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Hi there fellow biker or soon to be biker. And welcome to “The Motorcycle Podcast“. My name is Patrik and I´m your humble host. Like I said in the introduction episode of The Motorcycle Podcast – this is a podcast by bikers for bikers giving you all the tips and tricks that they don´t teach you at the driving school and the tricks that you normally have to learn the hard way. In this podcast you will learn these tricks BEFORE you learn them the hard way and loose loads of money or even your own life. As we all know, motorcycling IS utterly dangerous and the margins couldn´t possibly be smaller. A simple mistake can have fatal consequences on you, your bike or people around you.
And that´s the mission of this podcast. To make bikers better bikers one little step at a time. To share tips and tricks between bikers so that we can all live to ride another day. No matter if you´ve been riding for 40 years or for 6 months or never – we can all become better riders because motorcycling is a continuous learning process. To be honest, experience is great but just because you´ve got 40 years of riding motorcycles under your belt doesn´t necessarily mean that you´re a good rider or even a better rider than a well educated driver who has been riding for 5 years and continuously has been improving his or her riding technique. So for that reason, let´s get educated. Let´s become educated and skilled riders!
Today´s tip comes from David from London UK and he sent me this tip to The Motorcycle Podcast on Instagram, which you of course should go and follow if you like. David writes like this:
“Hi Patrik,
I’m thrilled about your initiative to share knowledge in the biking community. I completely agree with what you said about how we can all become better bikers, and there are countless small tricks you learn the hard way that can sometimes make all the difference.
Now, let me share my straightforward yet incredibly useful tip!
“Make it a habit to turn off your motorcycle using the kickstand.”
You might be wondering why. Well, there are several reasons, actually. I’ve noticed that, for some reason, many people prefer putting their motorcycles in neutral when parking. Turning off your motorcycle with the kickstand means that you’re in gear. If you’re in gear, the motorcycle can’t roll forward or backward by itself, thanks to the law of gravity. There might be situations where you have to park your motorcycle on a downhill slope, and in these cases, it’s always a good idea to park your motorcycle with the kickstand and a gear engaged. However, if you’re not accustomed to turning off your motorcycle using the kickstand, or if you’re not used to driving and parking on hills, you might forget to do it when needed.
That’s my two cents, Patrik. Thanks for having me on the show, and good luck, mate!
/David”
Thank´s a lot David for taking your time to write to The Motorcycle Podcast and thanks for sharing your simple but yet very good motorcycle tip. And I think this exact advice is such a good example on why I´m doing this podcast and how such a simple thing can have a huge impact on the motorcycle world. I know this because this exact thing has happened to me once and it can quickly become a very very expensive experience.
By the time I had a yellow Suzuki GSX 600F. It was my second bike and I had so much fun with it. I took it all around the country and once I planned a long trip to the north. I took off and made a stop on the way to see a friend in the capital. She was living in an apartment building on a small hill and right outside the house there was a small parking for about 6-8 cars. I had a little incident (or should I say accident) when looking for a good parking spot for my precious little bumble bee that we don´t need to talk about now but surely will come back to later in this podcast, so for that reason I was kind of high on adrenaline when I finally found a place to park it. Sweaty and still high on adrenaline I just wanted to get off the bike and go inside and forget about the incident. So i jumped off the motorcycle and started to take off my motorcycle jacket and helmet and such. I walked around on this very small parking lot for about 5 seconds trying to cool down a bit and when I turned back to my motorcycle again, it was gone. It was gone!
I thought I had gone insane. It was there 5 seconds ago. Am I so high on adrenaline that my eyes are not working properly or what? Where is the damn bike? A 200 kilo bike doesn´t disappear just like that. Well it turned out it actually did disappear. At least from the parking lot. Because, and I didn´t notice, but I had parked her in a slight downward slope that was just enough for the bike to start rolling by itself and end up in the slope two meters down.
