Causes And How To Prevent The DEATH WOBBLE

[Music] foreign this video is going to be about speed wobbles or tank slappers or a death wobble you've heard of there's a bunch of different names for it so whatever that is in the handlebars start vibrating way more than normal and start going back and forth back and forth and usually ends up in a crash so a couple things to First keep in mind motorcycles naturally wiggle right so you're going down the road you have the rubber tire that's trying to find traction on an uneven and bumpy pavement of the ground so it's always going to wiggle a little bit right so it's just natural for it to do but once it starts wiggling more and more people get freaked out and they grip harder when you grip the handlebars really hard it makes that wobble even more violent and like they try to prevent it from wobbling altogether a lot of people try to do that they try to grip so hard to not let it move because they don't think it's supposed to move and that's what makes them grip even harder oh my God it's wiggling and then it's wiggling more and now all of a sudden you're on a feedback loop it's just wiggling more gripping harder the more the wiggle the more the grip and then you can go out of the control I've seen people damn near crash just because they're trying to prevent the bike from moving or wiggling at all and just made everything worse so just keep that in mind and naturally when people that are in that state of mind they're gripping and they're wobbling they grip harder sometimes they if the handlebars start going like this it's pretty hard to keep you steady throttle while doing that so they start to accelerate and now they're whiskey throttling it where you're pretty much keep on giving a gas and it throws you back and your arms are locked out and you're just hanging on for the ride or accelerating faster and faster faster I've seen people do that teaching students that the very basic course they just start going and then they they get accelerated and it pulls their wrist back and accelerate even more and then all of a sudden they're going straight like this right into a fence I've seen it happen right before my eyes while teaching brand new writers I've also seen the speed wobble happen even at relatively lower speeds like less than 30 miles per hour and this is going to get into a couple of the reasons why in my experience and knowledge that I found to be the top probably five reasons this happened one of the main reasons is people accelerate if you accelerate very very fast it just unloads the weight of the front end right so if you accelerate the whole front end of the bike will hand the rear bike the whole bike lifts off the ground but there's a whole lot less weight on the front end of the tire so if you're accelerating the front tires barely just skipping across the ground so as you're accelerating it starts to come back down and go back and forth the tire might be out of alignment a little bit because maybe you turned or whatever while you're accelerating so while it hits the rubber ground it's going to try to find traction for a second and do a little dip and as you keep on accelerating and then you go back into the feedback loop you're scared you grip harder you're accelerating faster and there it goes again another big problem is maybe the wheels are just off maybe the alignment is just off maybe the bearings or the triple clamp or there's something wrong with the suspension that could be a big problem as well if you ever get new tires or if they're put on improperly or incorrectly by just a whatever mechanic that don't really know what they're doing that could be a problem I've seen people come back from the mechanic getting new tires on or they get some kind of maintenance done and they're like hey man this bike is jacked up I think my mechanic messed it up can you ride it around I'm like I'm sure sure we're in a parking lot and I jump on the bike and I start going I'm like yeah this thing is jacked up I don't know what's wrong with it I'm not a mechanic but you need to bring this thing back and have them ride it again I don't even know if they did ride afterwards and he's like no they didn't write it just to make sure but uh they definitely it's possible that people could just mess up I mean no one's perfect so there's that number three reason I've seen this happen a lot is low tire pressure it was amazing to me to find out how many people do not check their tire pressure as often as they should so I used to teach the total control intermediate riding clinic on Coronado to a bunch of Navy guys and Marines four or five days a week and the first thing I'm going to do um one of the first things you would do after within the first hour of classroom once they got there and we do a couple things in the paperwork we adjust their tire pressure and we talked we first we teach them the classroom about tire pressure and why I'm support and et cetera et cetera they may actually go on the bike and do it and we check it and adjust it depending on what we're doing that day and some people are like I don't know I've got new tires two months ago and I they must have set the pressure for me so it must be good and their tire pressure is supposed to be say 36 42 like 36 in the front 42 in the rear and it's 20 20 or 10 20 I there's been students and I mean students come into the intermediate riding Clinic these guys are military Navy Marines armies Army Air Force whatever and they could have been riding 10 15 20 years because they tell us and during the beginning during the introductions I've been running 15 years really we go outside to his bike his tires pressure was 20 20. so just because you've been riding a long time that doesn't mean you actually know what you're doing so tire pressure being really low can also cause that to happen because think about the lower the pressure the bigger the contact patch but if it's too low that's a big huge piece of rubber you're trying to turn on the ground and it's just bad for a lot of reasons right and I already mentioned uh mechanical issues that could just be jacked up or it could be something wrong with the suspension if something failed or broke inside or if it's adjusted incorrectly especially like the damping or it could back a jacket up and then if you load the bike up so say you have saddle bags on one side or the other or a lot of weight on the back and it's just very unevenly just distributed the weight then that could cause it to do things a little bit more that would be less frequent if you loaded the bike properly so what to do about it if your bike starts wiggling violently so in my experience this one this is what helped people and what I've heard help them when they actually get into a speed wobble death waddle tank slap or whatever it is so you don't want to pull in the clutch you don't want to apply the brakes and you don't want to chop the throttle okay so what do you do there's not many more options left from my experience of what I have read and