In the wet, what would you do if the ABS is triggered ?

In the wet, if you trigger ABS (i.e feel the rumble): do you ...

  • Ease off on the braking

  • Keep the same braking

  • Pull harder (i.e. pull through the rumble)

Results are only viewable after voting.
aSTerix

aSTerix

Joined
Dec 18, 2014
Messages
681
Location
Oman
Bike
ST1100AY
I started riding motobikes long before ABS had made its way across from aviation, so was never formally trained on how to get the best from it.

About 15 years ago I went on a 3 day advanced riding skills course and we spent a lot of time "exploring" the ABS capabilities. This turned out to be very educational to say the least.

After the course I had a different way of using an ABS equipped bike especially in the wet.

There are many different schools of thought on this and I was wondering what the result of a poll would be !
 
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ABS, shouldn't in my opinion change how you ride/brake. It is only a mechanical aid in potentially emergency situations which allows you to brake and steer at the same time without the fear of locking a wheel and inducing a skid. It will also provide assistance when unexpected changes in road surfaces would mean the planned braking distance would have to increase without ABS, i.e. Diesel on the surface etc. Although ABS will not necessarily provide a shorter stopping distance over non ABS equipped vehicles.
If riders are triggering ABS frequently then their riding style is questionable at best and their braking technique probably requires training input.
My present BeaST does not have ABS and in the last 6 years as far as I'm aware the wheels have never locked during braking, emergency stop or otherwise.
My last bike a CBF1000 had ABS/CBS and what felt like considerably stronger brakes, over 4 years as far as I know it never triggered the ABS.
Regardless of which braking system you have, braking technique is still extremely important to achieve shorter stopping distances. When braking always do it way ahead of the hazard, with light application first to weight the front suspension/wheel, then brake more heavily if required once weight has transferred forward. A snatched brake will extend your stopping distance even with ABS if enough force is applied to lock the wheel and activate the ABS. When I say lock the wheel, modern ABS has moved on a long way since Dunlop Anti Skid in the 70's but it's a term that is easily understood.
I have an article on ABS somewhere on why it isn't saving lives, if I find it I'll post, I don't necessarily agree with the findings but in lockdown it's something else to read other than the BBC.
Upt'North.
 
Great article Upt' North. For me or my riding level (riding to many years to count) ABS is a must have. I had a 1990 ST1100 non-ABS and it was guaranteed that hard breaking caused the rear end to slide right. I ride in the city a lot and for the most part cars, sorry their drivers, do stupid thing. The day I made the decision to change to an ABS assisted braking bike was when a car pulled a U turn in front of me on a city street in a 50km zone. Knowing what the 1100 was going to do allowed me to keep the bike right side up and avoided an accident. Now with the ST1300 with ABS I have not been able to cause any sliding when breaking hard. I feel much safer. So for me ABS is game changer.

I think the take away here is that we all, as motorcycle riders, should be doing control manoeuvres. I find that when possible, under various road conditions, I break hard, pretend there is something in the middle of the road that I need to avoid just to see what Estee (my bike's name) will do or better still what I will do. Understanding your bike is key. But having said that when technology can assist I am all.

My 2cents.
 
Upt' North said:
www.bennetts.co.uk

Why isn’t ABS saving our lives?

Safety tech has spread like wildfire over the last few years but death rates aren’t dropping – and it’s down to human nature
www.bennetts.co.uk

Take from it what you will.
Upt'North.
Click to expand...
Risk Compensation is a very real thing, and for most of us it is unavoidable. Take off on your bike in shorts and a backwards baseball cap and tell me you don't ride more gingerly that you would in a full riding suit with boots, gloves, and a $500 helmet. I don't do it often, but when I ride non-ATG, the pace is undeniably more sedate. When we get a choice to apply an innovation to either safety or performance, we often choose performance. If our make-up is such that we were pushing the limits before, we will likely be pushing the new higher limits after. That is the only reason I don't own a KTM 1290 SAS. At the very least we split the gains between them. Listen to the talk of how this or that brand of sticky tires allows you to more effortlessly scrape the shiny parts. While you are effortlessly scraping the shiny parts a dog walks out in front of you in a corner with limited sight distance. Then you slam the dog. Or you say "heck, I have ABS, I'll just clamp the brakes". Then you bite the dust because you were leaned way over. Your learning, rather than slowing down, is that your next bike will have Bosch CORNERING ABS. That will fix it.

One silly thing that I do even with new motorcycles is buy liability only insurance coverage. If I toss the bike down the tarmac, it is all on me.
 
Totally agree with the advice above, and having gone through IOM & ROSPA training, you should be aware of all road conditions at all times, and be extra vigilant in adverse conditions. ROSPA examiner's best bit of advise was "ride like everyone around you is an £$%*ing idiot, and expect the unexpected".

