If you ever read your bike or car manual you will note that is does advise you to regularly check your tire pressure, especially before a long trip. Like most people this is something I rarely remember to do, but now I wish I had.

My motorcycle had been sitting in the garage for a couple of months since I had last used it, so I thought it was time to take it out for a ride. The first thing I noticed was how hard it was to push it out of the garage, which I thought was due to the fact that pushing my bike about was the only exercise my poor legs got, so were now out of practice. Over the next few weeks there were other niggling things I noticed such as cornering and roundabouts being a little hard to handle and leaning the bike too far was starting to feel very uncomfortable, which I put down to having become used to driving a car the past months and not using my bike, yes believe it or not at almost 40 years old I only recently got my car license, but despite all the avoidance for all these the years I am now quite happy to be warm and dry in my car and not out on my bike most of the time :-)

Anyway while standing behind my bike one day I noticed that the rear tire looked a little flat, which again is in the manual, if you leave your bike unused for any length off time, this will happen and you are not supposed to leave it on the stand for long periods of time.

So I popped down to the garage to put some air in my tires, but what a difference it made to the bike performance. After I have increased both tires to the correct pressure it was like having a new bike. suddenly it was easy to manuvere again, gliding back and forwards with little effort, handling was also improved dramatically, with corners and roundabouts suddenly a synch again, and I was able to lean without feeling like I might lose the bike. So it seems my conversion to a car driver hadn't made me lose my bike riding skills at all, it was just down to the tires, and as well as spoiling the enjoyment of riding, it was also clealry quite dangerous as the ability to manuvere and handle the bike was dramatically decreased. While this situation is obviously a lot more drastic on 2 wheels, the same obviously must be true for your car as well, it also increases your fuel comsumption and wears your tires out quicker too, so the moral of the story, RTFM and REGULALRY CHECK YOUR TIRE PRESSURE.

The real bummer is that I now think this was the cause of my problems with my old Vulcan 1600 which caused me to sell me as I thought it was simply too big for my first bike.

Views: 954