> How to set up mountain bike suspension Topics covered in this guide Motorcycle Frame Neck Tube Adjustments.We’ve shown how your bike’s geometry influences things, now we look at how you can manipulate components and settings to improve your shape on the bike.How To Lower A Motorcycle: Frame Modification.Don't use trial and error when dealing with rake and trail, fork extension, offset, and tire diameter. When designing a custom chopper, you must delve a bit deeper into the rake and trail concepts presented here in order to ensure that your design turns into a safe bike after you've turned the paper design into reality. But slower speeds will be, at best, very clumsy and most likely uncontrollable. If a motorcycle has too much trail, the high speed handling will be very steady, too steady in fact. It would likely wobble so badly that a crash could occur at normal street speeds. In this situation, the motorcycle would handle great at low speed but would be nearly impossible to control at higher speeds. In a negative trail configuration the steering axle mark would be behind the front axle mark. In fact, the ride feels almost as if it is a part of your body, responding instantly to your every movement. When the trail measurement is within normal limits, the cycle will move through these types of turns without any wobble or sway. Having ridden, you know what is meant by "leaning into a curve". You don't actually move the handlebars to make small turns you simply lean in the direction you want to go and the motorcycle moves with you. Trail has a lot of do with how well the bike steers. It is most likely somewhere between 2 and 4 inches. With the tape measure, determine the distance between the two chalk marks. Next, hold the tape measure next to the steering next and follow the angle of the steering neck down to the floor. Hold a tape measure so that it forms a straight line from the front axle to the floor and place a chalk mark at the point where the tape measure touches the floor. Hold on, we're not done with rake and trail quite yet. Place your motorcycle in a fully upright position by putting it on the center stand in the case of a rigid frame. If you have a rear suspension, ask someone to sit on the bike, holding it upright so that their weight simulates the trail when the motorcycle is being ridden. Let's break trail down so you can really envision what it means. Well, better yet, print this out, walk out to your shop or garage, get a tape measure and some chalk and perform these measurements so you can really see how it works. See why it is the most difficult to understand? Trail is the distance determined when an imaginary vertical line is drawn from the front axle to the ground and that line intersects with another imaginary line going from the center-line of the steering neck to the ground. Diameter of the front tire is another variable.īut trail is often the most difficult to understand. Fork rake is the degrees of angle which the neck is angled from true vertical.įork rake works in most cases with the triple trees which create the fork rake however, triple trees with raked steering stems have additional adjustments, usually of 3 to 7 degrees rake, which are used to adjust trail.įork length is simply the measurement, usually in inches, from the top of the fork tubes to the center-line of the front axle. The front suspension of any motorcycle is made up of six key variables. But knowing rake and trail (and fork rake) is something you should 'get'. The good news is that, unless you plan to become a from-scratch frame and suspension designer, you won't need a university degree and a keen understanding of tangents, sines, and cosines to comprehend the basic concepts you need to understand how your motorcycle functions as a synergistic creation of many parts.
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