Using your hand as an auxillary brake
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!
|