Sturgis Motorcycle Rally

For anyone who loves to ride on a motorcycle, attending various rallies is a real treat. They provide fun opportunities to enjoy your motorcycle, get to know other riders, and have a break from the daily grind. The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally is an annual event held in Sturgis South Dakota. This rally has been taking place each year since 1938, and continues to grow in size each year. In the early days, the main attraction was a spectacular motorcycle raise that drew the top riders from around the world. This annual event was canceled in 1944 and 1945 due to fuel storages as a result of the war.

Keep in mind that each state has their own motorcycle laws to follow. When entering South Dakota to reach Sturgis, you are going to have to obey these laws. They are strictly enforced and you don’t want to spoil your trip by having a serious fine topay as a result of violation such laws.

Every motorcycle must have at least one headlight, and a maximum of two are allowed. There also needs to be at least one tail light that is in working condition. The handle bars on the bike can’t be higher than the shoulders of the individual who is operating it. Motorcycle helmets are mandatory for anyone under 18 years of age. However, they are strongly encouraged for anyone riding a motorcycle.

Eye protection is required for each individual on a motorcycle, regardless whether they are the operator or a rider. The eye protection may not be tinted after dusk. Noise ordinances are also enforced so make sure your motorcycle has a muffler on it. Motorcycle operators much have a valid motorcycle license. If they don’t, their motorcycle will be impounded.

While you are encouraged to have a great time while attending the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, code enforcement is strictly enforced. This is because of the sheer volume of people. There are fines for public intoxication, fighting, indecent exposure, disorderly conduct, careless driving. There are also Zero Tolerance laws regarding drugs. It does not matter the type of drug or the amount, you will be arrested and prosecuted.

There are many great places to hang out while attending the Sturgis Rally. There are also plenty of great concerts taking place each night. Some people decide to get married in Sturgis as well! There is plenty of food, fun, and motorcycle activities to keep you entertained for the entire rally.

If you own a motorcycle and enjoy attending rallies, then you should plan to attend the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally this August. Keep in mind that thousands of people attend each year. It is important for you to plan early and to schedule your accommodations. Many who come for the rally decide to stay in a tent they bring along. Others prefer the comfort of a hotel.

The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally is a yearly tradition for many motorcycle owners. Many of them have made it a family tradition with father’s, sons, brothers, and even grandfathers all traveling together. An average of 500,000 riders make their way to Sturgis each year to participate in the many events as well as the wonderful entertainment. It is a few days to enjoy being around other motorcycle riders as well as the pleasure of the ride getting there.

About Guest Author: I have a Harley Davidson Sportster. I rides around Los Angeles to beat the traffic. I have been riding for so many year. Check out this website

Winter wheelies: bolt-on kit turns your dirtbike into a powder-carving snowbike

 

February 5, 2009 This looks like serious winter fun. What if you could ride your high-performance, lightweight dirtbike in the snow? Imagine throwing huge snowy rooster tails, wheelying across snow-covered fields, carving corners through the powder and cranking your bike down to elbow-dragging lean angles - all the while knowing that if you overcook it, you'll fall into a nice soft pile of the white fluffy stuff... The US$4250 2moto snowbike kit is a bolt-on mod that takes about 2 hours to fit to a range of common dirtbikes. In place of the front wheel, you get a tough, flexible ski on the end of your forks. At the rear end, you swap your swingarm, wheel and suspension out for a thin paddle track drive unit - and voila! You've got half a snowmobile, except it leans over in the turns and looks like a helluva lot more fun.

In the depths of this year's long northern hemisphere winter, there's surely thousands of beloved dirtbikes sitting in garages waiting for springtime and riding season. But when you start looking at your bike as a snow toy, suddenly you're in a position where you can enjoy your steed all year round. And when you see how much fun a snow-kitted bike can be to ride, with zero learning curve, the US$4 grand price tag on 2moto's snowbike kits starts looking like a bargain.

