So I only have about 150 miles on my first SM. Yesterday was the first day I've really gotten to ride it. I noticed that bumps, even smaller ones, in the road want to cross up the bars when I hit them at an angle. Seems like the front wheel is deflecting off of them a bit. Once I was riding with one hand to flip up my visor and almost went into a tank slapper. Well it felt like almost. Another was when exiting a turn so the front was light under acceleration and when it hit it crossed up the bars about 30 degrees. Never really upset the chassis too much it just crossed up and when the front wheel gripped it just straightened out. Pretty impressive that it was able to do that without a steering stabilizer. My old fireblade would have wadded me up like a pretzel if the bars got that far crossed up. What can I do to eliminate this? Can you eliminate it totally or do I just have to be mindful of it because SMs have a certain amount of this that goes on?
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Hi everyone,
As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.
When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.
Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.
Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.
Thanks for your patience and support!
Can tweaking the suspension solve this?
- Thread starter brandontx
- Start date
The suspension will get a lot more compliant with time. Might take a lot of miles on a SM that is not receiving the same pounding a dirt bike gets. You can also lower the fork tubes in the triple clamp and run more sag (lower in the rear). This raising the front and dropping the rear will make the bike handle slower and be more stable. Always make sure you are running correct tire pressures as well. The type of tires also affect this so you might look into other tires when it comes time to replace. Additionally don;t be afraid to play with the suspension adjustments. Read up on what each does and play with them during a ride. Only change one setting at a time to see what it does tot he handling. Go 3-4 clicks one way or the other based on you assumptions and see if it makes it better or not. Remember that they are all interrelated. You would be amazed how much the suspension geometry and setting will change how the bike handle and deals with the road irregularities. Suspension is the single most effective adjustment you can make to most any bike.
Taking it to get it adjusted tomorrow. We'll see how that goes. I can already tell has sensitive it is to changes. Raised the PSI in the tires a few pounds and it steers a lot slower. You can usually tell a difference but there is a huge difference now. Going to a shop to get me in the ballpark and then I'll take it from there.