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August,2005
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Biking progress update
Posted on Sunday, November 26 @ 23:35:26 CET by Adam |
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Given that this thing started as a motorcycling weblog, I should post an update on the progress of my riding prowess.
Unlike a car, a motorcycle cannot stay upright as it takes a corner. The vehicle must be dropped into the corner by the rider, and this angle is maitained both by the centrifugal force related to the centripetal acceleration and by the gyroscopic stabilizing forces produced by the wheels.
Because these forces are unintuitive and the equilibrium is very dynamic, the rider must learn to overcome his inhibitions of dropping the bike quite low, lower than he instinctively feels is safe. With increasing angle, the bike will eventually lose traction and skid out. A bike with a racing geometry like my speed triple does not have any components close enough to the ground, so it will skid only when we roll the bike past the edge of tire's contact surface. The Honda 500 depicted below, however, has lower footpegs which will scrape on the asphalt first. Here are some pictures of this bike as well as of the cornering exercise being performed. I did the exercise with the 500, and did manage to go down low enough to scrape the footpegs. Also, before the exercise we marked the tire with chalk. The final two pictures show that going around the curve clockwise, I was able to scrub off the chalk almost all the way to the rim of the tire, but I am more inhibited counterclockwise, and there I still have a significant way to go. These pictures were taken in October.
One of the other guys / girls in my group doing the exercise:
The Honda 500 that I practice on. It handles like a bicycle compared to my Triumph, and its less expensive if I drop it.
And finally the chalk marks on the tire after I went round and round:
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