How to Ship a Motorcycle

Shipping a motorcycle may seem like a challenging task if you’re doing it for the first time. Yet we’ve shipped vehicles of all kinds safely and swiftly. This includes motorcycles. We’re happy to walk you through the process.

Preparations

First up, shipping a motorcycle isn’t like hauling it yourself in a truck flatbed. We can drive it up a ramp and secure it to a carrier, but if there isn’t a need to ship other motorcycles that way at the same time, to the same place, you’re going to spend a lot doing that. It’s not ideal, and it’s not really any safer than shipping it as freight.

We take extra steps to ensure the motorcycle is secured. The best way of doing it is often to secure it standing to a pallet. This gives the motorcycle a wide, square base. From here, we highly recommend crating the motorcycle and pallet. It can be further secured within the crate. It also allows us to move the motorcycle by interacting with the crate, not the bike itself. By handling the crate directly instead of the motorcycle, we ensure that the motorcycle risks less damage. Crating is especially useful for making sure dust and grit doesn’t damage the motorcycle during transit.

Transit

We’ll use an air ride suspension in our trucks. An air ride suspension means that instead of steel springs to absorb road impact during travel, we’ll use an air bladder. This absorbs shock much more efficiently, meaning less shock is absorbed by the cargo sitting atop the air ride suspension. The ride is much smoother. We use this approach when transporting performance parts and many kinds of vehicles, from motorcycles to high-performance cars. There’s no reason to strain your suspension or shake your vehicles around during transit when an easy and accessible solution is available.

If you have questions about shipping a motorcycle, we’re all ears and happy to answer. We know it’s hard to place such a personal vehicle in someone else’s hands for a time, and we do everything we can to ship your motorcycle safely and quickly.