Getting a flat tire in an automobile is aggravating enough. But on motorcycles, flat tires are a lot scarier, more troublesome to repair and can easily lead to serious harm for the motorcycle's operator. No wonder riders dread them so much.

Rhino Tire, a New York-based company, with a distributor in Singapore is out to assuage those fears with a patented 'Rhinotire' tire treatment claimed to seal punctures immediately after they occur. The treatment involves a special adhesive polymer gel that is first sprayed and then baked on all around the inner circumference of the tire. The gel remains tacky after application so it can migrate into and seal any puncture holes.

Rhino Tire will either sell you brand-new tires of most popular brands and sizes that have already been treated or apply the gel to your tires.

A video released by Rhino Tire in which a Honda CBR1000RR is repeatedly ridden over a nail-infested wooden plant and shows no apparent air leakage afterward.

In case you wonder why Bridgestone felt the need to abandon the Battlax BT-021 tire and present a successor, the answer is really simple. It wasn't a bad tire, but the competition has improved a lot over the past two years. Dunlop launched the Dunlop Roadsmart, Michelin the Pilot Road 2 and Metzeler cam up with a brand-new Roadtec. And, in most comparison tests, the Bridgestone Battlax BT-021 usually didn't come first.

Bad tests mean bad sales. It must have hurt, too, especially since the sports-touring tire segment is the most important tire these days. Apart from dirtbikes and scooters, sports-touring tires are an option for practically all motorcycles. Light, budget motorcycles perform so well, they can benefit from sports-touring tires. And the other way around, sports-touring tires offer so much grip and handle so well, many super- and hypersports riders prefer them to the real hypersports tires.

For those who mostly ride their motorcycles on the street, grip is sufficient and durability is so much better that is is the only sensible option. And, of course, the ever-growing group of touring riders need them too, as touring motorcycles have evolved into fast, agile transporters. And they really do distances, so they buy a lot of tires: in Europe, about 30 percent of all tires sold are sports-touring tires. So can you blame Bridgestone for trying to stay the number-one tire company in the market section where most of the money is.

Still, it must have been a tough job to improve the Battlax BT-021 tire, as it is already contained most of Bridgestone's top technologies. It had, for instance, the so-called 'Mono-Spiral Belt' (MS belt). Usually, the radial belt was made from a mat, cut to size and wrapped around the carcass with a small overlap. At that overlap, there would be a stiff spot, disturbing the balance and the continuity of the tire properties. The Bridgestone MS belt is not a mat but a very long card, wound around the circumference of the tire.

One of my American friends, who was not so long ago in Thailand, was a bit shocked from how warm the fuel-tank of my Honda CRF450X becomes after a bit fooling around in the sun. With a heavy American accent he said 'Boiling is pasta not for gasoline' and knowing he was right we moved our motorcycles to a place in the shadow.

Not so long ago I receive an email that he will send me something I would like. So I received a CV4 Fuel Kool. With the message 'Think of it as a space blanket for your fuel tank.'

In the real motocross world, the late Drew Lien of 100% Products gets the credit for discovering that space-age reflective foil could be used on a motocross race bike. Drew's idea was to apply the reflective foil to the inside of your bike's side panel so that your muffler wouldn't melt a hole in the plastic. This was, believe it or not, a major problem with motocross motorcycles in the 1980s. Drew used the aerospace foil to deflect heat.

Now, 30-years later, heat is still a problem, and motocrossers and enduro riders are still using Drew's solution. The difference is that the reflective foil is being used on the underside of a four-stroke's fuel tank. A four-stroke engine produces so much heat that the fuel loses its combustibility, vapor-locks the fuel lines, or boils inside the float bowl.

Over the years, I have ridden in all kinds of weather conditions, and that's one of the main reasons I still love riding. Battling nature is a major part of my hobby. It is what separates the men from the boys, and, more to the point, the prepared from the unprepared.

We all know about what to wear for cold-weather riding, but once the thermometer starts to go skyward, there are only so many layers of clothing you can remove. The trick is to learn to understand how the human body copes with heat stress and what you can do about it. The reality is that we have to make compromises.

We need protection in the form of helmets, boots, pants, jackets, gloves and protective pads, but these same protective gear can trap the heat next to our bodies and eventually cause a dangerous situations. Not wearing protective gear can result in life-threatening accidents.

The solution is to come up with the best possible compromise between protection against impacts and protection against overheating. The goal is to maximize all possible cooling strategies and minimize heat build-up by carefully choosing gear that is designed for hot-weather riding and optimizing the body's ability to cope with heat.