As to wearing the "correct gear" there's a little phrase to keep in mind ... ... ... "Dress for the slide, not the ride"
 
I'm with UP on this one!

In all of my 380,000 miles on ST1300s, while riding my ABS 2010, that I can tell you that I have used the ABS once! It was a wet neighborhood street, at a four way stop. I came to a stop, and I see a SUV to my right that stopped after I did. I started across to go straight when all of a sudden, I see her moving! I hit the brakes and I could feel the ABS kicking in, due to the wet surface. I hit my horn, which caught her attention and she slammed on her brakes.

The only reason I didn't go down was because of the ABS. I know if I would have been on either of the 2004s, I would have gone down, because the front would have been locked up.

I refuse to ride to the limits/edge. It's not my riding style! I know plenty that get on a motorcycle and it's crank it wide open.

There was a guy that I had met many years ago. His thing was that it was always a race. A couple of years after meeting him, he was killed out in the middle of nowhere when he came across an accident. They estimated that he was doing about 100mph when he ran into one of the cars that was still out in the road.
 
The biggest issue I hear of with ABS, or at least the thing that sticks in my mind is that some people ease off the brake when the chattering starts. It is foreign to them and they let off the brake to stop it. Here is an instance where a safety device is counter-productive and a reason why everyone should try to replicate it a few times, or more so it is not a surprise when it occurs. To the argument that some ride harder because they have ABS, Im not so sure I can agree with that. ABS is nothing more than a moniker or sticker until you need it. I cant imagine that people think about it to the point of tailoring their riding style to it. If a person is going to ride at mach2 with their hair on fire, they are going to do it with ABS or without... :twocents1:
 
Bmacleod said:
The biggest issue I hear of with ABS, or at least the thing that sticks in my mind is that some people ease off the brake when the chattering starts. It is foreign to them and they let off the brake to stop it. Here is an instance where a safety device is counter-productive and a reason why everyone should try to replicate it a few times, or more so it is not a surprise when it occurs. ...
Click to expand...

When I felt mine, it happened so fast and I was concentrating on her, I didn't feel the need to let up.
 
Bmacleod said:
The biggest issue I hear of with ABS, or at least the thing that sticks in my mind is that some people ease off the brake when the chattering starts. It is foreign to them and they let off the brake to stop it. Here is an instance where a safety device is counter-productive and a reason why everyone should try to replicate it a few times, or more so it is not a surprise when it occurs. To the argument that some ride harder because they have ABS, Im not so sure I can agree with that. ABS is nothing more than a moniker or sticker until you need it. I cant imagine that people think about it to the point of tailoring their riding style to it. If a person is going to ride at mach2 with their hair on fire, they are going to do it with ABS or without... :twocents1:
Click to expand...
When the ABS kicked in on my NT700V, I was concentrating so hard on braking that I didn't let up at all. In fact, that experience with the ABS was what convinced me to not own a bike without it in the future. In that case, it wasn't in the wet, but on dry pavement. Vertical. With nothing on the road to make it slick. (I pulled in behind a delivery truck on the freeway, and instead of slowing down, he was coming to a complete stop.) After everything was back to normal, I wondered to myself if the chattering feeling was the ABS.

My point is, that I was focused entirely on braking. Which is what anyone would be doing when they brake hard enough to engage the ABS. In those few seconds of trying to keep from doing a face plant on the back of a delivery truck, the last thing in my mind was to let off on the brakes and troubleshoot this new feel in the brakes.

I think the only time someone would let off on the brakes when engaging the ABS in the wet, would be in doing parking lot drills where you have no reason to continue braking that hard. But in a real situation where ABS kicks in, the mind will disregard the chattering out of self-preservation.

I'm not sure if ABS makes people ride harder...but it very well could have. I'm certain it did so on car drivers. Way back when I first started driving, ABS wasn't on cars at all. Or if it was, it was on the real expensive cars. People rarely tailgated. They might've been too close, but nothing like it was in the years after when ABS was on all the cars. It's one of those things that changed so quickly, that I noticed it. Cause ==> Effect.

Chris
 
Please don't think I was trying to be a smart arris (it just comes natural) when I said as far as I am aware my bike brakes haven't locked in the last 12 years, I was merely saying we shouldn't ride expecting ABS to pick up the pieces for us. One day they will lock, it's sod's law, although I can smell diesel from 400 yards away, you should see the size of my nose.
The loading of the front wheel was taught to me during advanced rider training in the 90's, it becomes natural and is worthwhile to try with or without ABS, if you snatch a front brake equipped with ABS it will try to lock and the ABS will release and apply the brakes accordingly, just the way it should. But the premature activation (I've seen a therapist) will extend your braking distance.
Upt'North.
 
