Motorcycle Quick Shifters

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I don’t know what quick shifters on motorcycles do or how they work.

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4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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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