I’m curious to why motorcycles essentially gear upwards from neutral to 1st. Then gear in the shifter down from 1st into 2nd, then 3rd and so on.
How do motorcyclists get back into neutral too? When gearing down from 2nd does it hit neutral before 1st?(and the gearbox just ignores neutral when upshifting?)
In: 2
Pretty sure it’s to avoid accidentally shifting into 2nd or 3rd from the start.
Neutral is pretty much ignored, the gearbox doesn’t really care if you go into neutral for a sec when shifting between really anything. Shifting from any gear into neutral is also pretty safe.
Neutral is a half shift. You have to intentionally put it there. Its hard to hit if you arent trying on most bikes.
Most bikes I know are the other way around
1 is down. The rest is up.
On some race bikes the reverse is used (often aftermarket afaik).
Why is neutral between 1 and 2? Because they chose to.
In essence. There is a neutral between all gears. But you don’t usually notice this because the changing mechanism skips it. If you ever hear of a “false neutral”. That’s when the gear changing mechanism “stuck” between 2 gears instead of changing to the next one.
The only thing they did was make the neutral between 1 and 2 a bit different so you can purposefully keep it halfway. Often made so that it is near impossible to get it there when moving. So when driving and shifting up or down it will skip the neutral “automatically”. If you do get it into neutral you’ll maybe look like a dork suddenly revving the bike, but that’s it. No harm done. Apart from your ego.
Now they could’ve chosen to put another neutral at the end of the selector drum (the thing that dictates which gears is engaged when). The you could go all the way down to neutral. But in traffic that can be quite annoying as you don’t usually need neutral. And never quickly. But changing back to first in a “panic” because the traffic started moving quicker than expected can happen at anytime.
If I’m understanding this correctly, you’re describing GP shifting.
Most bikes go up, with 1st being bottom, a half notch to neutral, 2nd-3rd-4th-5th- maybe 6th.
Some bikes are the opposite since it’s easier to jam through up shifts on rapid acceleration with a deep lean angle like what would be needed on a race bike. The Standard way was just what was chosen since it’s easy and there was an established agreement to standardize.
Neutral is a half notch shift. Not quite the same force between 1 and 2, and yes, when shifting it doesn’t really matter what gear it’s in if the clutch is still pulled in so having neutral between doesn’t matter. It matters even less because you’re flying through the gear shift pretty quickly.
Because you want the full upward setting to be a gear, instead of having it be neutral and then have to shift down for 1st.
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