Short Rider Tips by a Short Biker Girl: BAGGER edition

we'll cover short rider tricks for taking this 830 pound bagger off the kickstand reaching the kickstand and moving it around tight spaces like for parking i am 5'3.75" tall and can barely do five proper push-ups i'm working on it so when i brought two baggers for two road trips across three thousand miles while my bike that weighs halfway this way was still in the shop these are the quick tips i did to be able to handle a big bagger that didn't have short rider modifications i'm not that short i'm 5'3.75 inches tall but i am short enough that i need to tiptoe on the bikes i want to ride so i needed a lot of short rider tips and on this road glide even though the seat height is pretty low it's 28 inches high it's really wide so i'm still tiptoeing on it and if you're tiptoeing on a bike like me that's when accidents happen and i'll show you how i handle the weight of this bike so this is the moto police officer entry so you can get on your bike without being in traffic putting the weight over this kickstand as much as possible foot on the floorboard i guess not a peg on a on a big bagger so first things is this bike is 830 pounds i usually ride bikes that are about 400 pounds so to take it off the kickstand for me it's not happening i'm really trying as you can see so what i do is i turn this is the tip i got from donna palladino because she she's shorter than me and she rides a harley electra glide turning the handlebars all the way to the right first so i think the street glide handlebars are a little bit heavier feeling because the fairing's attached so i'll show you another trick what you can do so if it's still hard to turn even then what you can what i would do on the street glide is i would bump my hip and on each little bump i would turn the handlebar so and that just lightens that front wheel a bit and that's what i would do on the street glide or even on this bike if i'm not on a totally flat plane and then taking off the kickstand is much easier and if you're still having difficulty say you're even smaller than me here's another trick you can do once the wheel is turned away from the kickstand using your hip to bump it over i needed to do this on the street glide sometimes just make sure you don't bump it so hard you send it all the way to timbuktu and now it's upright so first issue resolved once i'm actually like sitting back on the bike as you can see i'm not completely flat foot close but not quite if i'm up a bit forward i can actually flat foot so i would do this sometimes when i'm stopped at a light in traffic just to give myself a more stable break but what i do on bikes that i'm too tall on is i do one foot down like this and this is how i stop dropping bikes at stop lights that i'm tiptoeing on now this spike it is double the weight of what i'm used to so what i would do is i wouldn't stop right away with just one foot down especially when i was getting used to the weight of this at stop lights so i would stop with both feet but just plant one a little heavier than the other so i'm not on toes on both sides i'm flat on one just kind of tapping the ground on the other if you can reach and then another trick so on the street glide it was actually a little harder for me to reach the kickstand a lot of times i would just stretch and hope and it would take me a few tries to bring it back on the road glide i can reach it so one thing you can do is i know jerry palladino i think he's like 5'8" or 5'7 and he adds he added an extender to his kickstand so that's something you can do i saw one guy on a harley street glide do some short rider tips and on his he can lift the floorboard so lifting the floorboard you can i can't do it on this one on this bike but oh wait oh never mind you can lift up the floorboard and you can reach the kickstand a little easier there's a little more room there so next tricky thing is i highly recommend if you're a smaller person and you get this bike taking a slow speed skills class and taking it multiple times because without that if just stop and go traffic slow speed skills this would be miserable because i didn't have practice on my tight u-turn skills i did end up in some pickles sometimes and i'll tell you how i resolved that by myself first i trying my best to just i made sure to be hyper focused anytime i came to a stoplight looking at the angle of the street if it's at all angled in one side of the other and since i'm not putting two feet down flat i'm putting really more weight on one foot than the other so just making sure that i'm putting my foot down on the high side of the street if it's slightly angled because i've definitely put my foot down on the low side of the street and before and dropped a top heavy bike so another thing is parking so that can be a big pain of course always trying to do a turn so that i'm pointing out of a parking spot so that i can just ride on out sometimes maybe i forgot or i just messed up or i was in a new parking spot i'll show you what i do and this is what i do on bikes that are too tall for me to duck walk uh it's difficult but it works especially if you're in a tight spot and nobody's around to help you push it because there is no shame in just asking for someone to help you push it while you're duck walking and struggling no shame at all so what i'll do is i basically lean a bike against my hip and move it that way that's what i'll do when a bike is too tall so it's up against my hip and with these bikes so heavy normally i'll go to the non-kickstand side because i've dropped my bike before moving it like this on a very hot entire day and i was on the kickstand side it fell right into the garage wall but only once like i mean i do it all the time and when i do it on a bag or just because it is so much heavier i do it on the kickstand side but i don't make it go totally upright i can because i want to look at the kickstand and see like I might may even almost scrape it on the ground just to know that it's not going too far over so ideally you can be in neutral but if not i'll show you it can be done so yeah it'll take me like 15 minutes just to turn around but it's doable so really the main reason i'm not doing it on the non-kickstand side is because it's just so much harder for me to bring it up on a mid-level sport bike i can just pull it and bring it up to my hip but with this bike even if i turn the front wheel it's still hard so i just take it on the side it's already low so i move it backwards but i don't like to move it forwards with this method because i like to keep the kickstand down i like to keep it low so that i know it's not going too far to the other side so what i'll do is to go forward i'll just turn it on and let the friction zone do it so my short petite riders that want to ride a big bike just because you want to show the others that you can you can do it so what if you struggle sometimes if you want to do something do it yeah a smaller bike may be easier to ride but maybe you don't want to ride a smaller bike maybe you want the big bike and why avoid something that you really want just because sometimes when you park it's going to take a little more effort so what by the time i return this one i'll be at about 3,000 miles on baggers between the street glide and the road glide see you in the next one

Channel: Doodle On A Motorcycle

Views: 651,717

Keywords: short rider tips and tricks, short height rider tips, short motorcycle rider tips, tips for short riders, motorcycle tips for short riders, short rider on road glide, short rider harley davidson, short rider tips, short female motorcycle riders, harley road glide, road glide short rider tips, bagger, harley davidson, harley

Id: Kq_9fRzz4fk

Length: 8min 33sec (513 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 11 2022