Motorcycle grips are essential for comfortable and safe riding, especially on long trips. If you don't have the right grips on your bike, it's time to find the perfect pair.

Benefits of Motorcycle Grips

Wrist and hand comfort. Some say that the numbness you feel in your hands is from the vibration or poor circulation. The right grips can cushion your grip and give your hands comfort.

Control. Depending on the type of aftermarket grips you buy, you can improve the control you have over your throttle. The right grips will prevent your hand from slipping.

Style. Changing out your stock grips for aftermarket ones is about more than comfort. You can choose a set of grips that can enhance the look of your bike. You could choose chrome accents or a color that matches your bike.

Types of Motorcycle Grips

There's heartache and joy that come with owning, and caring for, an older vehicle. It's helpful if you can sort out a number of problems on your own, it will save you cash and trips to your local mechanic. One of the more seemingly puzzling aspects of old-car ownership occurs when you drive a carbureted vehicle. Hagerty is here to demystify the deliverer of air and fuel for you.

The best way to familiarize yourself with any car part is to disassemble it. So the first part of Hagerty's two-part video guide involves a walkthrough of a carburetor teardown. There are floats, jets, needles, valves, and springs all waiting for your venture into the world of your carb. You don't need of tools to get started, just a few pliers and screwdrivers should get you moving. And a bottle of carb cleaner will get plenty of usage as well.

If you're going to tear down and rebuild your carburetor, you'll want a simple rebuild kit handy. A proper kit includes all of the diaphragms, seals, needles, seats, and more.

As you tear down the carb, you'll find parts that are either due for replacement or just need a simple cleanup. That's the beauty of a carb rebuild. Once properly addressed, and the carb rebuilt, your car will be running better than ever.

Once you have the carb completely broken down and cleaned up, it's time to crack open the rebuild kit and put everything back together. It's an entertaining puzzle, but a puzzle that makes more and more sense every time you tinker with it.

These two videos serve as a great guide for carburetor rebuilding. While we love the Hagerty time lapse videos, it's also nice to see one that's teaching us as well.

How it works: Brakes

If you've ever experienced brake fade or, god forbid, brake failure, you'll have an appreciation of just how important it is that brakes work consistently. Here are the basic principles and components for modern brakes – and by that we mean hydraulic ones, with discs not drums.

It's all about hydraulics

Modern motorcycle brakes work by transferring movement and force at the lever through an incompressible liquid to the caliper pistons, which then press the brake pads against the disc. For that force to be transferred efficiently, the brake lines must not expand, there must be no leaks and the fluid must not compress. If any of those happen, you get spongey-feeling brakes, or indeed no brakes. Gulp.

Gasoline engines are designed to take in exactly the right amount of air so the fuel burns properly, whether the engine is starting from cold or running hot at top speed. Getting the fuel-air mixture just right is the job of a clever mechanical gadget called a carburetor: a tube that allows air and fuel into the engine through valves, mixing them together in different amounts to suit a wide range of different driving conditions.

You might think "carburetor" is quite a weird word, but it comes from the verb "carburet." That's a chemical term meaning to enrich a gas by combining it with carbon or hydrocarbons. So, technically, a carburetor is a device that saturates air (the gas) with fuel (the hydrocarbon).

Carburetors have been around since the late 19th century when they were first developed by automobile pioneer (and Mercedes founder) Karl Benz (1844–1929). There were earlier attempts at "carbureting" in other ways. For example, the French engine pioneer Joseph Étienne Lenoir (1822–1900) originally used a rotating cylinder with sponges attached that dipped into fuel as they turned around, lifting it out of its container and mixing it into the air as they did so.

The diagram below, which I've colored to make it easier to follow, shows the original Benz carburetor design from 1888; the basic working principle (explained in the box below) remains the same to this day.

How does it work

Air flows into the top of the carburetor from the car's air intake, passing through a filter that cleans it of debris.

When the engine is first started, the choke (blue) can be set so it almost blocks the top of the pipe to reduce the amount of air coming in (increasing the fuel content of the mixture entering the cylinders).

In the center of the tube, the air is forced through a narrow kink called a venturi. This makes it speed up and causes its pressure to drop.

The drop in air pressure creates suction on the fuel pipe (right), drawing in fuel (orange).

The throttle (green) is a valve that swivels to open or close the pipe. When the throttle is open, more air and fuel flows to the cylinders so the engine produces more power and the car goes faster.

The mixture of air and fuel flows down into the cylinders.

Fuel (orange) is supplied from a mini-fuel tank called the float-feed chamber.

As the fuel level falls, a float in the chamber falls and opens a valve at the top.

When the valve opens, more fuel flows in to replenish the chamber from the main gas tank. This makes the float rise and close the valve again.