Trail

[VALLEYSBOY]

Have you got a brass mine in your valley then Gareth?

nah mainly coal up here, that lot is a small part of my late dads collecting habit from the steel works!!

[peanut]

Just to bring the discussion back to trail for a moment, I was having trouble calculating the trail figure for the girder-equipped trike I'm building. The Choppers 101 site has a very easy to use calculator that might help people, but I found that there was no substitute for mocking-up with the actual ride height and seeing what string and chalk gives you in the real world. I was searching for the 'correct ' figure of say, 4" or so, but then the technical gurus on the chopperbuilders trike section site said that I should be looking for an inch or so (Story of my life...) to make the steering lighter and yet still stay stable. I mocked up the chassis, forks and wheel and measured the actual trail from full compression to full rebound and found that I had to move my top pivot forward a 1/4 inch to achieve the right result.( I have a 40 degree rake). Now I have trail of 1" at full extension, gradually lengthening to about 4 inches as the 5" of travel is used up, which will hopefully make it stable under heavy braking.

Interestingly, despite very careful measuring I was not able to replicate the figures that any of the internet trail calculators gave me in the real world with my combination of parts.

 

[dracken1]

girders and springers aside.... raked yokes...

excellent for bringing trail numbers back into line on many customs. yes fit them to a standard rake just so you can fit 6" overs and stay level is bloody dangerous as it can easily knock your trail the other way, making a supermarket trolleys handling seem like a formula one car.

these people explain it better than i ever can. the chopper hand book is like a bible

http://www.chopperhandbook.com/neatstuff/index.html