The 2moto product is a fairly uncomplicated do-it-yourself bolt-on kit for anyone who knows their way around a set of spanners. It can be fitted to a broad range of dirtbikes from all the major Japanese companies, Husaberg and KTM, among others. It makes no permanent alterations to the bike, so when snow season ends you can swap back over to your wheels for regular dirt-squirting.

To install the 2moto kit, first you remove the front wheel of your motorcycle. In its place goes a strong fork extension leg, and on the end of the leg goes a Simmons FlexiSki with sides specifically shaped to enhance turning and handling. The front ski's trail is adjustable so you can choose whether you want to go for high-speed stability or super-quick steering, and your forks are left otherwise untouched.

The rear unit is a bit more involved, and requires the removal of your stock bike's wheel, swingarm and shock. The swingarm is replaced with a special unit that incorporates a long-travel Ohlins shock, a scooped belt track, an additional suspension linkage for the track, and a drive train system to get drive from the rear sprocket down to the track.

The track itself is curved - in a sense like the rear tire of a bike, which helps give better drive coming out of turns on a lean. It also means that there's a thinner contact patch on hard packed snow, making the bike handle more responsively under these conditions. The paddles are 2.1 inches deep, and the tracks are supported right out to the edge by a slide rail, so there's no deformation of the tracks at high lean angles, but a solid edge to bite against the snow. The wide slide rail also means that the bike can stand up by itself when stopped on a flat surface, with enough stability to let you kick start it.

The entire assembly is the lightest on the market, and the whole bike ends up weighing around 300lbs without fuel. 2moto claim it's also the most efficient snowbike conversion kit available, robbing only about 10% of the stock bike's power.

Riding it looks like a gas. It doesn't countersteer like a motorcycle anymore, so you turn the bars INTO the corners. Beyond that, there's virtually no learning curve when stepping up from a bike, and it seems to be able to achieve some pretty impressive lean angles in the 2moto demo videos. Top speed is around the same speed as when the bike has wheels on - although the fastest the 2moto guys have had it is 92mph. It'll jump with no dramas, and both ends are built to handle big hits all day long.

In 2 days' time, 2moto will be sponsoring the world's first snowbike race event at the 44th annual McCall Winter Carnival. It should be a blast.

These kits are a fantastic idea, they seem to be truly well designed and tough gear. Better still, they open up a whole winter world of powder carving and mountain exploration to dirtbike owners. Awesome stuff, can we get a ride?

Source: gizmag.com @By Loz Blain

4mc test ride: can a motorcycle have four wheels?

MOST tests involve a long process of careful assessment to judge the relative benefits and disadvantages of the bike in question, painstakingly attempting to judge whether the new machine has any clear advantage over its competitors. But on swinging a leg over the only existing 4MC prototype the only question in your mind is answered within seconds.

And the answer is yes; this is still a motorcycle, despite the number of wheels. The 4MC feels as natural to ride as any conventional two-wheeled bike. Blindfolded, you'd swear you were straddling a quite normal big-capacity scooter, so familiar are the handling, the feedback and the controls. And that in itself is perhaps the greatest achievement of this completely new design.

So, if it feels so normal, why bother with the extra wheels? To discover that, you really need to get into a situation that you never want on a normal bike; a big, unexpected slide of the front or rear end. Because on the 4MC that slide either simply won't happen, or if it does the bike will mollycoddle you through it, proving virtually impossible to fall off. It's little short of remarkable – in tests on a oil-covered skid-pan that would see any rider, on any conventional bike, picking themselves off the ground within seconds, the 4MC doesn't just remain upright, but it can actually cope better with the slippery conditions than most cars – as proved by skid-pan lap-times several seconds faster than most cars can manage on the same circuit. There are no bike times to compare it with; no two-wheeler has been tested that can safely make a single lap on the low-friction surface.

As a prototype, there's little point in going into the finer points of the 4MC's handling; it feels relatively long, with a low center of gravity disguising it's overall weight, and it's set up to give neutral handling. Only when you tip it over at ultra-low speed do you realize that, with the fear of crashing surgically removed, you can make full-lean, low speed circles tighter than you're ever likely to dare on a conventional bike.

