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[Closed] Can you diagnose my steering problems?
I like to think I can corner relatively well, but several times recently have had the front wheel slide out a bit. It feels very twitchy when it does and once even resulted in me going over the bars.
Tends to happen in tight flat-ish corners rather than wide open ones.
This may have something to do with the more forward riding position I've adopted when moving from hardtail to gnar enduro sled (and now tend to ride the hardtail more forwards as well). This is relative of course, I imagine I'm fairly centered on the bike now rather than backwards biased like I used to be.
Or it may not.
Could also be tyre too soft and folding?
Stem too short, bars too narrow?
Or could it be for some reason I'm turning the bars more than leaning the bike? That would explain the little sideways skid of the front wheel and twitchiness. If so I've never done this before and a bit at a loss to why I have started now.
How are you supposed to lean the bike over quick enough in a tight flat corner anyway?
No idea, could be many reasons, watch this, might help you identify whats going wrong.
Seen that vid before and I swear by his knee on frame technique for wide flat corners on the fs but it hurts a bit much on the hardtail with the frame bouncing all over the place 😉 never really got it working on tight corners though.
Drop the saddle, lean the bike over more, drop the tyre pressure up front.
Experiment.
I sometimes turn the bars more than lean and get a wash out. Takes committed practice. Find somewhere you can session a corner.
Had a practice yesterday. Just trying to do U turns on a fire road.
I realised if I'm not quite making a tight corner when leaned over my instinct is to turn the bars more and that might be what's leading to the washout. It's hard to know what else to do in this situation as leaning even more seems like it won't have an effect quick enough?
The difficult thing is that the speeds for this sort of thing are on the cusp between normal steering (turn bars left to go left) and countersteering (turn bars right to go left like we normally do, but don't think about it and actually just lean the bike).
Watching Fabien again did help actually - realising I could lean the bike over even more and keep my body upright. His technique round that switchback at the end is amazing - what I aspire to. I find it hard to pull up on the outer bar as he suggests without messing up the steering though.