Are Motorcycle Frame Sliders Good Or Bad?

Frame sliders, crash bobbins, fairing protectors—whatever you call them, they’re designed to help protect expensive and vulnerable parts when your motorcycle tilts off its tires. The theory is that by positioning a sacrificial friction point on the side of the bike, that part will take the brunt of the impact and abrasion instead of your tank, radiator, fairing, frame, engine cases, and other parts. We dive into the topic of motorcycle frame sliders and their pros and cons in this MC Garage.

This whole crash-protection conversation would be so much simpler if the parts were just called “tip-over protectors” because even the crappiest kits on the market are going to do something to reduce damage if your bike falls over at a standstill. And let’s be honest—tip-overs in your driveway or at the gas pump are common ways for a motorcycle to succumb to gravity. And for those scenarios, frame sliders are definitely a good investment.

But motorcycles are made to move, and once you crank up the kinetic energy by adding speed to the equation, things get a lot harder to predict. How well frame sliders work depends on a lot of things, like how your bike hits the deck. Did it go down violently in a high side, or was the crash more gradual, like a front-end lowside in a sweeping corner? The surface your bike slides across affects the outcome too. Asphalt may be abrasive but at least it’s flat. Soft stuff like a grassy highway shoulder or a gravel trap at the track are almost guaranteed to cause a wheel or handlebar to dig in and cartwheel your bike, and that’s when things get really damaged. The point is that high-speed crashes are capricious, unpredictable SOBs, so it’s important to have reasonable expectations.

So now that we recognize that frame sliders aren’t a magical force field, we can talk about these accessories like reasonable people. For starters, sliders come in two styles: Cut and no-cut. Cut kits require sawing holes in your fairing for the slider to pass through, whereas no-cut kits use brackets that position the slider around the fairing.

If the goal is to help protect your bodywork, why would you ever want to dremel a hole in it? Well, in general, cut kits are more structurally sound. The location of the slider and the strength of its mounting system haven’t been compromised to work around the bodywork, so the slider is more likely to stay put and do its job in a tumble.

No-cut kits are usually easier to install, but they aren’t always as strong because the slider is offset from the mounting point, sometimes by a lot. That gives it leverage to bend the bracket or whatever it’s bolted to.

Slider kits also come in varying lengths, from pucks that tuck in close to ones that extend way out there. As a general rule, longer sliders are more appropriate for the street and shorter stuff works better at the track. Let me explain. Street protection is more about avoiding damage due to tip-overs and low-speed falls, and being able to ride home instead of having to call a tow because of a cracked radiator or severely bent handlebar. For those purposes, a longer slider is better since it props your bike up and keeps more stuff off the ground. However, that long slider is more likely to bend and break or damage its mounting point if a lot of force is applied to it in a faster crash.

Racers and track riders are dealing with a different scenario. They’re liable to crash at higher speeds, which often means a harder impact and a lot more slide time. In that situation, you want a shorter slider, which is less likely to get wrenched off the bike and also keeps the motorcycle closer to the ground so it’s less liable to tumble. Shorter sliders might not do as good a job keeping your fairings pretty, but they’ll still help preserve the really expensive stuff like your frame and engine covers.

Now, whether you ride on the street or the track, frame sliders won’t do jack for a motorcycle that’s cartwheeling toward the horizon. And that brings us to that contentious bit of forum folklore about frame sliders actually causing bikes to flip over and tumble.

There’s some truth to the forum posts. Remember how we said that longer sliders hold your bike up off the ground but also have more leverage on the mounting hardware? Both of those things make it more likely that your bike will begin to tumble if you crash at speed, especially if it slides onto the softer ground or the puck isn’t made from a low-friction material. Blingy pieces made from aluminum or chromed crap won’t glide along the pavement smoothly, so there’s a higher risk of them digging in and launching your bike into the air. In order to be effective, the slider material needs to be slick, durable, and even a little flexible so that it absorbs some impact energy. That’s why brands with half a brain use synthetic polymers like Delrin or UHMW-PE. Kits that come with carbon-fiber parts are just jewelry since CF has zero abrasion resistance and is going to shatter as soon as it hits the ground.

The other scenario where a frame slider might cause more harm than good is with cheap where the bracket is only located with one bolt. That means the slider could rotate upon impact and smash your bodywork, even if the bike just rolls forward off its side stand.

Which brings us to my final words of advice. Frame sliders and other crash protection like case covers and axle sliders are a great idea but don’t buy cheap rubbish. You get what you pay for, and it’s definitely worth buying from a name brand that’s put some R&D into its products.