Any Value in ATGATT??

[ToroGuy]

With the media coverage of Ben R.'s unfortunate accident and serious injuries due to his stupidity, you may find the personal experience of users of the ST-Owners Forum interesteing.

As for myself, motorcycle PPE (personal protective equipment) has saved my bacon a few times including:

1973...doing ~40 MPH on Honda CB450...T-boned on Olds 98 that U-turned from right shoulder...flew over handlebars onto hood and windshield of car sliding to a stop on concrete pavement (similar to Ben)...wearing helmet, leather jacket, gloves, boots...injuries - road rash on perfect jacket and mirror helmet (anybody else have one of those?), bruise on butt, and extreme outburst of anger to cage driver.

1975...dirt riding ~35 MPH on Honda XL125 on pipeline RoW through very tall thick weeds and centered a BIG rock...over the bars with head making a direct hit on the rock...wearing helmet, gloves, boots...3 inch crack in helmet, saw stars for 10 minutes, sore neck for a week, no doctor visit.

1976...dirt riding ~40 MPH on Suzuki TM250 perpendicular across washboard gullies, lapse in concentration, next gully became 6 ft. deep and 10 ft. across, impalled chest into gully bank...wearing helmets, gloves, boots...simple fracture in both arm bones just north of left wrist.

1985...tank-slapper at ~50 MPH on Honda V45 Sabre due to wheelspin exiting corner...highsided...wearing helmet, leather jacket, gloves, and boots...road rash on helmet and jacket, ripped jeans, minor road rash on legs.

1987...passing slow moving farm truck doing 70+ on Honda V45 Sabre, he starts left turn when I'm 30 ft. behind his bumper, glancing blow to drivers door, my body slides along door and left front fender, hits pavement into grassy ditch...wearing helmet, leather jacket, gloves, boots...V45 Sabre w/ 83k miles totalled, helmet cracked and scratched, leather on shoulder torned almost all the way through, very sore body for a few days, no doctor visit. This incident initiated my "never pass going more than 20 MPH faster than passee" rule.

[AZST1300A]

Need option for successful advoidance soo far, PPE yet to be tested.

16 years, full PPE, 'If I had dime for each accident I've avoided...."

[Ken]

Need option for successful advoidance soo far, PPE yet to be tested.

16 years, full PPE, 'If I had dime for each accident I've avoided...."
+1 No damages here but I know if I ever went for a ride without some piece of gear, that'd be my time to go down.

[Kempo-STer]

Best gear I have is my brain...

I ASSUME EVERYONE is going to cut me off...This avoids a panic situation and I remain suprisingly calm when it happens..and of course it has happenned..(to us all I am sure)

[Coop]

Need an option for young and dumb.

[EASt]

Need option for successful advoidance soo far, PPE yet to be tested.

16 years, full PPE, 'If I had dime for each accident I've avoided...."
Ditto. I've never been a serious accident on the motorcycle (knock on wood), but I still ride with all the gear, all the time. I just don't want to take the chance.

I always convince myself before every trip that this'll be the one where I crash. Morbid, yeah, but it puts me into a defensive frame of mind.

[gene]

I took a buddies cruiser home to add piaa's to the front forks and I now know why they wear leather chaps as I melted the back of my new HT overpants to the stupid pipe !!!! It's the ST or nothing and we think we have a heat issue my ST is really cuite cool after that ride !!

[AZST]

Best gear I have is my brain...

Aren't you the one I saw a picture of with cake on his face at a recent STOC event? :p:

--Bryan
04ST1300A
STOC# 5197
:04biker:

[BooST]

Helmet saved me from what would have been a pretty bad scrape and knock on the head when I had a tank slapper and was pitch over the bars at about 35-40 mph. The cause of that was stupidity. Denim jacket and cotton shirt was damaged some, but my skin came out ok.
Again, when a car turned left in front of me the full-face helmet certainly saved me from some serious facial/jaw injury. The left-front section of the helmet's chin guard was pretty scraped up. In this event I was able to slow down, but still hit the car.
I have yet to be saved from injury by leather jacket, gloves, boots, pants. Hope it never happens.
In a lighter vein, I have thought about just going out and scraping my leather gear on the driveway so I would not look like such a new penny. Why not?
After all, fashion conscious people pay up for faded jeans because the don't want to be seen in new jeans.
Might even start an apparel brand of pre-scuffed leather gear called "Rash" and market it through Icon. They like poser gear. :p:

[Tor]

Enough proof, Charlie.

I use ATGATT 100% of the time, winter or summer, rain or shine. I have never been unfortunate enough to test the gear to see if it saved me, but I am sure the day will come, no matter how alert and careful and in the zone I am. And when it comes, I hope ATGATT will help me. In the meantime, all I can do is stay alert, stay educated, hone my skills even more, and always assume everyone else on the road is hellbent on killing me.

[chazs_peanut]

I made the mistake of reading the Hurt report before I began to ride and had serious qualms about riding for a while. I wear ATGATT because I have 2 young children and knowing motorcycling is inherently more dangerous than some other hobbies, I resolved to give myself the most protection I could. Although I hope I never need my PPE, I will always wear it. It's kinda like being a construction worker and wearing steel toe boots and a hard hat. You HOPE you never need it but you plan for the case that you DO need it.

[SteveST1300]

Yes that was him with the cake on his face I still pee myself thinking about that night. We had a great time!:D :03biker:

[Kempo-STer]

Aren't you the one I saw a picture of with cake on his face at a recent STOC event? :p:

--Bryan
04ST1300A
STOC# 5197
:04biker:


Yes BUT it was either the cake or the cager that just cut me off...SEE, always thinking :-)

[jeffmiller]

This clearly is NOT ATGATT! But funny nonetheless...

