Hi, Just been asked by a colleague interested in motorcycle mechanics, why we have a 1 down 5 up gear box arrangement on bikes these days and not the 1 up 5 down or even the N at the bottom of the stack! Is this just a safety thing, if so what is this reason, or is it just a standard imposed up on us by the Japanese industry? Love to get some answers, it's been on my mind for a while now with no definitive response. Thanx KJ --
.... That makes sense. ..... More like the '50's. Honda's first production bike was in 1949. Not suer when they started being imported to the U.S.. Called a "de facto" standard -- everyone else follows the leader.
Didn't at least some of them have a failure mode whereby it was possible, if you weren't aware you were in top gear, to go straight from top gear into neutral when you went to "upshift"?
Not so much that (for what would be the point?), but one of the Yamaha 2 strokes had a suicide box with a missing stop, where you could go straight from top into first.
I always assumed that one to be an urban miss. One of those horror stories spread about by Suzuki owners to make up for their feelings of inadequacy.
AFAIAA it was mandated for all machines sold in the US from a certain date, probably in the 1970s, and I guess it was easiest to standardise on that.
What I heard (and I don't remember where was that an RD250 had a 5 speed gearbox which actually had the same 6 speed internals as the 400, and you could remove a stop to get 6 speeds. If you did it incompetently, you ended up with something as above. But I never had a 250 and nor did anyone I knew, so this could be complete bollox. Regards, Ian
It was the 350; the YR5 that had the same gearbox as the YDS-7 but the 350 offered 6 gears whereas the 250 offered 5. I don't think the 400 was even thought of then. I had a Silver Bullet that *said* 250 on the side panels.
But, in Southeast Asia where the bikes like the Honda Dream and the Suzuki Smash outnumber cages by maybe ten to one, that shift pattern is considered normal. Have a look at http://phuketdir.com/swsuzuki/index.htm and look for an icon that looks like this: (N) (4) (1) (3) (2) You can shift up from 4 to N to 1, and you can shift down from 1 to N to 4. There's no clutch control on these bikes. The clutch is automatic, but the gearbox is manual. Operate it with you left foot, just like a real bike, except the pedal is a rocker: Press with your toe to shift up, and press with your heel to shift down (or maybe it's the other way 'round, I forget.) There's usually indicator lights on the instrument cluster to remind you which gear you're in. Of course, on a rental bike that's been beat to hell, the lights prob'ly don't work. (Don't ask me how I know.) Beauty Funny every time. -- Foo!
Hmm... Just realized you said "stop". That's not how my BMW oilhead works. Actually, I don't REALLY know. I've never seen the inside of the gearbox, so maybe there is a stop, but if so, it's redundant. See, on the BMW, when you're in top gear, you CAN pull up on the lever. You can pull it up all the way; It just doesn't do anything. Likewise, in 1st gear, you can press it all the way down, but it don't turn no shaft. This is actually an important UI feature that works with the klunkiness of the oilhead gearbox. If you press down and it don't move, you're NOT in first: It's stuck, and you need to stomp harder. You've made it to first when you press down and feel nothing. Either that, I guess or you've sheared something off. -- Foo!
Argh. You posted separately to various newsgroups instead of all at once to all of them. I'm adding alt.motorcycles to this thread. It has to do with practicalities in shifting while in traffic. Someone else explained how racers use a 1 up 5 down arrangement, but even that maintains essentially the same feature: N is halfway between 1 and 2, and while shifting, the gearbox usually skips N. To put N between any other pairs of gears or after top gear would be silly: You'd have to click-click-click all the way up to it and then, when the light turns green, go all the way back down to 1. To put N at the bottom would also not work practically. As you slowed down for a red light, stop sign, or other traffic problem, you'd eventually end up in N, and you would be require to shift again to get to 1. I do not consciously think about the number of the gear the transmission is in; I just know that it's too high, too low, or just right. If I need another gear on whatever direction, I shift that way. (Sometimes when I'm riding on the freeway, I want another gear, so I shift up ... and nothing happens. I was in 5th already.) Likewise, as I slow down, I keep downshifitng appropriately, and when I come to the end of the gears, the transmission is in gear and I'm ready to go again without any extra shifitng. The only time I need N is when I'm at a long red light. Then there's enough time to concentrate on the half-click it takes. When the light turns green, a simple stab downwards takes it into first. So the "1-down 5-up" pattern is practical in real traffic. (And in my day-to-day riding, I generally ignore N. During normal shifting, the transmission skips it, so "1-down 5-up" is not even accurate -- but it is shorter than "6 gears with N between 1 and 2.") As for controls standards, there was a time when there were no mandated standards for the major controls on a motorcycle. There were all kinds of confusing arrangements for controls. Someone who had trained on one style could make serious errors on another. This also complicated motorcycle training: a newbie might learn one style and then have to relearn for a different kind of motorcycle. I don't know the history of different control layouts, but in the end, it was the DOT that mandated how they work. (They did the same thing for cars, too. By the way, PRNDL came from Mercedes.)
This doesn't make sense (to me). If N's at the bottom, you'd click down from first to neutral. Then when you pulled away you'd change up to first. If N's between 1st and 2nd you click from 2nd to N or 1st to N and stop. Then when you pulled away you'd change down to first. I don't see the difference.
This happens because the shifting mechanism in a motorcycle transmission is a barrel with wiggly slots in it. Each transmission fork has its slot to follow as the barrel rotates, and the barrel has 4 or 5o or 6 canonical positions (plus the 1/2-step between 1 and 2 for N). The shifter operates a pawl that pulls the barrel in this direction or that, and a steel ball with a spring pushes on a set of detents in the barrel to make it lock in a canonical position. And yup, a badly designed barrel will allow an instant shift between top and 1. Yikes!
I noticed that on my R-GS. I'd rather have the lever have a bit of give to it than not move when it's at one end or another, for the exact reason you mentined. The clunkiness of the oilhead gearbox is a safety feature. Even the loud sewing machine sound emitted by the oilhead engine is not enough to be heard over the usual traffic noise, but the hmmmm CLUNK hmmmmm CLUNK hmmmm CLUNK is startling enough to alert cagers and pedestrians alike that something big is headed their way.
Timberwoof wrote I do. I am quite anal about it really and I count them all up and I count them all down again and if I had a pencil and a bit of paper attached to the tank I would probably write it down as well. Mine is always just right but then I always know what gear I am in before any changing needs to be done.
No idea, but at one time I had five bikes, mostly Brits, and had 4 different gear change patterns if you include left and right foot gear shifts. Two had gears on the left, foot brake on the right, but one was 1 up and 2 down, and the other was 1 down and 2 up. The other two were gears on the right, I wish I could remember the bikes, but time intervenes. Previous ones had a hand change and a car like gearbox. I can feel a bout of Alzeimers coming on just thinking about it. What was the question?
Why does this not surprise me? As definite subscriber to the "I am in the right one for the moment what ever that happens to be" school.
wrote I dunno, it should do because I am not a naturally anal type person but I do count all sorts of things for no good reason.
I used to be like that until I bought a GL1200A Goldwing Aspencade. I still count but I use the gear display for confirmation, espceially when stopped and I lack the cue of vehicle-to-engine-speed ratio. Roger that! I wonder what idiotic attempt at inane insult mentioning this Goldwing feature will have drawn.
I find the N position where it is to be handiest in heavy stop-go traffic, if you spend a lot of the time not getting out of second.
