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| Shaft |
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Shaft
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 Posted: 00:58 - 23 Mar 2019  Post subject: |
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My XL600 had both, but the starter was no good unless the battery was 100% and even then it couldn't be relied on.
On the other hand, I could kick it into life first or second go, every time, but there was a knack to it.
When I was selling it, somebody offered me a few hundred under the asking price, so I said he could have it for that, if he could kick start it - he tried for 5 minutes, then I fired it first time 
We had a work hack scooter that had both and the kicker was very useful, mainly because we didn't use it for weeks on end, so the battery was always below par.
I can see why 'normal' bikes don't really need them (assuming they can be bump started) but I would've liked a kick on my Silver Wing, when I was having charging issues.
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| McHattrick |
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McHattrick
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| Moxey |
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Moxey
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| Posted: 11:19 - 23 Mar 2019 Post subject: |
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Of the current crop the CG is kick only and the CB has both  whilst the VFR and Virago are electric start.
In the past made do with 2 other kick only bikes and been fine (RXS and KH both piddly 2T commuters though).
From experience I prefer the option of both (I know I'd rather be kicking the VFR over than struggling push starting it last weekend because the trickle charger hasn't been strong enough to overcome discharge but in traffic or a stall scenario I'd rather the convenience of push any day).
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| Ribenapigeon |
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Ribenapigeon
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| Nobby the Bastard |
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Nobby the Bastard
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| recman |
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recman
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| Teflon-Mike |
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Teflon-Mike
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| Posted: 14:28 - 23 Mar 2019 Post subject: |
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| Ribenapigeon wrote: | The question really is why did kickstarts still get fitted to bikes as standard for so long? |
Weight, Complexity, cost, reliability and necessity.
Because of the low compression and diminutive piston size, you used to be able to kick a lot of small two-strokes with your hand! They didn't take a lot of force, and as earlier comment, most of the kick-starts with stripped splines I have had to replace over the years have been on little 50 or 125 2T's after teen-age lads have been hefting themselves up and down on the damn things like it was a Pan-Head Hardley!
As to the apples and oranges of the car vs motorbike?
Cars were 'expensive'. As such the price could stand an e-start, that customers expected or would pay for... and was slightly more convenient than a cranking handle that generally begged a two-man operation, one wamping the handle at the front, whilst other sat in the driver's seat tickkling throttle choke and possibly even timing...
Bikes.... as consumer product lasted probably twenty years longer into the post war consumer-era when most folk wanted a car as their main form of transport and status symbol.
Bikes sold, significantly into the dumbell ends of the market in the over-lap period, either to budget-minded commuters who wanted cheap, or to enthusiasts who wanted performance or tradition.
The e-boot was then not such a sales feature, that could warrant the extra cost on the show-room price tag.
They were also heavy and unreliable, and cars got them, and they were still not all that reliable, because of the inconvenience of trying to crank start, especially solo, and the fact that the costs and scale of them meant they could, a little more easily, be made practical and viable. 15lb of lead acid battery is not particularly significant on a 1000Lb Austin Seven... it is on a 190lb Triumph Tiger-Cub or similar!
As to other 'cross-over' technology, like brakes... lets shelve comment on ABS for a second, because it is something of an anomaly, and unlike on a car that has a square-base and fairly netural joy-stick dynamics, a bike turns by tilting, and will sit up on the brakes, making it a much more complicated dynamic to devolve to an electric brain and actually get real 'benefits'....
But brakes? Why hydraulic discs over v-groove belts or drums or wooden blocks on a stirrup under the rim?
An awful lot of the rise of the hydraulic disc brake is simple consumerist value engineering. Its a myth that disc brakes are more 'powerful' than drums....
The 'power' that a 10" drum on something like an old Land-Rover or Daimler limousine dissipate when slowing that from 60mph to 30 is umpety times more than the power dissipated by the hydraulic discs slowing a Honda 750 four down the same amount.... simply cos the car is heavier, so the kinetic energy it has is higher, hence the energy dumped through the brakes is more, and power is rate of change of energy.
On Heavy-Goods-Vehicles, enormous drum brakes were and I think still are used in many applications... and these are FAR more powerful than the discs used on almost anything! Yes, they are also heavier.... they are also probably more complicated.... b-u-t... discs are NOT more powerful...
What discs are, is more convenient, and significantly, especially aided by wide-spread adoption and mass market manufacture, CHEAPER.
A drum brake has some awkwardness in heat-dissipation, if it IS very powerful, but a lot of that heat can be dissipated reasonably quickly by the expedience of scale, being big... which on a truck isn't particularly hard... on a car? More so, on a bike, very much more so.
