Five Essential Safety Items for Your Harley
Stay safe on the road — or roadside — with these tips from H-D Forums.
If you ride motorcycles long enough, you know bad things happen. The best you can do is to mitigate those risks and be prepared for when something inevitably goes down, whether it’s you, your bike, or both. Let’s take a moment to discuss five safety items to keep you safe, and keep you prepared.
1. Protect Your Cabeza
First off, let’s talk about the most obvious choice: a helmet. We recommend a full-face helmet in a bright color that makes you more visible to motorists, and protects your entire noggin. Granted, dark-colored half helmets look cool, but they fail to protect some very vulnerable parts of your face, and a black helmet can easily blend into the background when going for a rip at night.
2. Stay Powered Up
Next up, we highly recommend carrying around a fully-charged portable power pack for your device of choice. There’s nothing worse than breaking down in the middle of nowhere only to discover you’ve got 7% battery life left on your phone and you haven’t seen a car for miles. Although a lot of bikes now come with USB ports, that won’t help you if your bike is broken down.
3. Keep Safety Simple…and Effective
Speaking of getting motorists’ attention, we recommend this simple but effective upgrade. It’s called the LifeSaver Horn, and it effectively relocates the horn button so that you don’t have to reposition your hands on the grips. The horn button on Harleys is mounted high, and there are a lot of times when you’ll need to reach it quickly while pulling in the clutch and braking to avoid an accident. (Check out how you can win a FREE LifeSaver Horn below!)
4. Brighten-Up Your Ride
Another great item to make your more noticeable out on the road is a tail light upgrade. Whether opting for a cool LED taillight that’s brighter; changing your rear signal lenses to red and wiring them to get brighter when you brake; or installing a flashing brake light, they all improve your safety — and they look cool, too.
5. Put Eyes in the Back of Your Head
While this last tip may not apply to everyone, we still think it’s important to include on this list. Harleys are notoriously vibration-prone, and while there are a lot of cool-looking aftermarket mirrors, we implore you to pick quality units with good vibration resistance.
Riding safely means keeping your head on a swivel, and that means that you don’t have time to waste when glancing in your mirror and trying to figure out what that fuzzy blob was before executing a lane change or avoiding an obstacle.
Also, be sure that the design isn’t too small to effectively see everything, too. It’s understandable to like the aesthetic of a low-profile mirror; just make sure you have a wide enough field of view to see what’s behind you.
This is one place you don’t want to cheap out. Resist the temptation and spend a little bit of time researching, and you’ll find a design that suits your style and keeps you safe and sound.
Win a LifeSaver Horn!
H-D Forums is giving our readers a chance at snagging a FREE LifeSaver Horn! If you reside in the continental U.S., you can enter to win via the link below. Online entry is open until Sept. 4, 2017. Winners will be selected randomly. Good luck! Be safe!
HDForums.com’s LiveSaverHorn Giveaway
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