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I found this article (and website) to be very beginner friendly. Majority of the write ups are safety oriented.
Here's a hypothetical example of why its important to buy PROPER riding gear. As they say, "Dress for the crash"
"The Finances of Crashing
For this discussion, let's set up a scenario in which we have two different riders: Casual Carl and Safety Steve (thanks to David Hough for the naming convention. Go read his book, Proficient Motorcycling, if you haven't yet).
Casual Carl, as you'd expect, isn't wearing much for gear -- he spent $80 on a 3/4 face helmet and some fingerless gloves that look cool. He rides his motorcycle wearing those things, jeans and a t-shirt. He's got some leather motorcycle boots, but he doesn't wear them very often because they're not very comfortable.
Safety Steve is a safety freak, so he's got a leather jacket, a full-face helmet, full gauntleted leather gloves, textile riding pants zipped to the jacket, and mid-calf leather boots. He's wearing one of those orange-and-reflective safety vests over his jacket because he couldn't find a bright enough jacket that he liked, so his jacket is black. (Yes, people actually do that; I'm describing an outfit I wore for several years.)
Each man is riding along, a state apart, enjoying his bike, at around 35 MPH. Out of nowhere a drunk driver in a Chevy Impala clips each of their rear wheels. There was no way to react; neither driver could have done anything differently to prevent the accident.
In Washington, Steve is flung from his motorcycle head-first and lands hands-first in an instinctive attempt to shield himself from the impact. His right wrist makes a sickening cracking noise, badly spraining it, and he slides, Superman-style, down the pavement before coming to a stop 100 feet down the road. He gingerly gets up, a life-long memory of 20 grit pavement bobbling past his face, very fast and 2 inches away, burned into his mind. Other than the sprained wrist, he has some bruises where he clipped the handlebars with his right leg, and where he landed on the pavement. His helmet is still sort of serviceable but desperately needs a new faceshield, and the right knee on his riding pants is pretty hashed up, although it didn't actually abrade through.
Steve calls a friend to come pick him up and take him to the hospital, since he can't tell if his right wrist is broken or just sprained.
Steve is down about $300 to replace his helmet, $150 for the pants, and $70 for his emergency room copay, where they put a splint on his wrist. His insurance will probably cover the riding gear, and medical insurance reduced his emergency room bill from around $1000 to $70.
Casual Carl, down in Oregon, is similarly flung from his bike at 35 MPH. He also hits the pavement face-first, attempting to break his fall with his hands. The thin, cheap leather of his gloves splits apart in the palms, catching the pavement and yanking his hands backwards, breaking both wrists. His face is pressed into the pavement for a quarter of a second before he reflexively turns it to the side, allowing the 3/4 helmet to take the rest of the abuse. His T-shirt dissappears in the first 10 feet, leaving his bare chest to absorb the abrasive energy of his weight, pressed down across 90 feet of pavement. Both knees and thighs are immediately exposed to raw pavement as the jeans rip open. Fortunately for Carl, the shock causes him to pass out before his mind can fully process the damage he just received.
Carl wakes up in a hospital in Portland, having arrived in an ambulance 16 hours earlier. He's been in and out of surgery, prepping for skin grafts to his face, chest, arms, and legs. A plastic surgeon has already worked on him to reconstruct his nose and left cheekbone. He's had gravel removed from his skin with tweezers and a wire brush. He's in stable condition, but he'll be in and out of the hospital for the next 4-5 months receiving grafts and recovering from the accident.
When Carl is finally recovered, he's out around $15,000-20,000 in hospital bills, and he's lost his job due to his inability to work for the first two months after the accident. He was working at a job where he made $35k/year, so he has forfeited about $10,500 in income in addition to needing to find another job now. (Since I made up these numbers, I suspect they're pretty low -- Carl might actually be out more like $50k or $100k in medical expenses, but we'll work with these numbers, since they're horrifying enough.)
Let's see the tally of who spent what:
Item Casual Carl Safety Steve
Safety gear $120 $950
Replacement safety gear $0 $450
Medical bills $20,000 $70
Lost income $10,500 $0
Total $30,620 $1,470
Obviously, this is a contrived example. Real world numbers will be different, but this isn't an unrealistic example. Had Carl been wearing better gear, he could have notched down that medical bill. At some point, he wouldn't have been out of action for long enough to lose his job, which would produce dramatic results on the Total line in that table.
However, the point is obvious. Steve, who spent some good money initially, ended up with little financial liability from his crash. Carl, who didn't want to spend much money on safety gear, ended up spending a good chunk of the next few years paying off his medical bills. An ounce of prevention, in this case, is worth hundreds of pounds of cure.
And, of course, this strictly-numbers analysis doesn't look at what happens to a person who has to endure that kind of pain for 4-5 months. It doesn't examine the mental problems that could develop, or the strain on relationships with other people, or the fact that Carl chose to never ride a bike again because it's far too dangerous; he considers himself lucky (and rightly so) that he didn't die in that accident."
