Equipment Outfitters

Off-road riding is a popular pastime with many motorcyclists, and involves the dual-purpose trail bikes — motorcycles that are at home on both roads and the dirt. They are designed with greater ground clearance, greater clearance between tyres and mudguards, higher footrests, longer suspension travel and ‘knobbly’ tires.

It is an excellent hobby and can be a very good way of keeping fit. A tough ride requires a lot of physical strength and endurance. Read the rest of this entry »

Not only a safety requirement, but also a legal one in this country. An approved motorcycle helmet must be worn by riders and pillion passengers when the motorcycle is used on the road.

There are two basic motorcycle helmet styles, open face and full face: both are available in either glass fibre or polycarbonate. Read the rest of this entry »

Off-road riding is a popular pastime with many motorcyclists, and involves the dual-purpose trail bikes — motorcycles that are at home on both roads and the dirt. They are designed with greater ground clearance, greater clearance between tyres and mudguards, higher footrests, longer suspension travel and ‘knobbly’ tyres.

It is an excellent hobby and can be a very good way of keeping fit. A tough ride requires a lot of physical strength and endurance. Read the rest of this entry »

Just about every kid has attempted to jump their bike off something when they were growing up. Those that didn’t certainly never became extreme sport athletes. The small and cruiser-style bikes of the Sixties and Seventies began a shift in how people viewed bicycle riding. Kids found that they were quite maneuverable, and the smaller wheels and fatter rubber tires made them more capable of enduring the thrashing a hard-riding kid could deliver. These new bikes redefined what could be done, and soon kids jumping things found they could jump bigger things, and could ride on softer surfaces, and the idea of dirt racing and jumping just kind of evolved naturally. Read the rest of this entry »

The Obstacles—riders now weave their way through a series of turns that lead them over several obstacles (jumps), ranging from fairly easy to difficult and technically challenging. The jumps are designed to challenge a rider’s ability to the fullest, create close racing, and maximize airtime. Jumps come in many sizes and are linked to create varying degrees of difficulty throughout he course. The jumps are categorized as:

• SINGLE JUMP – rider jumps 20-60 feet (6-18m) onto a flat landing
• DOUBLE JUMP – rider jumps off one obstacle and lands on the far side of the next, usually covering 20-70 feet of terrain
• TRIPLE JUMP – rider must get through three consecutive jumps and may choose to jump them as sets of two and one, or as a group of three (launching over an entire triple requires the rider to catch up to 25 feet (7.6m) of vertical air over a distance of 75 feet (23m) or more. Triples are real crowd pleasers) Read the rest of this entry »

As off-road motorcycle riders have become more skilled, and as the equipment available from manufacturers has become consistently lighter and more powerful with an ever-increasing range of suspension travel, the physical boundaries of what can and can’t be done on a motocross (motoX) bike are expanding. In the early days of off-road motorcycling, the thought that riders would someday leap 40 or 50 feet (12-15m) in the air, regularly, would have seemed absurd. However that is precisely the state of extreme motoX today. Extreme riding is not as new as today’s riders would make it seem, though.

Extreme Riding is not as new as today’s riders would make it seem, though. Hill climbs, trials riding (riders negotiate through a broad range of obstacles, requiring low speed, highly technical, balanced handling), and motoX racing have been part of motorcycle sport for years. In their day, many other riders pushed the limits of what had been done to that date. Daredevil riderexample of an early extreme pioneer, who also had a pretty good grasp of self-promotion. Evel Knievel is a classic Read the rest of this entry »

Charging down a hill at warp speed on a bike is a rush that most of us have enjoyed at some time. As bikes developed they headed down the path of tradition, and for a while, all a bike buyer could find was a road-racing-style bike or a cruiser. Road bikes were fine for speed and offered a broad range of gears. But road bikes offered little comfort and didn’t take very well to rough surfaces. Cruisers were very comfortable, but heavy and not geared very well. All that changed in the early Eighties when a Japanese bike company by the name of Specialized purchased a unique bike made in Marin County, California, and took it home for a closer look.

The mountain bike can trace its roots back to when a small and unknown group of riders in Marin County, California first began riding stripped down and beefed up Schwinns on mountain roads just prior to WWII. One can only assume that the natural propensity of extreme oriented riders continued to pursue downhill riding until a few notable pioneers of the modern mountain bike began simultaneously experimenting and redefining the equipment they were riding. According to one of those pioneers, Gary Fischer, the early Schwinn “Ballooner” Cruiser bikes everyone was riding were so heavy that they were pushed, not ridden, uphill. Fischer is reported to have been the first to equip a Ballooner with multiple gears, an act that made it easier to pedal uphill, but also added 25 lbs (11.35 kg) to their weight. Read the rest of this entry »

Snowboarding was reviled for years by skiers and the ski industry. Early on, most mountains would not allow snowboards on their lift systems or their slopes.

These confrontations were when snowboarders, who justly felt they had a right to be on the hill, responded strongly and aggressively in their own defense. More than a few verbal and physical brawls resulted, enhancing skiers‘ perception that all snowboarders were bad news.

These cultural boundaries are now breaking down as skiers begin to appreciate three things; snowboarding is here to stay, snowboarders ride to have fun, just like they do, and snowboarders have attained a level of skill performance that is equal to or higher than skiing in many ways. Read the rest of this entry »

Motorcycles have always attracted people with a yearning for speed and an appetite for adrenaline. For years, the closest thing anyone could get to that sensation on the water was in a small boat with a big motor. These were fast, but could hardly be called maneuverable. Then in 1965 a Californian banker with a passion for motorcycles conceived of an aquatic version which would become known worldwide as the Jet Ski.

Clayton JACOBSON enjoyed building racing motorcycles in his spare time. He loved going fast on motorcycles— but crashing on hard pavement was not what he considered to be their appeal. The concept of the Jet Ski was born from Jacobson’s theory that a motorcycle for the water would be just as fun to ride as the ones he enjoyed building, but without the pain of a hard landing if you fell off. Mr. Jacobson would be correct. Read the rest of this entry »

Wakeboarding is a relatively new extreme sport. Its heritage can be linked to waterskiing, surfing, windsurfing, skateboarding, and snowboarding, and it is quickly redefining how we look at boat-towed sports.

Towing a surfboard behind either a boat in the water or a car on the beach on waveless days is as old as modern surfing. The need to ride on a board drives many “sideways” sports enthusiasts to try whatever they need to get out and ride on their boards. That’s how skateboarding began, and later windsurfing and snowboarding. For decades, if there was no surf, surfers were known to grab a line and get pulled by a boat or even by a truck running onshore. This was no easy trick, since this was not the intended purpose of a surfboard. Strong surfers could pull it off and get some turns in on a flat day. Read the rest of this entry »