Royal Enfield riders love to take their motorcycles on long-distance touring. But if you have ridden a motorcycle for long hours, you would know that at times the throttle is left at a constant position for long to maintain speed on wide highways with less interference of traffic. Modern touring motorcycles (when I say modern, I actually mean expensive ones) come with a cruise control feature. You build up to a certain speed and activate cruise control to maintain that speed without having to twist the throttle. But without cruise control, you constantly have to operate the throttle manually.
A Royal Enfield Thunderbird rider has worked up a way around the constant throttle operation. He designed and fabricated a mechanism to work as cruise control, and it can actually be installed on any motorcycle. It is a simple mechanism with some metal bent to fit over the throttle.
While one end can be tightened on the throttle, the other end with a clip fits on the brake lever. It also has an adjustable nut and bolt to tighten over various throttle positions.
The little contraption is fitted on the throttle, all the rider has to do is build up speed and since the flat end of the device will rest on the brake lever, the throttle will remain in its position.
It does sound like a neat and affordable idea to equip your motorcycle with cruise control. But what a genuine factory fitted system allows is that as the rider taps on the rear brake or pulls on the front brake lever, the cruise control is disengaged.
This little device will only allow deceleration when the nut on it is loosened. And for the system to work again, the nut will have to be tightened again which is a distracting task. And it may pose a threat if there is an instance of emergency braking.
Coming up with ideas to make long-distance riding less tiring is alright as long as you don’t compromise safety on any level. Especially since we need to consider that Indian highways aren’t free of hazards, safety should all the more have paramount focus.
