How to solve wind buffeting on your motorcycle

when I got back into riding years ago I started looking for a motorcycle something I could afford and something that caught my eye and the one that caught my eye was a yellow harley-davidson Sportster was a 1200 model was bare stock so I bought the motorcycle I took msf course to refresh in my skills got out on the highway for a ride and I was surprised at all of the wind pressure that I was getting off the motorcycle so I started asking around and people recommended that I get a windshield for it so I went to the Harley dealer buy the windshield put that on there got back out on the highway and there was less wind pressure but now I was facing a new problem the helmet that I was wearing was just vibrating all over the place it was an open-faced helmet that's what I rode with as a kid that's what I went and bought as an adult so it was open-faced helmet had one of those plastic snap-on windshields on the front of it so kind of the face shield stuck out a little bit to the front a lot of air was coming up underneath that thing and man it was just my head was vibrating all over the place so instead of having a smooth look going on the highway like this my look or my view through the windshield was a little more like this so this week on Mt writer we're gonna talk about buffeting and I'll share with you some things that I've learned along the way to help decrease that and help make your rides on the freeway a whole lot more enjoyable [Music] hey if you're new here my name is Kevin I'm the host here at MC Ryder where we release a weekly video to help make you a better writer we release rode skills and Road strategy videos every Friday morning with occasional videos in between there on other motorcycle related topics if you like to get more involved with Mt rider you can learn how to become a patron of the site and get access to the field guide or will give you training exercises where you can increase your skill on any open parking lot so wind buffeting let's talk about wind buffeting this week what some causes of it are and first of all let's describe it let's see if that's something that you are facing on your daily rides so the biggest thing that you'll feel if you've got buffeting is vibration you'll feel it primarily in your helmet or your head if you're having to be one of those guys riding without a helmet but you'll feel some vibration and your upper torso you'll also get louder Road noises so the wind noises will be louder and they won't be consistent it'll be a kind of a vibration type wind noise that can get really loud on a motorcycle particularly depending on what type of helmet you wear you'll find that buffeting noise louder or softer depending on the helmet that you wear and it'll increase your fatigue when I got back into riding and I had all that buffeting before I solve the problem just a 10-mile ride down the highway and I was ready to get off that thing because of all the buffeting that I was experiencing so let's look at the cause of buffeting and what creates buffeting if you're riding down the road on a motorcycle with no windshield your wind that's coming in is gonna be fairly strong and any gusts that you get from cars passing by or just gusts in the wind are gonna increase or decrease the pressure that you feel on your chest and that can kind of be problematic when you're new right just filling all the the wind buffeting because you're not used to it so if you go out and you add a windshield you've changed the airflow on your motorcycle so you add the windshield and now the wind instead of being directed at your head and chest area is being lifted up above there but what that causes is a vacuum behind the windshield so depending on the height of the windshield the buffeting is going to be at different levels on the shield and if it happens right at your head level where the wind is trying to fill that vacuum created by the windshield it's going to cause a significant amount of buffeting another area where you're gonna get buffeting from is wind coming up and a lot of people don't think about that but you create this vacuum behind the windshield and now you have wind coming up as well from the sides of the tank and the way that you can determine if that is where your primary source of buffeting comes from is if you ride down the road and you hold a hand next to the side of the tank if that quietens the the wind noise down or reduces the buffeting your primary source of buffeting may be that when that's coming up from the bottom of the motorcycle trying to fill that vacuum behind the windshield so we define the cause of buffeting it's a wind coming over the top of the windshield that fills up that void or that vacuum behind the windshield and if your helmet gets caught in that flow it creates buffeting you also have wind coming up from the ground around the tank that's going to come in underneath the helmet and that can also be a significant source of when noise and buffeting as you're going down the road so what are the solutions let's address the top solution first the windshield and people will choose various different heights of windshield man there's as many solutions for this ten times the number of solutions for it as there are problems different shapes of windshields to try to redirect the air around your helmet or head but what a lot of people try to address is just the height of the windshield so some folks go with a really tall windshield and I've got one here so low go with something just really tall like this where it's up above their head what I don't like about this is what you're seeing on the camera right now is having to look through this thing all the time going down the road I hate looking through a windshield riding down the road get the bugs on it stuff gets in the on the windshield and you're having to look through it it's much easier to clean your visor off in fact you can get bugs if you get a father still juicy if they get on your visor your helmet you can generally clean those off with your gloves and keep going but if it gets on the windshield you're just stuck with it so some people go with the higher windshield and that works well for them and it makes that vacuum it pushes it back a little bit further it's still gonna happen but it happens behind your head rather than right on top of your head going with that solution they say if you talk to a lot of experts that the perfect position for the windshield is just below eye level so I'll break my windshield back up so it's gonna be about right here so about even with my mouth is where a lot of the experts in the field say is the perfect position that's still gonna allow the wind to go over my helmet but it's not in my field of view the wind chills not in my field of view but getting that height can be difficult at times finding the right windshield that will fit your particular height your torso length seats of the motorcycle are different like when I went from the standard road king seat to the police seat that raised me up several inches so the height of the windshield would have been needed to be different depending on which seat I had on the road king at that time so a lot of things play into that but that height just below I level is probably the perfect position for the windshield some guys like me I kind of just prefer let's get that windshield as low as possible make sure it's clearly out of you that still allows the wind to come over and hit me but it moves the vacuum down lower so now my helmet is up in clean wind and I I prefer that personally over trying to move the wind pocket behind me I prefer to have my helmet out in clean air that will had a few extra bugs