You have the right idea. By small I mean kindof both engine displacement and general mass of the bike. They both increase pretty much together; as more HP comes the need for more steel and aluminum. As you get familiar with more motorcycles you begin to notice that fork diameters and frame weight and little things like that incrementally expand as the power increases.
Energy is mass times velocity squared, so this means that as you get the mass of you and your machine moving faster and faster the amount of energy that must be dissipated by the brakes, absorbed by the frame and sent through the drive train are exponentially increasing. The engineers know this and design tolerances (sizes) to reflect that. They add more brakes and that means more fork and that means stronger head bearings ... blah blah. You see what I mean. Regardless of all that, our wives (*as a generalization*) just see a "bigger" or "smaller" bike. A lot of my wife's confidence came from knowing that the early bikes were so small that she felt as though she could muscle it around to do what she wanted it to do. She cold lift it if it should fall, or if she felt it was going the wrong way it was more responsive to her corrections. Then, as she felt more comfortable going faster the joy went away as it was just not fun at higher speeds. It was a rough-er, less comfortable ride. She felt more vulnerable in faster traffic and trying to stop and accelerate at higher speeds. A step up to a bigger bike revealed to her that she can in fact manage a bigger, more scary mass of steel and aluminum and it paid off in a nicer experience. ...and the whole process started over again. STORY: One of our first big trips was over the north cascade mountains in Washington state, taking two of the northern-most passes in a loop over several days. During this ride she determined that her '82 Honda 450 custom (basically a Nighthawk 450) was too small for the job. There were a few reasons. Now she wants to do that trip all over again, before the end of this season, on her latest bike, just so she can enjoy the ride on her most favorite, bigger bike. So, Labor day weekend, you know where we'll be. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Nighthawk Motorcycle Lovers!" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/nighthawk_lovers. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
