The Best Ways To Lighten Your Motorcycle

Lightening your motorcycle is going to improve all aspects of its performance. With a lighter bike you're going to get more acceleration out of every horsepower, better stopping performance out of your brakes, and even quicker steering, and better gas mileage. You'll have to hack a lot of weight to notice a considerable difference, but every little bit helps.

Cutting weight is kind of like adding horsepower in that it can get expensive very quickly. Fortunately, there’s some stuff you can do that won’t cost you a penny. For starters, you can unscrew those steel feelers on your footpegs, and if you don’t ride with a significant other you can remove your passenger pegs, too. If you’re not much of a night rider unscrewing the reflectors from the fork and rear fender will cut ounces from the extremities of your bike, and you could ditch your tool kit and tire-plug kit, but this is MC Garage, so I’d never recommend riding without your tools.

Okay, with the $free.99 stuff out of the way, you’ll have to start spending money. Luckily, there are some pretty cost-effective mods that either have a great price-to-pound ratio or they offer additional benefits on top of saving weight.

Far and away the best bang for your buck will be swapping out your stock, old-tech lead-acid battery for a modern, lightweight lithium-ion option like those available through Shorai. Depending on your bike and the size of the battery you could be looking at weight savings of 75 percent. There’s no bling factor with a Shorai since it’s hidden under your seat and they are fairly expensive compared to lead-acid cells, but you’re simply not going to find a better value in terms of pounds per dollar.

The next best move is to throw your heavy, huge stock exhaust in the recycling and slap on an aftermarket pipe. Switching to a performance exhaust will not only slice pounds off the side of your bike, but it’s also got the added benefit of improving the look and sound of your motorcycle, too. If your bike’s catalytic converter is in the muffler then a slip-on is going to be the easiest and most affordable thing to do, but if the cat is further upstream you’ll likely need to invest in a full system to realize maximum weight savings. And if you do that, make sure you’re remapping your bike’s fueling to match your new exhaust.

Another recommendation is to change out your stock steel sprocket for a sprocket made from aluminum. Aluminum parts are going to weigh about half as much as their steel counterparts, and replacing the sprocket also gives you the opportunity to change your gearing for more acceleration or higher top speed.

Aluminum is softer than steel so you’re not going to get nearly as many miles out of the lighter option, but an aluminum sprocket is still a valuable mod because this weight is rotating and unsprung, meaning it’s not supported by the suspension, so it’s the most important weight to reduce in terms of performance.

Finally, the last way you can shed some weight off your bike is by shedding some weight on yourself. Whether this means being more active and increasing the amount of exercise you do, or reigning in what you eat, the cheapest way to lighten your bike is to lose some bodyweight.