A New-to-me-Trick

[Bokobob]

Yesterday in North Carolina, the temp reached 68 F so naturally I took a good, long ride on the K75. 

For some reason, I started to downshift differently yesterday.....What I started doing resulted resulted in  no grinding or loud clunking when downshifting into first gear...Here is what I did...Starting at about 30 mph or so, I pulled in the clutch and held it in and rather slowly and gently downshifted to 5th, 4th, 3rd, and 2nd gears, and the let the clutch out for an instant, applied a very tiny amount of throttle and then pulled in the clutch again and gently shifted into 1st gear...It only made a nearly silent "thunk" each time I did that...No more grinding or loud clunking the entire ride and no erosion of my enjoyment of the ride, to say nothing of not wearing down the splines.

Just passing it on. 

[John Lang]

That's a variant of 'double clutching'. It gets the gears spinning the same speed and facilitates smooth transition into the next lower gear. Common practice before 'synchromesh'. I'm old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manual_transmission#Synchromesh

[TrueAce]

As Lang says, that's a bit of a double clutch........a quick blip of the throttle between gears on the down-shift becomes second nature after you practice it for a while.