I did it again. I had a stupid low-speed spill on my motorbike whilst commuting home. In my defence, not much. It was raining very heavily and very windy, but I went down because the front wheel lost grip on the second half of a right-left bend on Canary Wharf. Looking back at it, there’s a manhole cover right where I think I went over. Definitely one to chalk up to experience.

My reason for writing this is my amazement at how little it cost to repair. Normally, when a bike with faring (plastic bits on the side) goes down, you’re looking at a good few hundred quid just to get replacement panels. Damage to the forks and to the crank case covering can quite easily raise that into thousands.

I’d known about crash bungs for a while before I bought my current bike, and one of the first things I did was bought a full set of them from R&G. The result of that little investment is that the total damage to the bike was a sheared clutch lever, a little dint on the faring and some scruffy looking, but still perfectly usable crash bungs. Total cost to get back on the road, £40 (thanks Motorworks!) - the cost of a second hand clutch lever assembly.

So two lessons learned. 1) Crash bungs are well worth the money. 2) Foldable levers are also very useful.

Here’s some pictures showing some of the damage the bungs picked up. They’ll still work in future, but they’ll just look a bit rubbish until I get them replaced.