I don’t know what quick shifters on motorcycles do or how they work.
In: Engineering
A quick google search will provide many quick answers to that question. What parts do you need an ELI5 for?
They momentarily stop the ignition and fueling to the engine when you shift gears. That allows you to shift into a new gear without lowering the throttle or engaging the clutch.
Answer: You can switch gears by just pushing up on the gear lever, instead of pulling the clutch, shifting gears and releasing the clutch
Fancier bikes like my S1K even rev-match on downshifts
You can up-shift on a motorcycle pretty easily without using the clutch by letting off the throttle to take the load off the transmission.
A quick shifter does this for you, typically by interrupting ignition or fuel momentarily when you lift up your toe to shift. Fancier quick shifters also use an “autoblipper” to rev match and allow you to downshift as well.
First you have to understand the motorcycle transmissions don’t operate like cars. When you shift from gear to gear in a car, you unselect a gear travel thru some neutral space and then synchronize to the next gear selected. Motorcycles use a cassette transmission, think of it like stacking legos, you can either add one to the top or one to the bottom, but they are always connected. Or beads on an abacus, you can slide them back and forth but they are always on the same bar.
So a quick shifter has a couple parts. A sensor in the shifter peg, a control module, and a way to link into the ignition harness. When the sensor “feels” you putting pressure on the shifter peg, it triggers the control module to interrupt the ignition circuit for a moment. That split second interruption cuts the engines power causing the parts in the transmission to not be under load and allows the shift to occur. Similarly how pulling in the clutch disconnects the engine output from the wheel interrupting the power transfer, this does it by stopping the spark plug from firing. Quickshifters can interrupt power in millisecond measurements.
You can manually do this by accelerating, then when you want to shift, push on the shifter and quickly close and open the throttle. You should be able to feel the shifter go from being hard to move to easy to move when the throttle gets closed.
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