More important than the handling – which on this prototype is so hugely adjustable that it's virtually immaterial anyway – is the feedback. Bumps are something you notice, but which don't upset the bike – even if you hit one with just one wheel during a tight turn, it does nothing to throw the machine off line. And at the bars there's exactly the feeling you'd expect from normal forks, with none of the remoteness usually associated with hub-center steered two wheelers – a result of a its designer's own concoction of play-free joints in the steering system.

So, it works. But why? Is it a bike? Is it a quad? Is it a car? As far as most governments are concerned, it's none of them – despite the mathematical evidence against it, they reckon it's a trike, and that's exactly why it's got the potential to be the most significant thing in motorcycling for years. Under the licensing laws of most countries, a machine like this can be ridden using a normal car driving licence, so its potential market is far, far bigger than any normal bike can dream of. In most developed countries, bike licence holders are outnumbered at least 15-1 by car drivers, and often the ratio is far greater. That means the 4MC's pool of potential buyers is simply enormous.

And thanks to its four-wheeled design and ingenious suspension system, which means it can go to full lean, complete with a rider, without falling over even at a standstill, it's got the extra element of safety that could tempt drivers who'd never dare venture onto two wheels. It's no wider than the average bike, so it can still slice through traffic, and it's bike-derived engine – a Yamaha YP400 scooter motor in the prototype – means its fuel economy is just as good as a two-wheeler's.

And its designer, Nick Shotter, isn't the only person to have spotted that this sort of bike could take off. Piaggio's three-wheeled MP3 scooter is already a huge success, and the firm has recently revealed a fractionally wider version that uses the same licence loophole as the MC4 to allow car drivers to use it without any extra training or testing. And Yamaha's 2007 Tokyo Show concept bike, the Tesseract, revealed how a future superbike using Shotter's suspension concept could look. Before that bike was built, Shotter had already approached Yamaha with his designs, and Yamaha Japan is in direct contact with him regarding the suspension layout; if they want to put the Tesseract into production, they'll need to licence the suspension technology from Shotter, who owns the patents on the layout.

Source: gizmag.com @By Ben Purvis

Diapermotard? Ducati dips under US$10 grand to deliver its baby Hypermotard 796

 

Ducati's supermotard-on-steroids, the 1100 Hypermotard, has been terrorizing the streets for a couple of years now, a concept bike that became reality after it made a sensational splash at the 2005 EICMA show in Milan. Aimed at marrying some of the soft-suspension, short-wheelbase, low-weight feel of a motard with the grunt of a 100-horsepower L-twin motor and unmistakeable Ducati streetbike style, the Hypermotard is an absolute giggle machine. It's also fairly pricey though, which is why Ducati have just given it a much more affordable little brother. The Hypermotard 796 will sneak in under USD$10,000, using a torqued-up version of the 696 Monster engine and boasting both less weight and a lighter clutch than the 1100.

The last time I swung a leg over an 1100 Hypermotard, my impression was that it was tall, tiny and a load of fun, the brakes putting it on its nose as quickly as the throttle lifted its front wheel. For a short-range hooligan streetbike, it seemed to tick all the right boxes - even if it was a little wide in the 'bars for serious traffic splitting (particularly given those fold-out side mirrors).

But its pricing still put it well into the boutique level - you can get a whole lot of bike for US$12 grand from other manufacturers. So this new mini-hypermotard (Hyperminitard? Hypomotard? Diapermotard?) 796 might look like a much more attractive option to buyers at its USD$9995 price point.
The 796 motor, developed from the 696 Monster engine, makes about the same horsepower as the donor bike, at 81hp. It's up a healthy 6 foot-pounds of torque though, at 56lb/ft, reflecting the fact that it's designed to be ridden harder at street speeds.

