On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 10:42:44AM -0500, Bijan Soleymani wrote: > On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 10:29:39PM -0800, Paul Johnson wrote: > > What I never understood is locally they tell bicyclists that you stop > > faster locking the brakes and everybody else to absolutely avoid doing > > so. Never mind that if you can stick a fast stop with good brakes, as > > hard as you can without locking the wheels, you stop way, way faster > > than skidding, especially going downhill...and I don't know anybody > > who enjoys the smell of burning rubber... Sounds daft to me, certainly... > Locking the real wheel is easy and won't give you much breaking. (Interesting how the variant spelling of "break" for "brake" has gone out of fashion. Victorian writings on railway stopping devices seem to spell it "break" much more than "brake".) > Locking the front wheel is not very fun :) as you tend to go > flying over the handlebars. Basically the wheel's not spinning > so you and the rest of the bike end up spinning over it. On a motorcycle, with the C of G of the bike/rider combination being much lower overall, and the C of G of the rider being lower in relation to the handlebars, that tends not to happen. What does happen is that the front wheel flicks out sideways from underneath you, and you have to be pretty good to catch it. On a dry road, though, it's pretty hard to lock the front wheel. > I believe the proper technique is to brake harder with the front brakes > and apply enough pressure to the rear brakes so that you can feel when > the rear wheel is just about to lift off. That is certainly true for motorcycles, especially on dry roads; as road surface conditions worsen, you apply less braking effort to the front wheel; you're stopping more slowly anyway, which lessens the so-called "weight transfer", so you can apply proportionally more effort to the rear wheel. In any conditions you're biasing things in favour of locking the rear wheel rather than the front, because controlling a rear-wheel skid is easy, but controlling a front-wheel skid is much harder. -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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