I recently did a 5,000 kay road trip courtesy of the Ducati Mystery Tour. When you are spending long days in the saddle on a Sports Tourer, you can be sure of one thing – bugs! Your head is in clean air supposedly, but as all who have travelled distance on a bike will tell you, especially in a warmer African climate, there is no shortage of flying beasties. Thinking about it, I could do a blog on the flying Kamikaze wildlife that has committed Harakiri on my visor over the millions of kays I’ve travelled across this magnificent land of ours! The worst was probably hordes of greasy flying ants, encountered on a ride back from Rhodesia, back in the day! The problem with bugs is how badly they impair your vision. What with potholes and other road detritus that we need to see and avoid these days, it is essential that we keep our visors clean.
It appals me to see what guys use to clean their visors. I have even seen spit and ‘witgoud’, I kid you not! (‘witgoud’, for the uninitiated, is bog roll, or toilet paper). I cannot comment on the effectiveness of gob as a cleaning agent, but I can tell you that paper is death to a visor. Made from wood, there are fine splinters which scour the face of your visor with devastating long term consequences. This means that you need to carry a microfibre cloth, or chamois with you, for your visor maintenance. As I have come to expect from Liqui Moly, they have come up with an ingenious and highly effective solution. In the one side pocket of my tank bag I have my 50 ml re-fillable Liqui Moly chain lube and in the other, the subject of this story.
Understanding the problem posed by dirty visors, Liqui Moly have come up with a fiendishly clever product. Enter the Liqui Moly Visor Clean Cloth Set. Bought by the box, you get a whole bunch of sachets (12 to be precise) which consist of two small packets joined by a serrated seam. In the left-hand envelope is your ‘wet’ cloth, joined to a ‘dry’ cloth. Very simply, you tear open the impregnated wet cloth, with which you wipe your visor and helmet.
The agents in the moisture remove bugs effortlessly. I find that the helmet and visor are perfectly clean after the wet application, however, Liqui Moly, being the perfectionist which they seem to be, gives you the dry cloth to polish everything to perfection. The sachets are a size that fits perfectly into a shirt or jacket pocket, which makes them a cinch to carry.
I found that on the Mystery Tour we often stopped where water wasn’t readily available and with over fifty bikes and riders, time was always of the essence. While my bike was being topped up with fuel, I would whip out a sachet, clean and polish my helmet, and be finished before the tank was full. Brilliant! The result was always riding with a clean and properly maintained visor and helmet, which kept riding safer and more enjoyable.
Given the cost of replacing visors which are marred and scratched, a little spend on properly caring for your visor is a no brainer. In poor light, or at night, when you have to contend with oncoming headlights, a clean visor is absolutely essential. I find that I can clean my helmet, visor, glasses and Irene’s visor, with one sachet. Bargain! I will never ride without a sachet or two in my jacket pocket. This is another bespoke solution from Liqui Moly which delivers more than it promises. You cannot ask more of any product.