The "super-light action APTC clutch" will make a nice change from the original Hypermotard's clutch lever, which always seemed like a bit of a test of manhood to me. Bikes like the Hypermotard seem to excel as urban weapons in my mind - hard seats and poor tank range tend to make them difficult tourers - so a nice, easy clutch is almost mandatory.

The Hypermotard 796 keeps its weight down, Ducati tell us, by means of a redesigned set of triple clamps and a reworked frame that gets rid of most of the 1100's forged components. The resulting 167-kilo (368 lb) motorcycle should feel light, agile and fun.

The Juniormotard's looks are very similar to its big brother's, retaining the single-sided swingarm, barkbuster-mounted indicators and mirrors and the sharp, flat beak of the 1100. So the 796, too, should be one of those bikes that feels like there's absolutely nothing in front of you as you ride; a bit of a flying carpet feeling.

We'll get our first glimpse of the baby Hypermotard in the flesh at EICMA Milan 2009.

Source: gizmag.com @ By Loz Blain

Electric Voltra concept paves the way for sexy next-gen motorcycle design

As we wrote in last week's article about the ECOS Harbinger, one of the best things about electric vehicles is that they're much simpler in many ways than a petrol vehicle to build. Freed from the necessities of fuel tanks, airboxes, cooling systems, exhausts and the bulky combustion motor itself, designers are going to be able to start with a pretty blank sheet when it comes to designing tomorrow's electric motorcycles. Take the Voltra, a design study by Aussie student Dan Anderson - with its low-slung, bulldog looks, a seat unit that looks like it's floating on air, detachable dash and an engine-mounted swingarm pivot. It's a filthy sexy bike - and yet unlike anything we've seen before; a blue-sky reinvention of the motorcycle based on the new rules the electric age is going to bring in.

Electric transport has captured the imaginations of the eco-minded among us, but if you're going to sell electric motorcycles in any decent numbers, you're going to have to give them a serious injection of desirability.

Performance in itself can make a bike desirable, but electrics won't be able to offer the stratospheric power-to-weight ratios of modern sportsbikes until battery technology has taken another few strides forward. And while electric will offer immediate practicality in a commuting sense, motorcycles are still viewed as toys by most western consumers, so they'll need to be able to comfortably run a 600km day before most riders will see them as reasonable options for sporty scratching.

But one thing they'll certainly be able to compete on is design. Removing all the dirty, complicated trimmings that a combustion engine requires can open the door for a range of design options the bike world has simply never seen before. In performance terms, mass centralization and targeted mass distribution will take huge leaps forward, which should pave the way for sensational handling, but there's every chance that first- and second-generation electrics will be able to sell themselves on looks alone.

Dan Anderson's Voltra is a great example of the kind of electric that's going to start light bulbs going off in the minds and loins of even the staunchest petrolheads. From any angle, this thing is absolutely stunning.
Without a fuel tank, Anderson was free to bolt the entire subframe to the front end of the bike, leaving the seat and tail unit floating in air above the rear wheel, and making the sharply angled rear shock uniquely accessible through the gaping space in front of the seat.

The engine drives directly to the front sprocket, and its casing appears to rotate as the swingarm pivot. The "tank"-mounted dash is removable, doubling as the bike's ignition key and storing a decent range of information - as well as offering control over selectable power modes that let you choose between giggles and mileage at the throttle.

The batteries, the bulkiest part of any electric, are slung low and forward in the bike's belly, and are kept out of sight by a beefy plastic side fairing - which begs the question, what would you call this thing? With no front fairing, it's not a sportsbike - but then, despite the sharp front headlight unit, with those plastic side covers it's not a naked or a streetfighter.

Whatever label you'd put on it, this is one clean design and one hot ride that would turn heads at any bike meet. We applaud Dan's efforts on this bike and hope he gets a chance to build it one day - for the moment it's just his final year thesis project in an Industrial Design degree. But it's eminently buildable, and a great example of what the electric era might bring to bike design. Bring it on!

Source: gizmag.com @By Loz Blain