Preparing your motorbike for transport

A quarter of a tank, give or take. Enough to move the bike on and off and get to a fuel station at the other end, and no more. A brimmed tank is heavier to handle and has nowhere for the fuel to go as it warms up, and there's no benefit to carrying a full one.

The other half of the fuel question is what happens after delivery. Plenty of bikes that get moved are going somewhere to sit: a winter garage, a restoration, a new owner who won't ride it until spring. For those, less fuel is better still, and the reason comes from one of the UK's road safety charities:

Gladman is talking about laying a bike up for winter, not about moving it, but the two meet more often than you'd think. If the bike is being delivered into storage, a nearly empty tank is less to drain at the far end. If it's being delivered to be ridden, a quarter of a tank gets the new owner to a pump with fresh fuel. Either way, a full tank is the one option that helps nobody.

Anything that unclips, straps on or hangs off the bike comes off before it's moved: top box, panniers, tank bag, tail pack, sat nav, phone mount, action camera, a cover rolled up under a bungee. They're the parts most likely to shift, scuff the paint or go missing, and none of them needs to travel on the bike. Fixed racks and bolted-on crash protection can stay where they are.

If you want the luggage to arrive with the bike, say so when you ask for the price and hand it over as a separate item. A bag in the cab is easy; a top box rattling on its mounting plate for sixty miles is not.

Keys. The ignition key goes with the bike, along with the seat or steering lock key if your bike has separate ones. Keep the spare keys and any coded master key yourself; they don't need to travel.

Steering lock off. A bike is steered as it's moved, so the lock has to be off. It sounds obvious until the key is in someone's coat pocket at work.

Disc locks off, and anything else that stops a wheel turning. A disc lock left on is the classic one: the wheel turns a few inches and stops dead, which can damage the disc, the caliper or the lock, or put the bike on its side. Take the chain, the ground anchor and the reminder cable off with it.

Alarms and trackers. An alarm with a movement or tilt sensor will go off the moment the bike is moved. Turn it off, or use the transport or service mode if your alarm has one, and leave the fob with the key. If you have a tracker that alerts you or a monitoring centre when the bike moves, tell them it's being collected. Don't disconnect the battery to get round an alarm: IAM RoadSmart notes that alarms and immobilisers won't work without the battery, and on some bikes that turns a simple collection into a problem.

Set the tyres to the pressures in the handbook. A soft tyre makes a bike harder to push and less stable when it's held upright, and a flat one means it doesn't really roll. IAM RoadSmart's pre-ride POWDERY checks make the point that pressures should be checked with the tyres cold, because the reading is higher when they're hot, so do it before the bike has been ridden that day.

Then do the test that decides whether I can move it. These are the three questions on my quote form:

1. Does it roll? Push it a few feet in a straight line. The wheels should turn freely with no brake dragging and no flat tyre.
2. Does it steer? Turn the bars from lock to lock. They should move smoothly with nothing catching.
3. Does it brake? Squeeze the front brake while pushing. The bike should stop and hold.

I can't move bikes that don't roll, steer and brake just yet. If yours passes all three but won't start, or something else is odd about it, tell me when you ask for the price and I'll tell you straight whether I can help.

Five minutes with your phone, the day before or on the morning. Photograph both sides, the front and the back, in daylight if you can. Then take close-ups of any marks the bike already has, the scuffed bar end or the chip on the tank, and a photo of the clocks showing the mileage. Your phone dates them for you.

Nobody expects to need them. That's the point: they settle a question about condition in seconds instead of turning it into a disagreement. If you're there when the bike is collected, it's worth walking round it together before it's loaded, so you both know what the photos show.

Most of the time lost on a collection is lost between the bike and the road. Think about the whole route, at your end and at the other end:

• Where can a van stop? A driveway, a quiet road, or a street with yellow lines, permits or a gated car park. Height barriers on car parks and estates matter too.
• How does the bike get from where it lives to the van? Gravel, steps, a steep drive, a narrow side gate, a garage with the lawnmower parked in front of it.
• Who will be there? Someone with the keys at each end, with a phone number I can ring if the traffic's bad.
• What's on the way in? Low bridges, narrow roads and steep driveways are the three things I look for first when I assess access. On the R1 move further down this page, the drive was steep, so we assessed it before loading.
• Any time limits? A dealer's opening hours, a block of flats with a concierge, a seller who's only in after six.

None of these stops a job. They just need to be known in advance, which is why my quote form has a box asking about access. If you're moving house as well as moving the bike, my removals business, Brewood Removals, handles the house; the bike usually goes separately.

If you're wheeling the bike out to the van, or doing the whole job yourself on a trailer, these are the mistakes I see most:

• Rushing. Nearly everything else on this list comes from trying to get it done quickly. A motorbike is heavy, and once it's rolling the wrong way it's hard to stop.
• Not looking at the space first. Before the bike moves an inch, look at where it's going: the slope of the drive, the gap past the car, the step at the garage door, and where you'll be standing.
• Leaving the side stand down. Put it up before the bike rolls. A stand left down catches the ground as you push, and it can dig in on a ramp or the edge of a lift.

My own first lesson was about straps rather than stands. The CX500 story in my guide to collecting a privately bought motorbike is what happens when you strap a bike down over the handlebars.

In motorcycle transport, securing the bike is the transporter's job, not yours, but it's worth knowing what good looks like so you can ask the right question. The government's guidance on securing loads has a short section on exactly this:

What I take from that is the principle, not a product: a motorcycle in a van should be held by its wheel and lashed to the vehicle, never left standing on its sidestand with a strap thrown over it. The same guidance is clear that everyone involved in loading is responsible for the load being secure during transport. So ask any transporter, me included, how your bike will be held and where the straps will go. A good one will tell you without hesitating.

How a Yamaha R1 was secured on a removals job

Here's a real one. On a Brewood Removals house move, a Yamaha R1 went from Penkridge to Oxford with the rest of the house. We raised it on the removals van's tail lift, and once it was up, it took a three-point manoeuvre to turn the bike from the lift into the van. The front wheel then went into a wheel chock, four straps held it front and back, and removal blankets padded it on either side.

That's the GOV.UK principle in practice: chocked, then lashed to the vehicle. The blankets aren't in the guidance. They're the removals habit of padding anything that matters before the van moves.

I'll be straight about my own position. That was the Brewood Removals van. MC Transports' own van and kit are still being set up, so I'm not going to describe them here until they're real and photographed; when they are, there'll be a guide showing exactly how your bike is held. And while I've moved motorcycles for customers through Brewood Removals, it's been three or four bikes, not hundreds. Whoever moves your bike, you're entitled to ask to see how it's held before the doors close, and that includes me.

If this checklist is for a bike you've just bought from someone else, my guide to collecting a privately bought motorbike covers the V5C and paying the seller, and the track day transport guide has a kit list for circuit days. Prices for every run are on the prices page, and the service itself is on the motorcycle collection and delivery page.