Now having the friction area where the heat is made, in the air-stream, and a peculiarly short thermal path to the mass of vehicle that might dump it, means that the disc starts to score.... fact that especially in the UK that air-stream is also full of water, is a little inconvenient, but...
If you throw away all the rods, cable links and stuff that might be needed to work a drum brake, and replace them with a bit of hose and a couple of syringes... the hydraulic actuation, again doesn't make it an more powerful, but it can make it more reliable with less parts to stretch or wear out or seize, or even make to start with. Serendipitously, the hydraulic system can also be self-adjusting, making it more convenient and easier to maintain.
Over the years, THIS has significantly been the attraction of a hydraulic dis brake, its NOT more powerful than a drum, but it can be a heck of a lot more convenient, and significantly 'cheaper' to make, and if that cheaper translates not just to a lower unit cost to make, but also a more saleable product, its a double whammy.
And Drum brakes lasted well past thier presumed sell-by date in competition, both on the tarmac and on dirt, when the show-room model motorcycles were vaunting a disc as 'progress'.
The mechanical actuation is far more direct, and the way that a shoe 'takes up' into a drum, makes a drum brake an awful lot more 'progressive' and gives a lot more rider 'feel' where a disc will tend to be rather 'sharp' and 'wooden'.
Interesting to note that in road-racing, riders would often have 'wet' tyres mounted on drum-brake wheels and 'slicks' mounted on disc-braked wheels.. in many cases cos the 'expensive' disc brake mags were kept for best, and the 'old' drum-braked wheels taken off for them, were then kept as 'spares' but, that fashion was started because of how 'sharp' a disc brake can be and how little feel they offer, plus the niggle of them not biting when wet, so in the wet when a rider was more likely to grab a big fist full and lock up, the feel of a drum and the progressiveness was a positive advantage.... hence the wheels were kept for it.
But... on a racer, that only has to perform for maybe 45minutes at a time? The serviceability and shear awkwardness of adjusting and setting up a drum.... especially something like a quad or 16 leading-shoe 'racing' drum, CAN be something of a hassle, and not getting it spot on, let a disc out-perform it! Even if its ultimate performance ISN'T actually as good.
For a road-bike? Probably thrashed until the canvas can be seen through the tyre, and "Well, I don't use the back brake anyway!" attitudes pervading.... the self adjustment of a hydraulic disc start to outweigh the high service demands of a drum!
Back to ABS....
ABS has been around on, mass manufactured 'production' cars since the mid 80's ish. It works, as name implies by stopping the wheel from locking. It does that by a relief valve in the brake line that actually bleeds off pressure from the brake so it DONT WORK! Hmmm.... This doess NOT seem like the most wonderful idea in the world, when you look at it!
The idea behind it stems from something known as 'Cadence' braking, a technique some drivers employed in days of yore to 'pulse' the brakes rather than keep them 'on'..
A lot of genuine but far more pseudo science behind it, which leads into the big-bang motors of the 2T GP era, looking at a fluctuating or pulsing force rather than a contentious one, but still...
When wheel rotating forces transmitted, and sort of predictable, when wheel locked, wheel is skidding, and forces transmitted are usually lower, but inconveniently chaotic. And THAT alleviation of the chaos, is significantly where ABS systems can score.
On early ABS cars, there was often an override switch to turn the dang thing 'off', particularly for surfaces such as gravel or mud or snow, where a car with a locked wheel will 'snow-plow' and build up a barrier of gravel, mud or snow to act as a wheel chock that will slow the car faster than the wheel-brake.... meanwhile, there were many many back to back tests done by various magazines, to try prove or disprove that ABS was 'better'... on a car.....
None were p[articularly conclusive, or often particularly scientific... but.... yes, MOST of the time an ABS equipped car stopped in shorter distance than a non-ABS equipped one.... a lot of the time, though that was because of more favoiurable conditions given to the ABS, like a wet tarmac road, rather than a gravel pathway....
More revealing is probably testing an automatic electronic controlled ABS to an experienced rally driver using 'Cadence' braking techniques... it took an awful long time for the presumed 'performance' benefits of ABS to actually be shown through.... and even then, conclusion was that it was probably still only about 'as good as'.
To wit... what ABS systems DID was NOT make cars any better at braking.... it just shifted the high level of skill that professional rally drivers had, from their brain to an electronic one.... it de-skilled the system....
This is then an advantage ONLY of significance to those that DONT have the skill to start with.... and danger, as has been shown with ABS cars, is that rather than making them any 'safer'... its just let folk that don't have so much skill, drive them with the abandon as if they did!
And advances in technology, that have given us faster responding relief valves and ever faster and more sophisticated pre-programmed algorithms have, IMO not made them any 'better' but simply encouraged ever more who do not have the skill, to push thier luck ever further.... but still.
