In an effort to get more heat in the tyre, Laurence drops the front ride height by 5mm, and I go out again. You can’t throw this thing around like a forked-600 the Girder likes wide, traditional racing lines, almost like a 250GP bike, not the point and squirt style customary to big litre-class monsters. However, by now I’m pretty in tune with the Girder. Understeer is nearly eradicated but the lack of front tyre heat is still a problem. The R1 doesn’t dive under braking, rather it squats, and while this has the benefit of keeping trail as constant as possible it can lead to the issue of not enough weight on the tyre to flatten out the contact patch.Īfter cranking up the rear preload and slowing the rebound down I go out again.
Girder front end brake plus#
He can also vary trail plus or minus 6mm. Laurence can alter the front end flex of his design by running the lateral Control Flex bearings at the top of the Girder at different points, but for this test he ran them with no flex as he said this part of the design was still in its early stages. The first 60 percent of the corner is fine, from set-up, to hard braking, to the beginning of the corner, but when on high lean angles with lots of front-end pressure the feel that was there through the fast sweepers is traded for a vagueness you don’t get on a conventional fork set-up. This leads to understeer and makes it hard work to get the bike turned and accelerated out of the corner without running wide. But here lies a problem: there’s too much weight transfer from the back but not enough weight on the front. Leading into the slow turn one right-hander the Girder brakes well with good feel from the front tyre. I shouldn’t say run over as much as floated, which is exactly the type of sensation it gives you-very BMW K1300R-like. There’s big bump that when hit means you’re on the right line but it will upset the chassis of a conventional front-ender, but the Girder ran over it as thought it wasn’t there.
Down the front straight and through the fifth gear kink under power the Girder feels great. It’s just talking to me in a different language. The front feels almost detached from the rest of the bike-like it’s operating in its own orbit-but down the back straight, over the braking bump, the R1 feels stable and sure-footed. Yet despite this staggeringly steep steering angle the bike isn’t anywhere near as twitchy as you’d expect. The Girder R1 runs a 16 degrees steering angle compared to the standard R1’s 24 degrees. The first lap on the R1 feels totally alien. Other than that it’s all about the Girder. There are no rearsets, it has standard road bodywork, a standard ’04 R1 swingarm and an Ohlins TTx30 shock from an ATV stuffed under the rider’s right hand. The R1 no longer runs the normal clip-on bars, with Smith swapping them for a bent MX-style single handlebar that gives the added advantage of more leverage when going between the triple left-hander and the fast right onto the back straight. Wakefield is an ideal 600cc track, but hard work on a 1000, and with the wind blowing some serious nut-freezing chill over the track, getting heat into the tyre would be a challenge Smith recently took me and his Girder R1 to a bitterly cold Wakefield Park in Goulburn, New South Wales, for a spin and a critique of his design. He’s a determined fellow, and convinced that forks are at the end of their life span.
No forks here, he’s chopped the front off a 2004 Yamaha YZF-R1 and grafted on his own design, one that went from CAD to wood to the product you see here-machined from billet 6061 aluminum-in just under a year. This is how he designed it with some pictures.īy Rennie Scaybrooks, "Can this Crazy Front End Really Replace Forks?"ĭown in the depths of the bitterly boring and generally freezing city that is Canberra-Australia’s Capital Territory-Laurence Smith of Suspension Smith has been burrowing away under a ton of aluminum swarf and sweat for the past 12 months to create his version of the future of motorcycles front suspension. What do you guys and gals think? You think its going to be the "future?" Or what would you think you would do to make the Girder handle better through high speed cornering? But I keep wondering if the "traditional" front end wasn't doing the proper job, wouldn't the big engineering guys up at Honda, Ducati.ect change it up? I would like to read about this front end in a couple months with the some tyres that suit the front end, have rake, trail, rider height dialed in and maybe send it to a track that's suited for a 1000. Or maybe just for cruisers or a non high performance bike. I think it needs some more development before its on a serious race bikes but it could be the future. I thought it's an excellent, different way of thinking. I read this article this afternoon about Laurence Smith redesign of a New Front End. I know it's LONG but really worth reading.
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