough, these are things we check/are aware of because of EXPERIENCE. If we could logically put this experience together in one thread, all Dawgs, experienced and newbies could gain from it, we could SAVE LIVES, including our own.
The most dangerous man is a man who makes himself believe he knows all, so let's humble ourselves for a while and learn from each other.
A thread like this will inevitably invite endless arguments, to argue points due to superior experience, I'll start a parralel thread, keep this one consise and clean else no newbie would make the effort to wade through the wise cracks to get to the info.
Pick your brains, we do a thousand things instinctively to keep alive on bikes, try to think in terms of someone getting on a bike for the first time and share that knowledge.
Disclaimer: Use the info on this thread at your own risk and with common sense, take from it what makes sense to you and what you feel comfortable with.
I have made a point of asking anybody I came into contact with who was in a bike accident, "what happened". Slaved many years as a press photographer and accumulated quite a bit of info as to what caused bike accidents and what course of action might have prevented the mishap we all dread. Example:most gruesome of these that I witnessed was an unknowing biker who stopped at a railway crossing in VTH Pretoria with a plumber's bakkie behind him, those days plumbers used 1" galvanised steel pipes, the bakkie screeched to a halt behind the oke on his XT and a pipe slid loose, sosatie'd the oke on the bike. The newspaper heading said: "Freak accident, biker impaled by water pipe." It was a freak accident until people read about it and knew it could happen. That info was added to my mental data bank and ever since, when I stop I check what's happening behind me and what is ON TOP of what stops behind me. I have even replaced my shiny new TDub mirrors with XT mirrors with longer stems to be able to see right behind me, paranoia? Maybe not, maybe just wisdom.
We all had "close shaves" on bikes, some not close enough, these are things we check/are aware of because of EXPERIENCE. If we could logically put this experience together in one thread, all Dawgs, experienced and newbies could gain from it, we could SAVE LIVES, including our own.
The most dangerous man is a man who makes himself believe he knows all, so let's humble ourselves for a while and learn from each other.
A thread like this will inevitably invite endless arguments, to argue points due to superior experience, I'll start a parralel thread, keep this one consise and clean else no newbie would make the effort to wade through the wise cracks to get to the info.
Pick your brains, we do a thousand things instinctively to keep alive on bikes, try to think in terms of someone getting on a bike for the first time and share that knowledge.
Disclaimer: Use the info on this thread at your own risk and with common sense, take from it what makes sense to you and what you feel comfortable with.
