How To Ride Safely In That Pesky Rain
Posted by Mike Werner on Apr 1st 2016
| Riding a motorcycle in rain brings a lot more issues, including a lot more dangers, to the joy of riding. In fact, not many bikers out there like riding in the rain. Your helmet’s visor gets rain on it, requiring you to wipe it away, your visor mists up and you stand the chance of aquaplaning when hitting the brakes too hard. |
| We’ll not deal with the brakes in this article, but the rain on your visor can be dealt with. The easiest is to use water repellants, like NikWax, to lessen the rain on your visor. Or you can buy gloves that have a wiper built in, like a small rubber pad or even a leather wipe. |
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| But the easiest would be a wiper on your helmet, like every car in the world has. Imagine riding along on your motorcycle in the rain, and not having to bother removing the rain from your visor? |
| The idea is not new. Several attempts of placing a rain wiper on a helmet already exist: |
| But riding around with a big unit like that bolted to the top of your helmet is not a good idea, is it? But it should work. So why not make it much smaller? |
| That’s exactly what what Adam Aarons from the UK thought. Riding in a country with more rain than sunshine, it is a noble cause to come up with something better. |
| Adam created RainPal, a very small unit that clips onto your visor and wipes away the rain (look at the photo on top). |
| The RainPal unit itself is very small, thin and light (150 grams). It gets clipped on the visor when you need it (in other words, you don’t leave it on when riding in the blistering sun). |
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| It takes 2 seconds to clip on the unit, and if you have to do it in the dark, there are even LED lights that light up for 7 seconds. The RainPal unit itself will be made in different coloring varieties: |
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| From colored to chrome, to flags (UK or USA): |
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| The unit has small buttons to start the wiping, to increase the speed or to set it to delayed (timer) wiping. But if you prefer not to put you hands on your visor while riding in the rain, they are even thinking thoughtfully to include a remote control that will be fixed to your handlebars: |
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| And when not using the RainPal, simply store it in its box: |
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| The USB rechargeable battery lasts about 90 minutes on full use, but the batteries are swappable. |
| According to RainPal, the unit can be used on almost any full visor (so not just for full face/integral helmets). |
| The RainPal is not yet being manufactured, it’s in development. They are looking for crowd-funding to finish the project. |
| At their crowd-funding site (click here to go to it), you can pledge money. UK£49.99 (about US$72) gets you the simple unit, UK£69.99 (about US$100) gets you the unit with remote control. |
| Here is a video made by RainPal explaining the device: |
| CAUTION: A word of warning. RainPal was initially looking for crowd-funding money on IndieGoGo, but got thrown out for “Trust & Safety” reasons, meaning that someone in IndieGoGo did not trust the setup. That of course does not mean that the product is not to be trusted. You go into this with your eyes open (and your visor cleaned). |
| Click here to access the RainPal site |
| Click here to access the RainPal crowd-funding site |