I felt so embarrassed and I hated myself and I felt so sorry for the bike that was in such a good condition before I recklessly threw her off the cliff and into the wild. At this point my friend came out and wondered what I was doing. She told me she thought I would come by motorcycle and I said I did and that it´s in the ditch two meters down. She looked at me like I was some sort of idiot and it was clear she didn´t believe me. Probably because I was too tired to be upset and angry about the whole failure. I was just disappointed in myself. And sad. But I mean, why would I come here with my frickin motorcycle helmet and all the gear on if I didn´t come with the motorcycle?
I was pretty sure that my yellow beautiful motorcycle would be scratched as hell and broken in ways that I didn´t even could imagine motorcycles could break. I saw rear view mirrors being shattered and cracked into pieces, I saw the handlebar and the levers being ripped apart and I saw the front light being smashed and all the plastics looking like a tiger had swung his paw and sharp claws all over it. For a second I was thinking about just leaving the bike where it was. I just couldn’t care less about it. But after a few minutes of cool down I changed my mind and became more problem solving oriented.
Me and my tiny friend realized quite quickly that we wouldn´t be able to get the motorcycle back up again. We needed to ask for help. And so we did. We went inside the apartment building and started knocking on doors asking for strong people to help us get the bike back up again. And as if I didn´t already feel embarrassed I felt sooo embarrassed when the boys who came to help started making fun of where I had decided to “park” my motorcycle.
I decided early on to just bite the bullet and go with the flow. I had to see this as a lesson. Never again would I park my motorcycle without using the kickstand and having a gear in.
Luckily the motorcycle had fallen into high grass and bushes so it was, believe it or not, in very good condition still. Only a few small scratches on the rear view mirrors and maybe one or two scratches on the yellow plastic fairing. I was so relieved when I saw it but I still felt like shit and I was worried that I would have caused some problems with the engine further on on my very long trip to the north. Luckily the engine was also fine. She didn’t want to start properly the first few hours after the mishap but then after a few hours with the rubber side down she sparked up and I took her for a test run around Stockholm. I think I asked her for forgiveness a hundred times. How could I do this to her. She had been so loyal and good to me. And this is how I thank her? That day I realized how little I knew and how much I had to learn to become a safe and skilled biker.
The trip went well apart from these two incidents in one day and I have to say that I felt shit for at least a week and I was really questioning my riding skills, my sanity and whether I even should continue to drive motorcycles or not. My ego really took a hit from that day. It was tough in the short perspective but in the long perspective it was a good thing. It was an eye opener and I got more humble and willing to learn to become a better biker.
So there you go folks. Today´s motorcycle tip from The Motorcycle Podcast. It´s such a simple thing but it can save you a whole lot of money and your dignity as a biker.
By building a habit of turning off your motorcycle with the kickstand you will never ever have to think about this again, no matter where you park. And another benefit of turning off your motorcycle with the kickstand is that you don´t have to struggle to find neutral as soon as you´re about to park. Cuz yeah, we all know how hard it is to find the neutral. It´s easier for a guy to find the sweet spot on a woman´s private parts that finding the neutral. It´s easier to find water in the desert that to find the neutral on a motorcycle. So just don´t. Why bother?
Make your biker life easier and safer for your bike and wallet – kill your bike with the kickstand!
Do you have a motorcycle tip that you want to share in The Motorcycle Podcast? Brilliant. It doesn´t have to be a huge thing, it can be as simple as David´s advice today. I´ve said it before and the devil is in the details. So bring them details and let´s talk about them. Think about it the next time you´re out riding. What do you do? What little tricks are you using or thinking about? What have you learned the hard way that might be interesting for others to hear before they make the same mistake?
If you have one, which I know you do, you send it to me on The Motorcycle Podcast on Instagram. It can be in text or it can be a voice message. You decide. I prefer voice because it´s more fun and interesting to add your voice to the podcast. But it´s all up to you of course. Like I said, hit me up on The Motorcycle Podcast on Instagram and we´ll take it from there.
Thanks guys for listening and thanks to all of you who spread the word about The Motorcycle Podcast on Instagram and TikTok. Big up to you! Also make sure to follow the podcast in your podcast player to make sure that you won´t miss the upcoming episodes.
Two wheels, one love!
Keep the shiny side up folks!
See you next time in “The Motorcycle Podcast”
Adioooous!
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