Hi,
Si wrote:NATURAL ANKLING wrote:Hi,
Alternatives to telescopic are heavy, and unsprung weight affects handling.
If not then lateral stiffness, too many moving parts adds to complexity and cost.........then there's maintenance.....
The former may be a compromise but works well..........enough....
Sounds like you've not used them. Reality, back when they were more widely used, was better tracking, easier maintenance and less complexity. Weight , £ for £, was a little more but mostly down to being more expensive due to lower production. The main difference was sensitivity to smaller hits.
Of course they didn't catch on back in the day but are sort of making a comeback now on gravel bikes
No I haven't used them at all.
We have no less than five cruise ships in the bay at the moment, Been there weeks
People stand there looking in amazement and awe taking pictures and selfies.
I think one of them is the QE?
They might well be going into cold storage or scrapped any time soon?
My interest would be simply to get on board and look around the engine room.
Don't get me wrong if I saw a fork tomorrow and they were going relatively cheap I might even buy a set to try them out.
I already have some downhill telescopic forks that's full stanchion forks on one of my bikes.
interestingly after your post yesterday, I started thinking about my Flexi stems, which I had on my Halfords bike many years ago and it still on it now.
Flexi stems are very good at small movements, suspension forks are more suited to large amounts of shock and travel.
But as Brucey has said if there were some real advantages there then we to see them more in production.
I used to work on motorbikes full time, maintenance on them was pretty chronic time wise, you needed to look at your bike several times a week if you are driving it all year round,Off-road bikes needed several hours work for an even shorter ride.
My most maintained vehicle is one of my skip trainers which I ride more than any other bike at the moment and have done for a number of years, cars need A very small amount of maintenance in comparison.
Girder forks need quite heavy bushings otherwise you're going to get lateral flexing.
And Brucey mentioned feel, I had not considered that, but it's incredibly important thing as much as brakes need to have feel too.
where the fork is like leading link forks have extra bushes that you wouldn't normally see on telescopic forks.
As for hub centre steering, you need gimbals/universal joints, Well this looks very nice and complex and even pretty, and it must be very satisfying to make something like this work.
with modern day technology which would involve using a virtual solid model (computer aided design) it may well be possible to produce something which ticks all the boxes, But it's unlikely to have the simplicity of something like a leaf sprung De-Dion rear axle, or a MacPherson strut.
But we can dream of bit can't we
