Crash Course In Understanding How A Motorcycle Engine Works

I love motorcycles. I love how they look, I love how they sound, I love how they ride, and I love how they make me feel; warm and fuzzy and free if you want to know. That obvious statement being said, while I understand the basic functioning of a motorcycle, I’m not as familiar with what makes the clock tick.Unlike our resident mechanic Kate, I haven’t had a chance to poke around a motorcycle engine as much as I would have liked. What I lack in understanding of a motorcycle’s inner works, I make up for in candid curiosity.

Learning The Ropes:

How To Secure Your Stuff To Your Bike

You can understand my excitement when I found this video by awesome Brit lady Tamsen Cooper who meticulously pulls a Suzuki SV650’s V-twin apart, carefully explaining what each component is and how it all works. If you’re the visual type like I am, this is worth taking 16 minutes out of your day to watch.

Based in Cornwall, United Kingdom, Tamsen Cooper does what very few YouTubers manage to do well: vulgarize efficiently and make motorcycle maintenance easy to understand. Her eponymous YouTube channel focuses on teaching viewers about different components and their maintenance, taking example on her blue SV650. From cleaning brake calipers to clutch adjustment, she covers a lot of ground in her series of videos.

The one I find the most fascinating, interesting, and informative, however, is the one in which she slowly pulls the engine of her SV apart. Piece by piece, we get to have a look inside the bike’s ticker and understand what does what. It’s easy to talk about the clutch plates or the camshaft, but it remains more of an abstract concept until you get to actually see it in action and visually understand the interconnections between the parts.

I would have liked her to expand a little more on the clutch system, that being said, this simple, straightforward video is a great place to start if you want to understand the motorcycle engine a little better. 10/10 would recommend watching.