Why Don’t Motorcycles Have Landing Gear?

One of the reasons I bought my Yamaha Virago 535 was fairly straightforward. At 71 I wanted to get back onto two wheels, but I didn’t particularly want some enormous great motorcycle landing on top of me.

The Virago looks right. It looks like a proper motorcycle, has a proper V-twin and enough performance to entertain me without requiring the reactions I probably had 40 years ago. More importantly, it is relatively light and manageable.

Then, standing at a bus stop in Yeovil, just about to board, I watched a large Harley-Davidson go past. On it was an overweight rider and an equally overweight pillion, whom I presumed to be his wife.

Now, a big Harley isn’t exactly a lightweight object before you put anybody on it. Add two generously proportioned adults, with the pillion perched considerably higher than the rider, and the combined centre of gravity must have been heading for the upper atmosphere.

Yet while they were moving, none of this seemed to matter. The Harley sailed past quite happily. I found myself wondering what happened when they reached the next set of traffic lights.

Because that’s the odd thing about motorcycles. Weight isn’t necessarily the problem while you’re riding one. Get the thing moving and even a very large motorcycle becomes remarkably manageable. It’s when you stop that gravity reasserts itself and all that metal, fuel, luggage and humanity has to be kept upright by a pair of legs. Once it starts leaning, all that weight acting through a relatively high centre of gravity rapidly turns into a substantial amount of motorcycle determined to reach the ground.

Which led to a thought. Why don’t motorcycles have landing gear?

Nothing elaborate. A small retractable stabiliser on either side. As you slow to walking pace, flick a switch and two little wheels descend. Come to a halt and the motorcycle sits upright without you having to support it. Pull away and they retract again. You’re back on two wheels.

And while we’re at it, why not let them extend a little further when parked and do away with the centre stand as well?

I thought this was all rather clever for approximately the length of time it took me to search the Internet.

Of course somebody had already thought of it.

In fact, people have been playing with the idea for decades. There is a US patent from 1991 describing retractable stop-support wheels for precisely this purpose, including automatic operation according to road speed. A later patent describes an aftermarket system using 12-volt electric linear actuators, pivoting arms and little wheels operated from a switch on the handlebars.

There went my first million.

More to the point, there are commercial versions. LegUp LandinGear makes systems primarily for heavyweight motorcycles such as Honda Gold Wings, Harleys and Indians. The principle is pretty much what had occurred to me at the bus stop. Slow to walking pace, deploy the wheels, stop without putting your feet down, then retract them as you accelerate.

Excellent. I’ll have one.

Ah.

The current systems retail at around $3,650. By the time one had crossed the Atlantic and HMRC had welcomed it to Britain in their customary fashion, we’d be talking several thousand pounds.

Now, I can understand spending that sort of money on a large and expensive Gold Wing or Harley, particularly if it means somebody can carry on riding a motorcycle they love. But my entire Virago probably isn’t worth what the landing gear would cost.

Which inevitably raises the question: does it really need to cost that much?

I’m not suggesting anybody is profiteering. These are specialised, low-volume products with development costs, bike-specific fittings, electronics, manufacturing and all the liability that comes with selling something whose failure could dump a customer and his motorcycle in the road.

But strip the problem back to what it actually has to do and there isn’t an enormous amount there. You need a crossmember attached to proper structural points on the motorcycle, two pivoting arms with a small wheel on each and probably a pair of 12-volt linear actuators. Add a handlebar switch, suitable controls, mechanical stops and a proper safety interlock and you have the bones of it.

A very rough costing using readily available bits puts a crude experimental version somewhere around £200-£450.

At which point I start getting interested.

The difficult bit isn’t making two arms go up and down. I could probably achieve that in the garage and frighten myself with it by teatime. The difficult bit is making absolutely certain they don’t go down when they shouldn’t.

Any road-going version would need a fail-safe speed interlock. Above perhaps 5 mph, the wheels are up. Not “should be up”. Up. The rider shouldn’t be able to press the wrong button at 50 mph and suddenly discover that his motorcycle has acquired undercarriage halfway round a bend.

Then there’s another slight nuisance: roads aren’t flat. Stop on a cambered road and one stabiliser may need to extend further than the other, which suggests two independently controlled actuators rather than one and a common linkage. Exactly how they sense the ground is an engineering problem for another day. For the moment, it’s enough that the problem is hardly beyond the wit of man.

