For your safety and to ensure that your bike is legal to ride, it is advisable to perform a pre-ride check every time you go for a ride.
You can read my tips on pre-ride and post-ride checks here.
Or you can watch the above video released by the American Motorcycle Safety Foundation (MSF) and hosted by actress/motorcyclist Celeste Creel (Gina’s Journey: The Search for William Grimes, Hollywood Chaos and My Movie Girl) and actor/motorcyclist Gunner Wright known as the face and voice of Isaac Clarke in the videogames Dead Space 2 and Dead Space 3.
It’s called “T-CLOCS” which is a convenient a six-letter acronym to help you remember the checks. It stands f
or the six main categories of inspection: Tyres (and wheels), Controls, Lights (and electrics), Oil (and other fluids), Chassis, and Stands.
MSF spokesman Mark Wing says a pre-ride
inspection should be “as routine and automatic as checking the weather forecast before heading out for the day”.
“There are a lot of things to check on motorcycles before you go riding, but performing a pre-ride check shouldn’t take more than a few minutes,” he says. “Memorizing the T-CLOCS acronym makes these steps easy to remember and easy to perform before every ride.”
You can get a handy print-out of the pre-check list here.
Performing a pre-ride check every time you go for a ride will also help you detect a small problem before it becomes a major and potentially dangerous problem needing costly repair.
It may also help you avoid a fine for an unroadworthy bike. Telling the police officer that you didn’t know your tyres were worn or your taillight wasn’t working is no excuse.