At some point in your motorcycling career, you're going to have to learn how to use a clutch. This will allow you to stop, start, shift gears and ride the kind of motorcycles you want to ride. Sure, the 50cc automatic bikes are fine and fun, or your dad's midsize pitbike with a three-speed automatic transmission is getting the job done, but moving up to a clutch bike opens up the door to riding any and every kind of motorcycle and makes doing things later on in life, like driving a stick shift, easier. And for you parents reading this, the clutch is the stepping stone to better manual dexterity, as explained in the sidebar for Mom and Dad's lesson on proper teaching techniques.
To help explain the basics of the clutch, we used Honda's CRF80F as our clutch bike. This is a very friendly machine and just a small step up in size from the CRF70F, which has a three-speed automatic-clutched transmission.
How It Works
The clutch is like an on/off switch for the power in your engine. It's controlled by the lever on the left side of the handlebar that pulls a cable (or pumps fluid in a hydraulic system) that activates the clutch inside the motor. The clutch is comprised of spinning disks inside a basket that grip each other when you let go of the lever. What a clutch does is transfers and controls the power the motor produces and delivers it into the transmission. You can look at it like a tire. When the clutch is "engaged," or connected, it's like the tire is running on good, smooth pavement. All of the tire's power is getting put on the ground. When you disengage the clutch, it's like lifting the tire off the ground and holding it in the air; it just spins and nothing happens. But when you go to engage the clutch, you want to do it smoothly, because if you "drop it," or release it too quickly, like dropping the spinning tire on the ground, bad things will happen. The tire will either take off abruptly or it will suddenly stop. The same thing happens when you drop the clutch on your motorcycle; the bike will jump forward or it will stall out.
Most of the time you don't...
Most of the time you don't need to be worried about the clutch when you're riding, just when you start, stop and shift.
Two Digits
Learning to use the clutch can be really easy if you take a couple of small steps. It's best to practice this in a big dirt area where there's nothing to hit and plenty of space to ride around without having to stop. To begin with, learn to hold the lever with your middle and index fingers. This may seem tricky at first, but it will allow your other two fingers to hang onto the handlebar, which will help you to hold on during rough riding. All the top pros use one or two fingers for a reason-it's the best way to use the clutch! Practice moving the lever without the bike running to get a feel for operating the clutch once you're actually riding.
Feel The Power
The next step is to learn the "engagement point" of the clutch. This is where it starts to hook up and the bike wants to move. You want to feel where this happens and learn to move the lever really slowly there, so you don't drop the clutch. At the same time, you will be giving the bike a little more gas when the clutch begins to engage, so the motor doesn't stall. The best way to learn this is to start the bike up. Then, without giving the bike any gas and when the bike is in first gear, slowly let out the clutch lever until the motor begins to slow down but the bike still isn't moving. Get a feel for where this engagement point is and learn to control the lever movement, so you can bog the motor a little and then pull in the lever to let it idle back to normal. When doing this, you don't even move, and you also don't want to stall the motor. If it's difficult to operate the clutch in this way, you might want to adjust the lever so that it isn't a stretch for your fingers (you also don't want the lever bumping up against your two smaller fingers on the bar).