If you only read one article about gear - Ninja250Wiki
Remember: "ATGATT"
Here's a hypothetical example of why its important to buy PROPER riding gear. As they say, "Dress for the crash"
"The Finances of Crashing
For this discussion, let's set up a scenario in which we have two different riders: Casual Carl and Safety Steve (thanks to David Hough for the naming convention. Go read his book, Proficient Motorcycling, if you haven't yet).
Casual Carl, as you'd expect, isn't wearing much for gear -- he spent $80 on a 3/4 face helmet and some fingerless gloves that look cool. He rides his motorcycle wearing those things, jeans and a t-shirt. He's got some leather motorcycle boots, but he doesn't wear them very often because they're not very comfortable.
Safety Steve is a safety freak, so he's got a leather jacket, a full-face helmet, full gauntleted leather gloves, textile riding pants zipped to the jacket, and mid-calf leather boots. He's wearing one of those orange-and-reflective safety vests over his jacket because he couldn't find a bright enough jacket that he liked, so his jacket is black. (Yes, people actually do that; I'm describing an outfit I wore for several years.)
Each man is riding along, a state apart, enjoying his bike, at around 35 MPH. Out of nowhere a drunk driver in a Chevy Impala clips each of their rear wheels. There was no way to react; neither driver could have done anything differently to prevent the accident.
In Washington, Steve is flung from his motorcycle head-first and lands hands-first in an instinctive attempt to shield himself from the impact. His right wrist makes a sickening cracking noise, badly spraining it, and he slides, Superman-style, down the pavement before coming to a stop 100 feet down the road. He gingerly gets up, a life-long memory of 20 grit pavement bobbling past his face, very fast and 2 inches away, burned into his mind. Other than the sprained wrist, he has some bruises where he clipped the handlebars with his right leg, and where he landed on the pavement. His helmet is still sort of serviceable but desperately needs a new faceshield, and the right knee on his riding pants is pretty hashed up, although it didn't actually abrade through.
Steve calls a friend to come pick him up and take him to the hospital, since he can't tell if his right wrist is broken or just sprained.
Steve is down about $300 to replace his helmet, $150 for the pants, and $70 for his emergency room copay, where they put a splint on his wrist. His insurance will probably cover the riding gear, and medical insurance reduced his emergency room bill from around $1000 to $70.
Casual Carl, down in Oregon, is similarly flung from his bike at 35 MPH. He also hits the pavement face-first, attempting to break his fall with his hands. The thin, cheap leather of his gloves splits apart in the palms, catching the pavement and yanking his hands backwards, breaking both wrists. His face is pressed into the pavement for a quarter of a second before he reflexively turns it to the side, allowing the 3/4 helmet to take the rest of the abuse. His T-shirt dissappears in the first 10 feet, leaving his bare chest to absorb the abrasive energy of his weight, pressed down across 90 feet of pavement. Both knees and thighs are immediately exposed to raw pavement as the jeans rip open. Fortunately for Carl, the shock causes him to pass out before his mind can fully process the damage he just received.
Carl wakes up in a hospital in Portland, having arrived in an ambulance 16 hours earlier. He's been in and out of surgery, prepping for skin grafts to his face, chest, arms, and legs. A plastic surgeon has already worked on him to reconstruct his nose and left cheekbone. He's had gravel removed from his skin with tweezers and a wire brush. He's in stable condition, but he'll be in and out of the hospital for the next 4-5 months receiving grafts and recovering from the accident.
When Carl is finally recovered, he's out around $15,000-20,000 in hospital bills, and he's lost his job due to his inability to work for the first two months after the accident. He was working at a job where he made $35k/year, so he has forfeited about $10,500 in income in addition to needing to find another job now. (Since I made up these numbers, I suspect they're pretty low -- Carl might actually be out more like $50k or $100k in medical expenses, but we'll work with these numbers, since they're horrifying enough.)
Let's see the tally of who spent what:
Item Casual Carl Safety Steve
Safety gear $120 $950
Replacement safety gear $0 $450
Medical bills $20,000 $70
Lost income $10,500 $0
Total $30,620 $1,470
Obviously, this is a contrived example. Real world numbers will be different, but this isn't an unrealistic example. Had Carl been wearing better gear, he could have notched down that medical bill. At some point, he wouldn't have been out of action for long enough to lose his job, which would produce dramatic results on the Total line in that table.
However, the point is obvious. Steve, who spent some good money initially, ended up with little financial liability from his crash. Carl, who didn't want to spend much money on safety gear, ended up spending a good chunk of the next few years paying off his medical bills. An ounce of prevention, in this case, is worth hundreds of pounds of cure.
And, of course, this strictly-numbers analysis doesn't look at what happens to a person who has to endure that kind of pain for 4-5 months. It doesn't examine the mental problems that could develop, or the strain on relationships with other people, or the fact that Carl chose to never ride a bike again because it's far too dangerous; he considers himself lucky (and rightly so) that he didn't die in that accident."
If you only read one article about gear - Ninja250Wiki
Remember: "ATGATT"
