Review: Throttle Rocker II.

I love my CX, and my CX loves me...well, up to 55mph. Any faster than that, and she shakes way too much. The handlebar vibration really gets to me, and I do have the liberty of letting my left hand let go of the handlebars, but not my right because I need it to control the throttle. Some days I get up and ride and my right hand extremely numb because I didn't have it positioned right or something. I eventually got over that, but sometimes it creeps up on me and ruins a large portion of my ride.

I started looking for alternatives to make the ride more comfortable (and bearable) at highway speeds, and I found the "Throttle Rocker". ($9.99 at jcwhitney.com) It's one of those "wow, why didn't I think of that?!" kind of inventions. It's a simple piece of contoured plastic that wraps around your grip and is positioned so that you can control the throttle with your wrist or pretty much any part of your hand, letting your hand raise up and stretch and get some airflow without slowing down or letting go of the throttle. I tried it out for the first time the other day and it worked awesome for about the first 15 minutes until it started slipping. My wrist started cramping up because it was in such an awkward position to keep the throttle at 55.

It came with a big fat rubber band to put over your bar to help prevent the device from slipping. I guess it would have worked nicely for grips that aren't foam like mine. With the foam you really don't need the piece of rubber to keep the Velcro from slipping; the Velcro with the foam just works out better. I'll have to test this sans-rubber trick on my next ride this weekend. I ordered one for the left too, but I don't think I'll use it because I really don't need it; I can let go of the left grip whenever I want.

One con I noticed was that it wasn't as comfortable as I thought it should have been, but that's just because I'm using the stock CX500C handlebars, that have ends that just point past the rider, not like traditional motorcycle handlebars. I think that these would be a lot more comfortable on bikes with straighter bars, like drag or Daytona bars. I could put it on the GT750 and see how that feels.

In other news, I haven't been able to work on the Suzuki lately because of school. My classes are wrapping up soon (less than a month!), so I'll be able to tinker with it fairly soon. The CX is getting a new tire mounted in the next two weeks (Just need to remove the front wheel), so I'm pretty excited about that. The Canada trip is still on for June, and I'm looking for a set of crash bars...