all right today's subject is motorcycle handlebar vibration and what you can do to battle it I've had some bikes where I've done a bunch of different things over the years so I thought I'd just share that here we're going to start out simple so one of the simplest things you can do is get super squishy foam grips and put them on the bike this is to see a zu key GS 650 g 1981 model and it's great except the handlebars are super buzzy so on this one I've got the squishy grips but that was not enough I was going to fill the handlebar with something people told me that if you put lead shot in the handlebars it would reduce the vibration now dollars should all the gun stores were out of lead shot so I bought bb's and I went to fill it up and I found out that the previous owner who's kind of a mad scientist had welded bolts inside of here so he tack welded a big long heavy bolt into the inside of both handlebars because he was trying to reduce the vibration well as well well obviously that didn't work because I was still having trouble with it so what I did was drilled a hole in the middle of the handlebars under the under the bracket here I drilled a hole in there and filled it up with with BBS with steel bb's and then plugged it with some I think I use shoe goo or silicone caulking material something to keep the BBS from all falling out and rolling across my gas tank so far it's held and so this handlebar itself is really super heavy it's like a bar of solid steel and that helps somewhat that plus the squishy grips makes it makes it D label the vibration wasn't really bad unless you were doing 80 miles an hour or 75 but the problem is you have to do 80 miles an hour or more on the freeways out here because they're doing 80 on all four lanes or they're stopped standing still so that that worked pretty well I was kind of expecting it to work better to make it this heavy now what I've done on some of my other bikes and the other simple solution is like harley davidson makes motorcycles that vibrate they also make gloves that have gel padding in them so you can see they put actual gel in the parts of the glove where your head is going to be touching the handlebars so gloves and squishy grips are the cheap solution then we move on to this Honda so the Honda gets buzzy on the freeway as well this is a hi Honda XL 500 R and what I did was put some bar ends on it some aluminum bar ends and these you basically should open up the hole to the what I did was just cut the ends off of my my hand grips and then stick this in the hole tighten it with a allen wrench and when you ride when you've got these bar end grips in and you put your hand on this you can feel a lot of buzz out here and a lot less buzz on your handlebars so it does it moves the vibration out a little bit to where your hand isn't there's a guy who's been selling something I think it's called a vibrator or something like that has a weird name but that makes one of these that has a big heavy bar that extends inside the handlebar so the vibration goes out here goes into the big bar and then dissipates I haven't tested that yet to see if that works but on so on the Honda I put these on it helped it a little bit and then I bought what's called a bar snake which is a big heavy piece of rubber that you run through the handlebars so basically you you take the ends off of your handlebars and then put a whole bunch of grease on this big heavy piece of rubber and stuff it through the adil bars goes all the way through to the other end and then you cut it off on both ends and that helped to so it combination of the bar snake and the end grips made the Honda a lot better on the road now it is a big single it's a counterbalance big single but it still it still vibrates it's just not as irritating as it used to be now in the world of Harley well I wrote a Harley Sportster for years and I made a bunch of modifications to it because it vibrated a lot that was pre e 2003 when the Sportsters were solid mounted engines and and there was no vibration damping no rubber mounting of the engines what the Harz what they did on the older Harley's was you can see where the handlebar connects to the triple tree thingy is rubber so that you can actually we can see that but the handlebar actually moves independently of this so it's not a solid mount like it would be on other bikes it actually goes into this big rubber biscuit that you can see sticking out here so they sell different different densities of rubber and you can switch back and forth to either get more control of your bike you know get a get it until it moves around less or if you can get a smoother ride so it is possible to tune it that way now you could use the techniques I used on Honda into the bar snake you could try various end grips also if you're trying to get the tingle out of your handlebars so I ended up getting rid of the Sportster altogether and picking up a fuel which is rubber mounted and make double horsepower and is super smooth on the freeway but I'm but it runs a Sportster engine this is one of the older Buell is running the Sportster engine on my Sportster I bought a Fisher harmonic balancer made by Fisher Racing and it basically it's a big steel donut that goes right up on the front sprocket coming off of the crankshaft so you remove the move the nut that holds the big gear that turns the primary here and you put this big giant I know maybe weighs three pounds I have to do some research and maybe I'll put a notation on this video I can't remember how much it weighed but it's basically you're bolting a big heavy rubber weight onto the crankshaft so it's the rubber absorbs some of the vibration and the extra weight of it dissipates some of the or produce reduces the vibration that's created by the engine and that that helped out a little bit but it's still vibrated quite a bit it was kind of like like changing the gearing maybe would have an effect you know it was noticeable but it didn't make it super pleasant to ride there's a company called Sun tech that makes the thing called ballast masters which is they have a circle that that goes on here and in a circle thing that goes on here and on the outside of the circle is a mysterious material that dynamically balances the vibration out of your engine I think that mysterious material is probably mercury but it's something so it's got it basically a heavy some kind of heavy liquid metal in there spinning around and supposedly vibration I haven't tried that so I haven't heard if that works really well or not now the other thing I did with the Sportster was similar to what I did with this is uki I killed the that on the on the Sportster though I filled the handlebars with latex caulk which is not as heavy as a bar snake or as heavy as the steel bb's and that didn't seem to make much difference at all so if I were doing an old Sportster I would go with the bar snake I would try some of those of Viper later things I know I'm saying it wrong the the one that goes in the you know the handlebar end weights that have the counterweight that goes inside the bars that seems to make a little bit of sense to me I haven't read a review on those I Fenny of you guys have used them I'd like to know if they they actually work for you of course the other thing you could do to reduce vibration would be to change the final gearing on the bike by putting on a different rear sprocket or different fronts pocket if you have a if you have a belt drive you can do that have a chain drive like this one you just alter the gear ratio so it's turning less rpms at higher speeds and when you do that you want to make sure that you if you have a GPS unit you want to calculate or calibrate your speedometer with the GPS unit because in some cases the speedometer is driven off of the off of the transmission rather than the front wheel so if you change the final gearing your motorcycle won't know how fast it's going it'll still think that you have stop gearing it would be wrong Oh chef drive bike you're you're hosed there's not much you can do you know you can't really go in there and you know by a different shaft or different different gearing arrangement you could put a bigger tire on it to get a little more lower rpms at high speed but so anyway that's been my adventures with vibration reduction hopefully that helps because I know it's a question that a lot of people ask and especially if you're a Harley person and you ask about it people uh people a lot of people tell you well it's supposed to vibrate its are late and that's about as far as you get but there are things you can do to reduce it