Fact that ABS has so thoroughly been adopted on cars, and I doubt that any-one who has taken their car test this century has even driven a non-ABS equipped car, let alone learned the skill of modulating thier foot-pressure on the pedal to stop a cross-ply tyre locking on a damp- road, has made it an expectation on bikes.... where as said you have a much more complicated dynamic and braking effecting steering, as well as balance, and you are STILL turning OFF the brakes for the system to work, and trying to shove skill that aught to be in the riders head, into a black box....
But what we come back to, is that it so often has eff-all to do with the actual engineering or merits of one way of doing anything over the other...
What it comes down to is MARKETING.
What will sell, and what makes the manufacturer most money.
Here 'car' thinking predominates, because that is what most people are familiar with. A domestic applience like a washing machine, they expect to start on the key, take them where they want to go, for as little money or with as much prestige as they are prepared to pay for...
It has very very little top do, even with ultimate performance, even where that is given un-due priority on the marketing men's agenda.
Then get the beurocrats involved! And it gets even more murky! And its NOT what is technically best, or even whats most profitable... but what 'sells' to a peculiarly disinterested market, informed, peculiarly by, oh, yes! Them marketing men and bureaucrats!
A-N-D the mass-market... CARS! leading to an awful lot of 'car' thinking, erroneously being applied.
Like I said... disc brakes are NOT more powerful than drums. Technically you can make a drum brake as or more powerful than any disc. They are just different ways of skinning the cat, they both have pro's and cons, BUT which is better, or better in any particular situation, does NOT lead one solution over another... what leads is what the mass market are lead to believe..... what the money men can make most money on, and what the politicians can get away with!!!
And trying to force bits of car technology onto bikes, like ABS and using the precedent that "Well they have them on cars!" is incredibly perverse, short-sighted and often plain daft. Its apples and oranges reasoning.
Te e-boot didn't get adopted on bikes as early as on cars, basically because it the market didn't really see the point and wasn't prepared to pay for it.
Interestingly, the e-boot didn't migrate down to the lower cc's of bike until very recently, but where it did, it was as much because of customer expectation or ambition, 'cos bigger bikes had it, and it was an aspirational thing as much if not more so than it was practical.... and thirty or forty years of evolution in the arena of electrical engineering, made it that much more viable and cheaper.
And as it doesn't turn your brakes 'off' when you most want them? What the heck!?
To go don the apples an oranges car thinking route? Why dont bikes have ash-trays like my car does?!?!
Its NOT a fuggiung CAR, that's why! And its a way of thinking we aught get away from.
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| bhinso |
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bhinso
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| Posted: 14:56 - 23 Mar 2019 Post subject: |
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| MarJay |
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MarJay
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| Posted: 15:14 - 23 Mar 2019 Post subject: |
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| Ribenapigeon wrote: | The question really is why did kickstarts still get fitted to bikes as standard for so long? After all the car industry gave up on hand crank starting in the forties. I think it's just the old thing that the bike industry is the cheapo brother to the car industry. ABS, for instance, was becoming standard on cars thirty years ago, its only become so on bikes recently and that's because of regulation. You could look at traction control as the latest thing that is almost standard on cars now but is an additional feature on a bike that will add a premium to the retail price. Then there's keyless ignition and automatic starting, although I notice Suzuki have this easy-start system that seems to be getting fitted as standard on its new bikes. Suzuki is interesting in that they also seem to be fitting traction control as standard on a lot of their new bikes. Maybe Suzuki have realized that bikers aren't necessarily all anachronists and want to see the same technology that's standard on cars on their bikes? After all the technology isn't new really, it's well understood and for the most part electronic so a lot cheaper to adapt to different machines than mechanical devices. |
As is often the case with your posts, there is quite a lot of nonsense here. Don't forget that weight is a critical factor on a motorcycle, and that motorcycles lean over and do all sorts of unpredictable things. Bikes had ABS in the early 90s, it was just awful and couldn't be used when cornering. Now with more poweful CPUs we can build complex 3d maps of what action the system should take and when. The same is true for fuel injection and traction control (especially traction control).
The kickstart thing saves quite a bit of weight, and it's not really that inconvenient. You can kick a bike from the seat, and you're getting wet anyway if it's raining. A hand crank is far more inconvenient and difficult, and an extra couple of KGs of weight for a car is nothing. An extra KG of weight on a bike is massive. Especially on a little commuter or two stroke weapon.
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| chickenstrip |
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chickenstrip
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Posted: 18:54 - 23 Mar 2019  Post subject: |
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Kick start? No thanks, not with my dodgy knees.
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stevo as b4
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Old Thread Alert!
The last post was made 5 years, 31 days ago. Instead of replying here, would creating a new thread be more useful? |
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