Advice: Motorcycle ergonomics made easy

Are you in the market for a motorcycle, only to get cold feet after you heard a mate or colleague complain about the riding position? Or worse, have you ever bought a motorcycle only to find the bike is too small, too big, or just uncomfortable?

If you're sitting there nodding your head -- and even if you're not -- this website is a great tool: Cycle-Ergo.com.

Though it's not a fancy-schmancy website by any means, it's simple to navigate and incredibly useful. You adjust your body size via the +/- buttons and then choose a motorcycle, at which point a silhouette of your body type sitting on your chosen motorcycle will appear.

The great thing is there's lots of motorcycles in the list, all the major manufacturers, and the measurements can switched between imperial and metric. Furthermore you can see the difference between feet on the ground, or on the pegs -- and there is even data for forward lean and knee bend angle.

There are adjustments for suspension compression, arm straightness, plus the addition of bar risers, bar pullback and even seat height adjustments.

It's actually a really fun little diversion if you've got a spare moment in the day, and it seems as though the tallest stick figure you can plonk on a bike is around 10 feet tall (though you can adjust height beyond that mark, but it may not display it).

Cycle-Ergo works by using a formula to calculate how different sized riders would sit on various motorcycles. The motorcycle measurements are compared with the data entered by the user and result is one of the best web-based motorcycle ergonomics tools we've ever seen.

Unfortunately, the website doesn't display data for all the latest models, but if you're in the market for a used bike it's well worth a visit.