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How to check your speedo without consulting Johnny Law

Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 8:32 am
by Brady
After several days of being hot in my gear with temps in the 80's I decided to take out the liner of my jacket. Murphy called in a cold front and it was 36 when I left my house this morning. I've got the fly screen on my bike, which seems to be good at catching flys, but not much else. Trying to reduce my exposure to wind blast of the 25 mile highway leg of my 45 mile commute, I laid across my tank bank, put my feet up on the passenger pegs and touched my arms in. This superman look does a good job of keeping your exposure down but means you need have your eyes looking up to see the road. At normal eye level I was staring dead on at the insturment panel. "Does the clock tick between minutes or creep?". "Click" Then I decided to see how far I travled in 1 minute at 80mph. Five times I clocked it and five times I came up with 1.3 Miles. For those of you with out a calculator, 1.3 x 60 Minutes = 78 MPH. So the Spedo is about 2 MPH slow. Not bad.
Brady

Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 8:44 am
by challey
I was never very good at math, so I think I'll stick to comparing the speedo to the readout on my Garmin :P

Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 12:07 pm
by R4R&R
Ahhh......But what if the clock is off too?

Find a buddy with a GPS unit and borrow it. It's really the most accurate way within reason.

Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 1:08 pm
by towerworker
Or you could just run like heck and wait for the trooper with the radar gun and find out then.

Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 5:13 pm
by MIXR
My clock surges in sympathy with the rest of the bike.

?

Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 5:26 pm
by OU812
60 miles an hour = 1 miles per minute. Thats all I know. :oops:

Speed

Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 6:32 pm
by Xray28
My speedo is off a bit more than that, but I checked it out with my GPS and now know that I'm about 5 miles per hour off pretty much all the way through the speedo range. There are several places locally where the highway is marked off in 1 mile increments. There are tic marks on the side of the road that airplane cops can use to time drivers. You might watch out for those. They are usually about 2 feet long attached to and at right angles from the fog stripe on the edge of the road.