Metals are strange stuff. Everyone has bent a bit of wire or sheet metal back and forth until it has broken – that's what you do when you need to cut a piece off but have no cutting pliers about you. But how does it work?

The reason metals appealed so much to their ancient discoverers was that, unlike tools made of flint or other stony materials, metals can bend rather than just snap under stress. They can also be hammered, bent, or otherwise forced into desired shapes – especially with application of heat.

Metal atoms are held to each other by electrical forces, mediated by outer shell electrons so lightly bonded that they really constitute and 'electron gas' in the metal. This being so, a particular metal atom, when forcibly moved, can bond into a new location as well as it did in its original one. The atoms of stony materials, by contrast, are bonded by exchange of electrons between particular atoms. When those bonds are broken, they are not self-repairing. And so metals yield while stony stuff snaps.

The mechanism of yielding involves the shifting of ranks of atoms over each other – a process made easier by the occasional out-of-place atom called a 'dislocation'. When stress is applied, motion begins more easily at the out-of-place atom and spreads to its neighbors. Bump-bump, the ranks of atoms move across each other, and dislocations move as well. The dislocations within it are driven, eventually forming tangles that resist further movement. This is why, as we bend the wire back and forth, it resists more strongly just before it breaks. The metal has become harder. Metallurgists say the metal has been 'work-hardened'. Since the tangled dislocations can't move any further, the material stiffens. When we keep on bending the material, it can't bend any more so it cracks and breaks in two.

The Shoei XR-1100 is one of the latest helmets from Shoei, the XR-1100 which the Japanese company claims is superior to all of its previous helmets in every respect.

Intensive preparatory work with CAD programs, in the laboratory and in the Shoei wind tunnel, plus extensive road tests involving our test riders around the globe, resulted in a helmet with an absolutely innovative design.

While that might sound a bit overly dramatic, there's no denying that there's been a lot of work put into the Shoei XR-1100 'the latest addition' to the range. The Shoei XR-1100 features:

The Dainese Torque In boots, modern roadracing boots are highly specialized, but some models with their many fancy bells and whistles take longer getting into than the rest of your riding gear combined.

Not so Dainese's Torque In boots. These sleekly styled, Romanian-made numbers go on and off in seconds yet have the Italian company's torsion-reducing, full-wrap, D-Axial system, which offers comparable ankle protection to that of other high-end boots. A single, full-length, rear-entry zipper provides closure. There are no buckles, straps, tabs or other types of fasteners to adjust or slow the process.

About that funny name: 'In' refers to the patented design that lets the boots be worn inside the legs of the Italian company's 'professional' leather suit. Hook-and-loop swatches stitched to the shins of the boots and inside the legs bond boots to leathers securely. Despite drawing criticism from appearance-driven traditionalists, this is a good system that works flawlessly.

I'm not gonna lie – I haven't paid for motorcycle gloves in some time. Apparently motorcycle gloves are the ideal presents for me, with my birthday mid the year and Christmas at the end of the year I have more than I use. But, I can clearly remember what a difficult time I used to have at the different shops, and particularly how annoyed the sale person used to get as I asked to try on every pair of textile gloves on the wall.

It's hard to find the right combination of looks, price and dexterity, but the Scorpion Sports Cool Hand's for woman have given me all that and even a special surprise they're name Cool Hand for a reason.

HJC's SPXN is an attractive new dirt helmet with the usual peak, plus a option for a fold up-down clear visor. You can use this HJC SPXN helmet in a variety of combinations. For long distance road work you can adjust the airflow, and have a low drag touring visor helmet.

For pure dirt riding you do not have to adjust anything, you can easily remove the visor, and use goggles as usual. For me using HJC SPXN helmet on the Honda CRF450R in rural Northeast Thailand it was leave it all there, lower the visor for the high-speed road sections and push it up under the peak for getting max airflow and vision when picking my way through the off-road sections.

In this form the HJC SPXN helmet really come into its own when the rain came down. I find goggles give less than ideal visibility in the rain, can fog easily in the slower sections, and of course any high speed road bits cause the before-mentioned rain pain ending with you riding one-handed, and using the other as a lower-face shield.

Inspired by Ducati heritage and thanks to PUMA’s leadership in footwear industry, the Two Iconic Brands Invent Moto Lifestyle. The latest footwear range produced through the Ducati and PUMA® partnership has now arrived in stores. This highly productive brand collaboration has produced many aspirational products, and continues to lead the field with its latest range of lifestyle products.

The two latest designs are no exception, the innovation, comfort and technology incorporated in both these shoes continue to push the boundaries.

The En Route LT Ducati shoe is the ideal product for both the causal and serious biker, providing the heavy performance benefits that riding requires but within a lighter, more casual sneaker feel.