what I've learned and talking to people is if you can so you so you slowly roll off the throttle to not do anything crazy with the suspension automatically load the front end if you chop the throttle right so you slowly start to slow the bike down and keep in mind if you're accelerating then you're accelerating but once you begin to roll off the throttle you're engine braking so some people have been commenting or telling me the engine braking is some special thing it's just not on the gas whenever you're not accelerating you're engine braking unless you're keeping it steady but if you're rolling off the throttle you are engine braking it's the same thing as taking your foot off the gas pedal the car will start to slow down so if you're slowly able to do that the cool thing is that would be the number one advice I would give to people is slowly start to walk the throttle and let the bike just allow itself to slow down now the cool thing about bikes they're made by really smart people and the bike wants to self-correct itself it'll do a bunch of really cool things you know this happens because if you're just the front tire and that's the rear tire if you do a rear tire skid and it starts to slide the front tire will turn Which Way left or right if the rear tire starts to skid and kick out this way the front tire will actually turn into it like this because it's trying to self-correct itself it's trying to help you out from preventing you from crashing so the bike wants to correct itself but we jack it up we're the problem right so slowly roll off the throttle let the bike come Town come down in speed and then stay loose on the handlebars the bike's gonna naturally vibrate all the time regardless what kind of bike you have it's going to vibrate a little bit right because you're just on the ground itself no one's riding on marble so it's going to be vibrating but if you death grip or grip really hard it's just gonna make everything worse your writing technique your stamina on the bike everything's going to be worse especially from this situation and now how are you able to have a loose grip even if something crazy is going on stay relaxed and roll off the throttle and not freak out how are you able to do any of that stuff when something like this is happening well I've said it before and I'm sure I'm going to say it again you take a whole lot of courses to actually learn how to ride the bike because please don't think the basic course I don't care where in the world your basic course was or how long it was or what they had you do it's still the basics and you have to practice in order to get better at anything it doesn't matter if you're an instructor it doesn't matter if you have a million miles under your belt none of that means you're actually a good Rider so you need to continue to take courses nobody stops going to school after eighth grade education right you go to high school Associates bachelor's Master's PhD right that's like uh eighth grade math student stopping school and thinking they know anything about something like astrophysics or they could debate someone like Neil deGrasse Tyson so why do people who only take the basic motorcycle course think they know everything there's so much more to learn you need to continue to learn so that will keep you relaxed and understand the right technique of what to do and what not to do and how to improve by going through courses if something does crazy happen like that or if you just crash or something happens out of your control completely I hope you're wearing full quality gear in case you do decide if you hit the ground and you start sliding or tumbling at least you're protected and then keep the bike in a high state of Maintenance get it checked out make sure you do the oil changes make sure you every time you even get on the bike do a quick once-over just check the bike make sure there's not anything loose or wiggling or something doesn't sound right or if anything's leaking that's a good indication to go check it out there's no need to skip out on maintenance or if you're on if you're doing your own work well make sure you actually know what you're doing or if you have a bike like my bike the BMW it's like a computer on Wheels you can't do anything like that unless you're like a BMW Certified mechanic you can't really do much to the bike so bring the bike to the dealership often I sometimes I just ride to the BMW dealership where I got my bike like hey this thing sounds weird this doesn't work I don't understand what this is um I smelled something funny on the bike I don't know if I'm burning something up can you just look it over real quick most places if you just roll into there without even even without an appointment there's someone knowledgeable about the bikes because you bought it from there their mechanics that could probably just take a once look you know look over real quick you might have to wait a half hour or something to get somebody available but most of the time in my experience out of all the places I've bought all these different bikes I've had no one has ever said I'll make an appointment call back I'm not going to look at the bike it's very rare that's going to happen so there's my advice about death wobbles speed wobbles high speed bubble tank slappers whatever you want to call it accelerating way too fast some kind of wheel alignment thing is off low tire pressure mechanical issues suspension problems or the load of the bike is wrong so take a lot of courses to learn how to ride a bike we're full quality gear keep the bike in really good state of Maintenance check the bike every time you ride just do a quick once over takes 20 seconds and just understand the bike naturally Wiggles but your job is to stay loose and if something happens just try to roll off the throttle slowly and slowly to bring the bike down to Speed without doing anything crazy and of course there's a million different situations you're in traffic you're done traffic if you're on the highway from off Street I got there's a lot of variables and you cannot predict everything but all you can do is invest in the software right understand how to handle the bike in all different types of situations and then practice a tremendous amount just in case something happens you have a better understanding of what to do because you'll be more prepared versus less prepared all right everybody thanks for watching see you later

Channel: MotoJitsu®

Views: 93,891

Keywords: Riders, motorcycle, motorcycle tips, motorcycle safety, motorcycle riding tips, new rider tips, motorcycle riding, riding, motorcycle training, motorcycle training course, motorcycle safety training, how to ride a motorcycle for beginners, how to ride a motorcycle, how to motorcycle, road safety, motorcycle vlog, beginner motorcycle riding, motorcycle course, motorcycle skills, motorcycle techniques, motorcycle videos, moto, moto moments, MotoJitsu

Id: uyiwEJxqkWs

Length: 11min 17sec (677 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 18 2023