About Motorcycle Tire Tread Wear & Brake Pads

Video Transcript

"Hello! I am Jerry Fishel from Vicious Cycles in Santa Clara Utah for Expert Village. Today we want to go over tire wear and a couple of other front end things. One of the ways to check your tire wear is with a gage. They do make a tire gage. Another way if you don’t have a gage is with a regular Lincoln penny. Your wear limits on almost most bikes is going to be between 1 and 32 seconds or up to the head of a Lincoln penny. If you stick the edge into the groove, if you are above the head of the penny, it is time to change your tire. Another thing you want to watch out for on tires is cupping. If you have any ripples in your tire, or as you are riding down the road and you feel any strange vibration coming from the front or the rear of the bike. Another thing to watch out for is weather cracking all along the sidewall of your tire. This unfortunately is a brand new tire, so you are not going to see any weather cracking. Another thing you want to check is your brake pads. While you are checking your front tire, if you look in on most Harley’s your front caliper is easily exposed to your brake pads. You want to make sure that there is at least of a 1/8 inch. Another thing that we want to talk about is basic maintenance on your windshield and keeping your bike cleaned. One of the things you want to make sure you don’t use is paper towels. You don’t want to use paper towels on your bike, anything that one time had been a wood product. You don’t want to put any more scratches on your bike than you have to. You want to use a micro-fiber type cloth to clean your bike. When you do your windshield, you don’t want to use Windex or any ammonia glass cleaner. You want to make sure you use something like Harley Bug Remover or there is a vast amount of cleaners out there. You want to make sure whatever you are using works with and will protect lexian plastic. "