And then, inevitably, scope creep sets in. If you’ve already got two powered legs capable of supporting the motorcycle, give them a little more travel and they could push the bike completely upright. Stop slightly off vertical, press the button and let the motorcycle stand itself up. You’ve now got low-speed landing gear and an electric centre stand from essentially the same bits.

I was feeling rather pleased with this train of thought when I realised that I already own a motorcycle stabiliser.

It’s sitting in the garage.

The Watsonian Monza sidecar I’ve been restoring is, when you strip away all the romantic nonsense about sidecars, an enormous stabiliser bolted permanently to one side of a motorcycle. Attach it to the Virago and the bike can’t fall over when I stop. I don’t need to put a foot down or use a centre stand. It even has suspension, lights, a comfortable seat and somewhere for Hayley or the shopping.

For a while that was precisely what I intended to do with it. However, several friends with considerably more experience of motorcycle combinations than I have warned me to think very carefully about it. A motorcycle and sidecar may look like a motorcycle with an extra wheel, but it doesn’t behave like one. I’ve spent years with the instincts of a solo rider, and the dynamics of a combination are sufficiently different that those instincts can sometimes be exactly the wrong ones.

At 71 I’ve decided I don’t particularly need to discover that distinction halfway around a corner.

There’s a financial argument as well. I bought the Monza for £250 and have restored and improved it for comparatively little additional outlay. Once finished, I reckon it could fetch somewhere around £2,000 on the open market. So rather than bolt it permanently to the Virago, I’ve decided to sell it.

My enormous, permanently deployed motorcycle stabiliser will therefore be going to somebody else.

Which brings me straight back to the original problem.

There is a serious point lurking underneath all this. Motorcyclists are getting older. I’m hardly unusual in returning to motorcycles later in life, and there are plenty of people considerably older than me still riding them.

The problem isn’t necessarily riding. A competent rider doesn’t suddenly lose the ability to control a motorcycle because another birthday has gone past. The difficulty increasingly becomes what happens at walking pace and, particularly, at no pace whatsoever.

A big motorcycle can be an absolute pussycat at 50 mph and a bloody great lump when you’re shuffling it backwards out of a parking space. Once it starts going over, there comes a point when youthful optimism about catching it really ought to give way to getting yourself out of the way.

The conventional answer as we get older is to buy progressively lighter motorcycles, perhaps eventually move to a trike and, ultimately, hang up the leathers. I don’t particularly like the inevitability of that progression.

If somebody remains perfectly capable of riding safely, but the problem is simply supporting 250 or 300 kg of motorcycle at traffic lights or manoeuvring it around a car park, surely the more sensible engineering answer is to deal with that particular problem rather than give up the motorcycle.

Retractable landing gear does exactly that.

The idea isn’t mine. The patents prove that fairly conclusively, and the commercial systems prove that it works. What interests me now is whether the same job could be done much more simply and cheaply for ordinary motorcycles rather than only making economic sense on £20,000 heavyweight tourers.

Whether I actually build one is another matter.

I have a certain history here. Projects tend to arrive faster than they depart. About this time last year I decided that an old shotgun stock would make a rather splendid table lamp. I acquired the stock, the lamp fittings and the various other bits, and they’re all still sitting on my workbench waiting for me to solve the relatively minor problem of how to split the stock neatly lengthways, cut a channel for the flex, and put the whole thing back together without making it look as though somebody has attacked it with an axe.

I haven’t abandoned it. I just haven’t quite got round to it.

In the meantime the Virago and the Monza somehow became more urgent. This is one of the hazards of being more interested in solving problems than necessarily finishing the solution before another, more interesting problem comes along.

Unfortunately, I also have an unhealthy tendency to look at something costing £3,000 and wonder whether I could make it for £300.

On the other hand, this is supposed to be a Motor Club. Somewhere among the Old Conways there must be somebody who understands fabrication, somebody who understands electronics and, with any luck, somebody foolish enough to think this sounds like an enjoyable way of wasting several weekends.

Perhaps I don’t have to build it at all.

I’ll supply the idea. I might even supply the Virago.

Although I think we’ll test it on something else first.

This is how trouble starts.

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