[Horst]

oh boy ... that tickles ... :D


... as mentioned before .... 3 years ago ... Shoei RF200 (now retired) saved my head ... full leathers helped although I've since gone textile ... much lighter :)

... that and some help from above :bow1:

:biker:

[ToroGuy]

Jeff, the pic is certainly true to the subject of the poST!?!? http://www.st-owners.com/forums/images/icons/icon12.gif

Maybe these dudes just slightly mis-read the PPE message. Rather than correctly underSTanding the smart thing to do is wear PPE "HEAD TO TOE", they heard "HEAD AND TOE"??

Anyway, poST like yours is what makes ST-Owners good, cheap entertainment !!

[jbim]

Same here ATGATT. Actually, I apply this principle to everything I do.

In particular, I paddle a kayak for fitness. I am into endurance racing. I never leave without all my rescue gear and I always dress for the water temperature and not the ambient temperature. For example, I will wear neoprene pants when it's 90 degrees if the water is at 50 degrees.

I think safety is pretty much a matter of frame of mind. The same frame of mind as to why we buy a safe bike with good ABS brakes, we take MSF courses and drive with ATGATT. Not the one where we ride helmet-less, without a valid permit and try to time our roll-on at the intersection with the light changing to green.

You can't fake safety. Again, just my two cents.

[Mr.Brownstone]

I was unfortunate enough to throw my CBR929 down the road going between 40-50 mph. Completely my fault, momentary lapse in concentration where I hit some wet leaves in a turn while braking, lost the front end and boom down the road I went. Fortunately for me I was wearing a full vanson riding suit, diadora boots, shoei lid, and jr gloves. I did not realize how hard I hit until I took off my helmet and found scrapes all don the side. Outside of having a headach and a bruised ego I walked away without a mark on me.

Now I do not leave the house, no matter what the temperature without all of my gear.

[dteel]

I answered the survey with: I sustained serious injury which might have been avoided had I been wearing PPE, but that’s not the whole story.

On my way in to work on Tuesday, November 15th, 2005 wearing a ¾ length leather coat, full faced helmet and riding boots. My pants were nothing special, just denim. Was on a ramp at 25-30 mph when I hit a patch of spilled diesel fuel. Back end slid to the left, fish tailed to the right then came around left again. The oscillations were dampening so I thought I was going to get it back under control when the back tire caught. I high-sided and started flying. I remember hitting the road, doing a combination of sliding and tumbling; next thing I remember is three people staring down at me saying, we need to get this guy out of the road. I can still remember my first thought was that I was waking up from a very nasty dream, then reality started to impose itself. I don’t know how long I was unconscious. I was having a hard time breathing. Turn out I had broken a rib and my lung was punctured. At the hospital they inserted a chest tube, not something you ever want to experience, take my word on this. I spent the next three days in intensive care and was finally released on Friday.

There was a good scrape on my helmet on the left side about where my ear is at; my leather coat had abrasions mostly on the left sleeve/shoulder. Must have landed on that side. I also had a pretty good bruise on my right hip where my keys sit in my pocket. They exited the pants through a hole worn in my pants during the accident.

So if I had been wearing better protective gear it’s hard to say how much it would have helped. I’m a big guy and throwing my weight to the ground is not likely to have a good outcome. My poor STeed suffered $5,300 in damages, I suffered over $20,000+. Yep, I’m still paying the bills for that. I have since purchased an Olympia Motorsports Bushwacker jacket. It comes with built in armor. I hope I never have to test it out. The STeed is completely recovered and I've been riding again since mid December. I'm pretty much recovered, but I still get twinges from the accident, especially as I approach that curve every morning on my way to work. At first I avoided it, but figured I can't live my life being afraid of that stupid curve.

[ToroGuy]

Dana, thanks for the poST of your unfortunate crash. It is a great teSTiment to riders who think STatiSTics will never catch up with them and choose to ride without proper PPE.

[dteel]

Thanks for the kind comments ToroGuy

Things not said in my previous post is that I was driving the recommended speed around that corner, it was marked 25 MPH. I was in a line of traffic with a delivery panel truck in the lead about 4 vehicles in front of me and several vehicles behind me. I was just taking my planned line through the curve, I was neither accelerating or braking at the time I began to slide.

I had taken that same curve on days when there was no traffic rather aggressively at 45-50 MPH in the past.

The thing that shakes me up the most is that I was doing absolutely nothing wrong and doing everything I could think of right and I still ended up off my bike and in pretty bad shape. I didn’t see any evidence of contaminants on the road before I was riding a bucking bronco.

The bottom line is that I may not have been wearing the best protective equipment, but I wasn’t in tee shirt, shorts and flip flops either. Without the gear I was wearing, things would have been much, much worse.

[STnAV8R]

Never been down in 35 yrs, but I don't pass slow moving vehicles going 70, I expect cars on the side of the road to pull out when I get there, and expect every curve to have gravel (if the shoulders are gravel, cars often cut corners short and spray gravel over the road).

That said, I do wear protective gear, but do not favor government control over what we wear.

[emshaferii]

Researched all helmets and chose the one I thought was the safest and lightest. Never plan not to wear it. No tests of my helmet yet. Your poll will be skewed as those who suffered the "most" from not wearing a helmet can't reply. Agree with STn on getting the govt out of just about everything including mandating helmet laws.....I'd like to see insurance companies offer helmeted policies and non-helmeted policies so the folks who wish to take the risk take on the financial implications as well. Freedom with a price....

[emshaferii]

hard to answer this poll - I entered the first option, but I've never had a close call or had the bike down....I will always wear my X-11 regardless of if it ever has to live up to it's reputation and testing in a real world scenario.