For me this product generated more ‘Hmm, yeah, but, what if’ thinking than anything else for a long time. About how wheel flop is a force resulting from other design needs – front centre length meant slacker angles etc. How it’s a negative at times or a bike with a lot of wheel flop becomes great in some places that most of us want, and really not great in other places (I was working alongside a team who developed a steering stabilser not long ago and tried it on that vehicle, it was very effective and thought provoking generally esp as they’ve been on Dutch bikes for so long already)
But one area that really makes a bike handle well for me is how positive feedback in the steering (wheel flop force) can blend with with common lean angles for that bike type to create a bike that just carves and curves like it’s the most balanced, natural thing. It’s part of how some bikes are such a joy to ride and it’s like frame stiffness, it’s subjective and depends on how you ride to some extent. So I went from thinking that having some influence / control / ability to neutralise a resultant force while keeping all the benefits of long trail was good, to thinking you risk losing that link between steering influence and lean angle if the spring is pulling back to centre.
Then I thought how tuning the amount of wheel flop you feel would be interesting since it’s a subjective thing. You might not need to tune it or even understand what the adjustment is doing. But if slacksets are a good thing to tune to taste, so is this if it covers the right range of adjustment. (can you fit a progressive spring to it? Did they test that? Probably)
Bikes already self-centre, if they didn’t then they wouldn’t work.
A bike doesn’t self-centre, it’s the opposite. Particularly a slack MTB. The rest position is with the wheel at an angle and that’s what flop is – wanting to rest in that position due to the bike or bike+rider weight. And the self-centre effect of a bike in motion can generate is temporary and such a small force compared to the forces the mass of a rider on top generates.
As above you can have zero trail and the bike can do that ghostie thing to some extent. That’s the lean and centripetal force balancing up for a moment.
Gyro effect is the Room 101 type answer about bike stability, it’s not how a bike stays upright. So what we’re left with is rider input as the reason a bike works and the geometry of a good bike aids that process.
Bikes work because we continually steer into a fall to one side, self-correct then adjust the inevitable over-correction and so on. We never track a perfectly straight line. When not cornering we’re always weaving a little in order to keep out C of G as close to the line between the 2 contact patches as we can (there’s some case law on this that justifies a bike waving in the road as normal).