as you're going down the road but for me it gets a lot more wind in my helmet and flowing through my helmet and particularly here in Texas I I enjoy that more being able to get that wind flow rather than sitting behind a helmet in that little pocket of that void that's created by a windshield I like to have my head up in the wind and as part of why I ride a motorcycle I like being out in the wind and that allows me to enjoy that fact sometimes on the road King I'll just pull that windshield off altogether when it gets warmer out you know if it's not too hot I'll pull the windshield off and just you know enjoy riding enjoy being out in the wind and you still get wind on you but it's not buffeted wind so it's not coming and slapping down on your helmet it's a cleaner air flow so that the noise is more consistent so the big things if you're wanting to lower your windshield down like that you want to have a good helmet that flows air well that's quiet and then like we've talked about in other videos you want to wear earplugs because you'll have consistent noise but it will be loud enough to cause hearing damage if you hear that on a consistent basis so you want to make sure you're wearing earplugs to help protect your hearing so we've addressed the top end the wind coming up over the top of the windshield now let's address the bottom end of it the wind coming up of the tank and from the bottom of the motorcycle that can cause as much turbulence buffeting as the wind coming over the top so let's step over to my motorcycles I'll show you a couple of solutions it's available for the road king and the Super Tenere and you'll need to do some research for your particular brand of motorcycle and find something that can help you with this if it's something that you're experiencing as well so here's my Road King this is a LRS windshield that I've got right now and you can kind of see it's got this little bend in it and the jury's still kind of out on whether or not I like this windshield it raised it up a little bit from what I had before and I'm getting a little bit of buffeting now through this it's still below my chin level as I'm sitting on the motorcycle but I'm getting a little bit of buffeting I think that crease or that lip right there moved the air further up as I'm riding and that's caused me some problems so it may end up just going back to my stock windshield on that but let's talk about the lowers let's talk about how you can adjust for that air coming up from the bottom let me hop on the bike real quick and I'll show you how you can test to see if this is an issue for you so if you're riding down the road you're on the motorcycle and you can reach down here with your hand and you may need to play with the placement on it but if you reach down with your hand and that reduces the buffeting that you're feeling it's probably that air coming up from the bottom of the motorcycle it's attempting to fill this void right in here and that can create some buffeting as well so while you can test for that right down the road get that hand out you might have to move it in some different positions there but see if that reduces your buffeting and if so something that you can do to help with that is to add a lower to your motorcycle so for the road king these go right here they mount to the forks just right behind the blinkers I'm sure there's some third-party products for this as well these happen to be Harley OEM lowers but they mount and they just push that airflow further out from the bike and it reduces that buffeting or that wind that's coming up around the tank it reduces all of that so on these on the road King it's a fork mount that has a significant effect in reducing the buffeting that I was getting when I initially got this bike from that air coming up from the bottom so on our tenner a tenner a one nice thing it's got an adjustable windshield so you kind of turn these knobs here there's one on each side I don't like the way Yamaha implemented this fix to the auto adjust the windshield because it's kind of a pain to adjust it and it's not something you can do on the fly you have to pull over but you release those and then you've got different levels that you can set the wind chill that to find the one that's right for you but it faces that buffeting problem as well when coming up from the bottom a solution that Yamaha has got instead of having the fork mounted because of the way this bike is designed having them mounted here on the frame just up near the dash reduces that buffeting and it pushes that airflow further out to keep that from being a problem so this is a Yamaha part that's just kind of bolts on right here pushes that win further out these were actually clear plastic just like the windshield when I bought it and that's Newton going down the road I would get direct sunlight reflecting off of those back into my face was very annoying so this is plastidip but I just sprayed this plastidip on there I took these off sprayed it down on both sides and then it looks like it was was made this way that stuff has been on there for about a year I don't really see any peeling in that at all it's a reversible procedure so if you spray that plastic dip and I'll have a link to that where you can buy it on Amazon if you've got something that you would like to plastidip this is good stuff man it is was real easy to apply if I decide I don't like it you can just start chipping at it and you can peel it away but like I said this has been on my bike for a year now will over a year and it's held up really well I'm not had any issues you've got a part that you would like to make black then that's a good option to do that so the lowers on here they work really well to reduce that wind and keep that win from coming up around the tank so as I said in the introduction to this video there are hundreds of solutions to this problem and I've just scratched the surface and talked about a few things that have worked well for me if you've got something that has worked well for you leave a comment below I'd love to learn some other ideas on this and other ways that the problem can be solved and maybe one of the ways that I've discussed won't work well in your particular situation so if you've got an idea leave it in the comments to help your fellow writers out as well so I hope this helps you out particularly you new riders who are experiencing that buffeting for the first time there is a solution to it sometimes just a little bit hard to track it down because everybody's body type is different airflow on motorcycles is all different windshields are gonna change that airflow so there's a lot of different trial and error sometimes in order to it the problem solved but this will give you a good basis to start on but I'd love to hear about your journey or particular problems that you facing with this issue or how you've solved it in the comments below so hope this helps some of you guys out and until next week guys this is Kevin with MC rider and we'll see you on the road MC riders supported by our friends on patreon to learn how to support MC writer and get access to the field guide go to MC rider dot-com slash support

Channel: MCrider - Motorcycle Training

Views: 425,120

Rating: 4.8185554 out of 5

Keywords: MCrider, motorcycle, motorcycle class, motorcycle training, motorcycle skills, learn to ride a motorcycle, Kevin Morris, MSF, Motorcycle Safety Foundation, motorcycle classes, wind, turbulence, wind buffeting motorcycle, wind buffeting meaning, motorcycle wind buffeting solutions, stop wind buffeting motorcycle, stop wind buffeting

Id: hFIaptiWQew

Length: 17min 33sec (1053 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 22 2018