Using your hand as an auxillary brake

[charlie malone]

Many years ago when I was a young boy and rode a hand me down bicycle with no brakes, I learnt that there were two methods of stopping the bike.
Option 1. Ride into something like maybe a wall
Option 2. Drag my feet along the floor and hopefully stop before hitting something like maybe a wall.
Option two was always my favourite but it did of course require a degree of pre planning where as Option 1. was always there to be used at short notice.
Many years later and now riding motorbikes with fully functioning brakes I have found that in an emergency Option 1 and Option 2 still work just fine. However, the other day I discovered there is in fact an Option 3. Using your hand as an auxillary brake.
Whilst riding the XT600e along an old drover's single track road in Mid Wales I decided to perform a u turn and go back to RV with a mate who was along for the ride on his KLR650 and had stopped to take some pictures. Unfortunately and at only walking speed I was far too close to the edge of the
road when the front wheel washed out and dropped off and pulled me and the XT off the road and down an incline toward the bottom of the valley. Now, had I been riding a Husky TE there is a chance, perhaps only a small chance, that I could have ridden my way out of this one. But on the XT, with its soft front end and brimming with twenty plus kgs of fuel up high in the acerbis tank and with those low far too narrow after market bars that the previous owner had fitted and I planned to replace with Renthal Dakar high bars but just hadn't got round to doing-things were going to get shitty before they got pretty.
So, picture if you can, XT and I travelling at reletively low speed, downhill with me sort of on the bike, but not actually in contact with either the handlebars or the pegs, just sort of bouncing around on my arse on the saddle like some kind of apprentice rodeo rider. Instict was to stop the bike but with my arms doing a mexican wave and feet around my ears conventional braking wasn't going to happen. Emergency Option 1 wasn't going to work-no walls to ride into. Emergency Option 2 wasn't going to work-couldn't get my feet any where near the floor; but it was at that moment I discovered there is an Option 3. and it goes like this. If you sort of roll to the right and place your left hand on the right side of the spinning tyre, it will get carried round until it jams against the swinging arm and this is pretty much guaranteed to stall the engine and stop the bike whereupon you both abruptly fall to the ground-simples. Ok I'll be the first to admit that just like Option 1, there are some inherent risks, in this case being off the road out of sight in an area with no mobile phone signal
unable to free your hand from it's jammed position. Fortunately for me, my mate came looking for me but only found me some distance from and below the road because of the white acerbis tank fitted to the bike. He said the rest of the bike and I were invisible amongst the shrubbery in which I had landed. Only with his help I was able to release myself from the bike, lift it and eventually ride it out of the valley. It took another four hours to get home. It was a very cold day, that and with a handful of painkillers bought from a shop in the first village we came to and mostly clutchless gear changes the pain was bearable, but once I got home and warmed up.......! A visit to hospital numerous xrays and a bone scan confirmed my worst fears.

Medical diagnosis-Broken hand, broken wrist.

Accident diagnosis- Pilot error.

Moral of story- Consider your options carefully!

[TurboCharger]

Oooouch!!! At least the XT was still ridable.

Lucky you didn't have the bike with full kit ie panniers, tankbag and pillion, otherwise it would've been more than just a broken hand and wrist.

For the record, I have an option 4, stick something else (not your hand) between the tyre/wheel and the frame of your bike like a big stick or your MX boot and use it as a lever to jam the wheel and hopefully stop the bike. I used to push my foot on the front tyre to stop the my bicycle (without brakes) when I was a lot younger, but it has its own risks, ie. if you stick your foot on the front tyre and it jams and snatches all of a sudden then you might end up flying over the handle bars...

[oothef]

Hope the pain and embarrassment are wearing off.
I used to stop brakeless pushbikes with my heel against the back wheel, get the pedal near the top and back a bit, it wears a lump out of your heel though.
I've long since employed the "bail out!" option when the bike starts to take control, I've found it hurts the least....

[charlie malone]

So I wasn't the only kid without brakes, excellent!

One of my mates who isn't the sharpest knife in the kitchen drawer and wouldn't know irony if it came down the road with a marching band in front of it asked "did you really put your hand in the back wheel to stop it on purpose?"

For God's sake!

[bruken]

I have an option 5 when it comes to unexpected massively steep downhill drops. When the back wheel tucks and kicks up, shoot over the handlebars using your petrol cap as a scrotum hold while resting your face on the front mudguard and then in fright letting go the handlebars, grabbing hold of of the spinning front wheel with both hands and holding on for dear life. End result pulls you up and over while cushioning the bike as you bring it to an abrupt stop without damage. Tuck your nuts back in and hobble to A&E for stitches to torn nutsack.


Hope you recover soon mate. Kudos for riding out of there with a broken hand

[McCrankpin]

Quite an incident that...... one of those things that memories are made of!
Hope the hand heals well.

Reminds me of one where my hands completely failed to bring me to a halt.
Riding a Norton Commando in a race at Cadwell Park back in the early 70s, on a long and fast-ish righthander (Charlie's bend I think it's called) the rear tyre slid gently away and bike and I continued onwards both lying on the ground. I was no longer attached to the bike but stayed in close proximity sliding along the tarmac. The deafening sensations were the noise of the bike on its side, grating along the tarmac, sparks coming off of a handlebar, the bumpiness of the tarmac as you slid over it with no mechanical suspension, and a couple of 'hot-spots' building up on bodily extremities.
The bend is a wide sweeping one, plenty of run-off and nothing to hit. So no chance of any braking there, and this experience continued for quite a while (it seemed, at the time) until a certain dazed feeling encroached.

But lo! It all stopped. Everything fell quiet, no sparks, no bumping. Quite calm in fact.
So, like you do in these situations, I went to get up on my feet straightaway to take stock of the situation. This involves firstly putting your hands down to lift yourself up off of the ground.......
Immediately I found I was staring up at the sky, for a microsecond, then the ground, then the sky...... and so on.

After a bit, this summersaulting settled so I could get some awareness, and I was able to see that earlier, when I thought I had stopped sliding, nothing of the sort had happened. I had merely reached the edge of the tarmac and continued on the nice smooth and level grass run-off area. Hence the silence, and feeling for a moment as though I had come to a halt.

Anyway, still travelling, I was rapidly approaching the earth bank at the edge of the grass, and I found with judicious use of hands (still with gloves attached) I was able to steer enough to make sure I didn't hit the banking head-first or legs-first, and all ended reasonably well.

So, not a case of braking with hands, just a touch of steering with them.

But that wasn't a 'first'. Later in the paddock a fellow racer came up, who had been behind me at the time.
"What happened there? It didn't look as though you made any mistake! Got me worried for a moment in case the same was going to happen to me!"
"No," I said. "Can't work out what went wrong there at all."
"How far did you slide?" he asked. "I came off there once, it feels as though you'll never stop!"
I related my experience.
"Snap!" he said. "Exactly the same happened to me. Really strange feeling when you go onto the grass after what feels like a mile on the tarmac."

[loony]

Lucky that you didn't have panniers on, otherwise they might have obstructed the grabbing of the wheel and hence the braking procedure would not have been successful. Sorry for the injuries, but funny telling of the story. Thanks.
PS I know dry stone walling is a dying art. Option 1 might have been available if is was a thriving pastime still.