Do you have to shift down when braking on a motorcycle? Say if you were in 4th gear, could you just use your breaks to come to a stop and then change the gears, or are you suppose to change gears as you slow down?
It's best to be downshifting WHILE braking, as many times, it;s difficult to get the thing into lower gears while stopped. You don't want to be stuck trying to get it into 1st gear when the light turns green.
Unless you will be in a stop for more than a few minutes, the motorcycle should be in gear. At a stop in traffic, you hold the clutch, ready to move. You use the clutch between gears, about a 1/4 second. For safety you do not hold the clutch and coast. Ever.
Are you sure you mean breaks? If so, what is it that is broken? I would have thought you were talking about brakes. Anyway, it is easier to change gears when the bike is decelerating and if done properly will help with brake wear but you can to it what ever way you want. Just don't think that you can come to a near stop in a high gear and then instantly accelerate away if it is necessary for some reason.
Why does this question come up regularly? Surely the first thing you should learn when you get on a bike is how to stop. Emergency stop, just concentrate on stopping, leave the gears alone. Any other situation change down as you slow so that you are in the appropriate gear to pull off again. You can use a downchange to slow by engine braking, but you might find that too much at this stage. Do yourself a favour take some professional training.
Some motorcycles are hard to shift when they're standing still. If you're going 60 mph in top gear, then you have to break to a stop, when you start out again you have to shift down to 1st, and that can be hard. So it's good to get into the habit of shifting down to 1st as you come to a stop, while you're still moving. This is one big difference between cars and motorcycles. In a car with 4-on-the-floor, you can get out of 4th or 5th and into neutral, then go from neutral directly into 1st. But in a motorcycle you have to go through all the gears, one at a time. If you are not braking to a stop, you're just slowing down, you want to shift down to a gear appropriate to your new speed. This can be difficult, but with a little experience you get a sort of judgement about it. Going around a tight curve, for instance, you get the idea that you need to shift down 1 or 2 or 3 gears. When you let the clutch back out, you might find yourself in a gear too high or low, and you quickly pull the clutch back in and make the correction.
