dddd
Joined: 11 Jan 2004
Posts: 3345
Location: NorCal4/16/14 11:07 PM |
"All front brake and keep the chain loaded on the top is how I was taught."
I recall that I eventually did almost the same thing by instinct after many years of riding on rain-slicked NY back roads, except I used the rear brake together with the throttle and front brake.
This seemed to keep the rear suspension from topping out under braking, since the rear brake's backing plate was anchored directly to the bike's swingarm, which maintained a compressive force on the shocks.
Poor man's traction control I guess.
Riding off-road, and often downshifting two or more gears at a time, I would keep the clutch lever in the whole time, but those bikes usually had "floating" rear brakes that didn't feed any braking torque into the swingarm, but used a parallel rod that was anchored to the main frame. Here, I would just use the front and rear brakes for all the traction that they could use.
Riding hard on the brakes on dry pavement, most street bikes can put little if any braking power to the rear tire without the wheel locking up.
There was a period of intense interest in, and development of, swingarm pivot-to-countershaft distance and the effects that this had on braking and on chain tensioning. I designed a constant-tension linkage in the best Rube Goldberg traditions as one of my freshman mechanical engineering projects at NC State back in 1979.
Your Buell would have had a most generous swingarm pivot-to-countershaft distance, owing to it's Harley Sportster engine unit architechture.
Flat-trackers (dirt-trackers) utilize adjustable swingarm pivot height eccentrics to fine-tune their rear suspension's squat behavior for each track that they race on.
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