homemade FF bike

Tony Foale experimented with steering rake using tellies. Each time he steepened the rake, the better the bike steered. The last experiment used a vertical steering head. But when he braked, he got an unholy judder. I went one step further with a negative rake. It steers lovely and there is no dive, and no judder on the brakes. If you can't join 'em, beat 'em.

https://youtu.be/ECzFlrXNry8

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Picture/s?

Be nice to see some pictures on this site. By 'negative' rake I have to assume you mean the rake angle is beyond vertical and slopes back to the wheel centre? (as opposed to forward) So the front of the vehicle rises as the steering is turned? This would seem to imply substantial self-centering and a need for very low trail to counteract that. What sort of suspension do you manage all this with? Some form of trailing link? is the suspension steered? Intriguing!

Of course lack of dive (actually adjustable to taste) no judder under braking and pretty much any sort of steering desired, along with exceptional torsional stiffness, high steering precision and a separation of steering, suspension and braking effects is also available with Difazio,Tait and Voyager HCS systems, but it would be very interesting to see what you've done.

I well remember Tony Foales experiments with telescopic geometry but thought his 'Arm and Wishbone' HCS, subsequently copied by Yamaha on their GTS was a better development route, only limited for FF use by the need for a fat lower arm intruding into one foot space. This is one of the reasons for the more common "Double Wishbone" systems, mentioned above, used in several FF designs.

more detail photos

There are some more details here:

https://www.facebook.com/wobblywonders/

New Picture Folder Created: http://bikeweb.com/image/tid/192

If you look here, you will see that I have created a new file of photos of this machine in the One-Offs folder, here: http://bikeweb.com/image/tid/192