Leaderboard

Just so that those who are not in the know, do know, this seems to be more directed at Harleys with the baffles cut out. But, there are some of our type bikes that are modified to make them louder. That is still illegal and enforceable. The decibel reading has nothing to do with the charge. Section 7A.01 Motor Vehicle Act Regulations covers that. Create Unnecessary noise and that is an offense. Deliberately doing something to your bike to make more noise is unnecessary. Screaming along the roadway maintaining near red line, is not necessary. Much the same as squealing your tires in your Camaro. Same thing. Just a heads up to everyone. I am not debating this.

Just a reiteration of local "news". Meaningless whining from ignorant folks who want simple solutions to their incidental discomfort. Like I said the noise issue will not be addressed or solved in our lifetime. The whiners are just adding more useless noise, none have actually proposed a useful, workable solution. I actually agree that there is a problem with trend-humping, leather-chapped fashion lemmings that know little about actually being able to ride a motorcycle but that's beside the point. Further, I've always surreptitiously cringed when starting up my full TBR race VFR or even my Racefit slip-on SDR. Until I hear one of the shotgun equipped, dew-rag brethren firing up his/her potato-potato lump. I think both my bikes pass the 83 dB limit but then they'll find something else to complain about... like how I ride around these days on one wheel. Pantywaists the lot of them.

Lots of people playing with fork changes etc, but without any real data to judge what effect the changes may or may not make. So I set up a spreadsheet and entered some typical examples to illustrate what happens. But first... This is done for the 5th gen 800 and it relies on original spec in order to be able to calculate what it does. If anyone needs data for a different model, providing the original spec is available, just let me know. I have based everything on the suspension being fully extended as that's the only reliable and repeatable state. Hard to measure in practice of course, but that doesn't matter as what we're concerned with really is changes away from standard, which is the line in red. The fork length is from the upper surface of a flat top yoke/triple clamp to the centre of the front axle. Gull wing yokes and/or forks not being flush with the top of the yoke will have to allowed for as it's impossible to build-in all possible variations. E.g. the standard forks I believe are 780mm overall. But they should extend above the upper surface of the (flat) top yoke by 41mm, plus the top cap which is about 2mm so the length to use is 737mm (780 - 2 - 41). In case that disappears geom800.tiff It can be seen that reducing the OFFSET has a significant effect on the TRAIL which suggests that it's not a good idea to replace with forks with a very small OFFSET. It can be counteracted by dropping the front and/or raising the rear to steepen the RAKE, but there's a limit to how far you can go with this. Anyway, hope this is of interest to others.