Indiana Joe
Member
- Location
- Indiana, USA
"Laying down" is when someone doesn't have a clue how to handle the front brake. Laying down was before bikes had front brakes. And that means functional ones like the jap bikes had.
In 65 years of riding the only time I "laid" down a bike was I had my first bike, a '74 Harley. A bunch of older bikers adopted the 15 year-old and taught him how to lay down a bike. I learned the correct way to stop a bike with a combination of front and rear brakes after buying my first Japanese bike. The brakes on those bikes were the real thing.
To my surprise the hydraulic front brakes worked amazingly well. I began training my self to using both brakes to stop. It took a while, but I finally could brake down in an incredibly short distance from even a hundred mph. A cycle magazine which did bike reviews usually would post the distance their testers could stop each bike in. Those guys were pros, and I damn well almost equaled them in braking time and speed.
At time during rides, I would suddenly think of practicing. Almost immediately I'd scan ahead for dirt, pebbles or what have you in the road. If you do a quick stop in that stuff, you'll slide and possibly dump the bike. Anyway, after a split second of seeing the road clean and safe, I did the simultaneous braking to stop. Even in the city I could practice on side streets, or late at night after the stores closed in a mini mall and the parking lot was empty.
This discipline of much practicing saved the life of me and my daughter one day when we lived in Chicago. An elderly woman with blue tinged hair pulled out from her parking space at the curb into an immediate U turn right in front of us. Luckily I was going pretty much the slower city speed limit. In the middle of her U turn she saw us and froze and braked, totally blocking us with the length of her auto as she sat right in the middle of the street.
In a micro second I judged the closeness to the car and our speed would not allow veering around her. I hit the brakes just as I had always practiced. Long story short, while the woman stared in fright at us, the bike stopped before hitting her car. With what was years of practice at that time, the distance my front wheel had stopped from her door was about only about a foot or two.
End point to make - a few moments after the stop, I raised my helmet shield and explained to the woman through her open windows that had she done that to almost anyone else she probably would have seriously injured them or killed them. It was then I felt my daughter patting my shoulder, telling me to look behind us. On the sidewalk were about a half dozen teenaged boys who were clapping and exclaiming some praise or other. They had known we were going to go into that car and maybe be killed. They couldn't believe the stop I had made.
At least 90 percent of bikers don't have a clue how to do a life saving brake. That's why you usually see the streak of rubber from the rear tire at these accidents. The ignorant biker locks his rear wheel and the bike begins to slide and go over on its side. Who knows where the biker ends up after the bike is laid over.
Believe it or not, the vast majority of bikers are afraid of that front brake except maybe for a slow stop at a street light. They're afraid of locking the front wheel. It takes practice to balance the braking between front and rear. The only way that talent comes is by practice. It has to get etched in your skull by practice so it's automatic when needed.
Oops! I just thought of one time I did lay down a bike. I had screwed up didn't get the kickstand all the way up. It had come back down to it's lowered position. I was going up what was about a three-story hill. There was a small guardrail to my right. It was only about a foot or two high. I decided I was riding too close to it. I flipped the bike a bit to the left. The kickstand hit the road at about the speed I was going, maybe about fifty or so. The reaction jerked the bike hard right toward the guard rail. I knew i was about to hit the damn guard rail and fly over the bars and down to the street below. I flung my body hard left, the bike followed, I lunged on the handlebars to turn the wheel left at a right angle. It worked. The bike slammed into the ground, and slid along the highway to a stop. My wife was on the back at the time. She went into me with such force, sending me against the handlebars, breaking a couple of my ribs.
That is the only time I laid the bike down.
The ride home was fun. We were a couple of hundred miles from home. The country roads weren't too bad. I only had to make an occasional stop on those roads. Each stop, no matter how slowly done, sent my body a bit forward, compressing the busted ribs. What I had waiting for me in the city on the way home was stop after stop at lights and stop signs. Yeah, of course I cried. You would have, too.
You think that ends the story? Wrong. I didn't ride for more than a month until those ribs healed enough. After the first ride when healed, I was carrying stuff from the saddlebags to the house, I tripped in the yard and broke a rib on the other side. Have you ever seen a sixty-year-old sit right down in the muck among tomato plants and cry?
How in the hell did we get from ATVs to this?