I have three ABSII ST1100s and one standard (that now has the ABSII calipers but not the system). If I know I am going to be riding where the idiots and mobile phone booths are going to be plentiful above 'normal' (like downtown Nashville), I usually take one of the ABSII ST1100s just because smidsy factor will be cranked up. In almost 400,000 miles on ST1100s, the ABS has kicked in maybe 3 times and in all cases it was a 'abnormal' situation that all the practice in the world would not have prepared me to handle. To me, it's just like any other piece of safety gear - I hope I won't need it but it's mighty nice to have just in case! :biggrin:
 
A motorcycle is not a jet, but we always trained to let the ABS cycle during an aborted takeoff. It was proven in the simulators (and IRL) that doing so resulted in significantly shorter stopping distances. I've seen several motorcycle You Tubers and Bloggers state you should back off the brakes until the ABS does not cycle. I'm no expert, but that does not fit with my experience in the aviation world and seems to negate the whole purpose of ABS.
As I said earlier, a bike is not a jet and the sophistication of the ABS system on a bike may not equal that of a jet costing tens on millions of dollars, so my aviation experience may not translate into the two-wheeled world. That said, I have seen many pilots who thought they were smarter than the ABS go off the end of the runway (during sim training), while I just stood on the brakes, maintained directional control while the ABS happily chattered along and I would stop well short of the end of the runway. Yes, a simulator is not the real world, but it's uncannily accurate and I have aborted takeoffs IRL, using the ABS and always met or beat the calculated abort distance. Of course, good braking technique is still required on a bike, i.e. loading the front wheel then brake hard vs. jamming on the brakes, but I'm guessing the average rider should allow the ABS to cycle during a panic stop. I would love to see some real-world data on motorcycle stopping distances using both techniques.
 
Maybe I misunderstand the intent of the survey questions but they beg the question as to if the OP understands how ABS works. If you're braking hard enough in the wet to activate the ABS then ease up if you're able to or want to, take note that it's slippery and you might be braking too hard for conditions and move on. If you're in a panic stop because someone has turned left in front of you then the ABS is doing its job. Keeping braking hard and try to ride around the obstruction if you can. My 2002 ST is a standard non ABS and in the future I'd never purchase any bike unless it has ABS.

Driver training required to obtain a license in Canada, and I'm sure in all of the US, is so basic and rudimentary that it in not surprising to hear that many drivers don't even understand how their ABS system works. When my daughters finished their drivers ed classes and had their learners permit I took them to a local parking lot to practice hard stops and panic stops. Recognizing that they were still new drivers it was still surprising to see how tentative they were on the brakes and their natural reaction was to let up on the pedal if the ABS kicked in because they thought something was wrong with the van when the pedal pulsated. It was quite surprising to them (me too) when they learned to put the pedal to the floor and hold it there and how fast the van was able to stop.
 
Everybody practice emergency and threshold braking and you will be better prepared and less likely to lock up the front wet, dry, or dirt.

Doesn't matter if you have ABS or not, do the drills.

My poll answer is to brake normally and the way you've been practicing.
 
On the other side of the coin, as our bikes ages, we have to be careful, if the ABS system becomes intermittent.

Last month, while driving to work in my 99 Suburban (with 185k miles, with lots of hard off road miles) in the rain. I had to stop hard.
A traffic light changed, I was only doing 35 mph. The abs kicked in and the peddle when to the floor buzzing. I held it down.
Instead of a "normal" smooth straight ABS braking, I thought I was riding a bucking bronco.
The truck swerved left then right then left then right... - several times. I was all over the road.
One side would grab then let go, the other side would grab then let go......
I thought I was going to go through the intersection but she stopped just past the line.
I had lots of room and normal ABS would have stopped me in half the distance!
I would have been in heavy traffic, but thanks to Covic, I had the road to myself and did not hit anyone.
I pulled over and pulled the ABS pump fuse.
The ABS sensors in my truck are buried somewhere in the wheel bearing and are now most likely defective.
It is a different setup than our bikes but be aware anything electronic, and old, could go flaky on you, when you least expect it.

Just be careful and test your ABS systems in a safe location once in a while......
 
aSTerix said:
I started riding motobikes long before ABS had made its way across from aviation, so was never formally trained on how to get the best from it.

In 2004 I went on a 3 day advanced skills course through BMW and we spent a lot of time "exploring" the ABS capabilities. This turned out to be very educational to say the least , different bikes on many surfaces. After the course I had a different way of using an ABS equipped bike especially in the wet.

There are many different schools of thought on this and I was wondering what the result of a poll would be !
Click to expand...
If your abs is kicking in
a) your going too fast
b) your braking incorrectly, too hard on the rear not enough front
c) poor tires
d) panic stop caused by some idiot
e) a and c
f) all of the above
 
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