New Owner here. Anyone tour in the winter?

[Coop]

On 8/14/2020 at 7:56 PM, 1moreroad said:

Givi handguards definitely make a difference especially with heated grips.  They keep a lot of wind off your hands letting the grips work better.  Below 40, I still gradually get cold thumbs.  Below 30, I'm extremely uncomfortable after about 2 hours, and I like to stop briefly every hour or so for a few minutes.

Last winter I used spacers to move my Givi windscreen more upright.  I looked through the screen instead of over it.  Definitely helped keep me in a pocket of still air and let my heated jacket work better.

Once cold assed day on I-70 I stopped for fuel and asked a little granny lady if I could hold her hands.  LOL! She had warm hands, but wouldn't agree to meet me a couple of hours later in Illinois.  Bummer!

[Wintersdark]

3 hours ago, piotrek said:

LOL...you make it sound so casual. Good for you bud... 👍

It is!   Get the right gear and tires, you get good traction and you're nice and warm instantly.  Ironically I'm warmer on my bike than in my Jeep, as it'll also be freezing cold but while the heater works fine, it's got to heat the air, then the steering wheel+interior - it takes a good amount of time to actually warm up.  My gear starts out inside (and thus is warm), and is up to temp within seconds of starting the bike.  I actually tend to wear the heated liner even when I'm driving (threw together an adapter for the Jeep's 12v plug) as it's so much better.

It's really simple and easy.  Bit of an expense initially (~$200 of gear, and a second set of tires) but then you can ride when it's freezing cold as if it was a warm spring day.

[roadwarrior]

With five feet of snow on the ground, there ain't no way in hell I'm riding a motorcycle.

Winter is why God created snowmobiles.

 

 

[Wintersdark]

On 8/15/2020 at 9:17 PM, roadwarrior said:

With five feet of snow on the ground, there ain't no way in hell I'm riding a motorcycle.

Winter is why God created snowmobiles.

 

 

Yeah, realistically you're limited to about an inch of loose snow on the roads if you want to ride normally, beyond that the best you can do is get a dirt bike with big knobbly tires and play - but even that is pretty floppy.  It's not particularly different then cars though, once you've got any significant amount of snow on the roads, it's a mess.

Cold, frost, light snow, packed down snow and slush though are all workable.  

For sure it matters where you are though.  Wet heavy winters (such as in Ontario here in Canada) are much harder to deal with as you just get too much snow.  

One big problem with large-snow-volume areas even if the roads are well plowed is melt+freeze ice.  Here, it's dry, so melting snow evaporates and doesn't make significantly more ice.  There's frost everywhere and wet pavement that freezes, but those are ok.  What's not ok is puddles with some depth freezing. Unlike the frozen wet pavement, that's smooth ice, and that doesn't care what tires you're running. To my knowledge, there aren't MC tires with retracted studs, and while spiked tires work great on ice, they're obviously not ideal on pavement.