Viewing 18 posts - 1 through 18 (of 18 total)
  • loose snaking singletrack at speed …technique to stop front end washing out?
  • kaiser
    Free Member

    I always feel held back by the concern that the front wheel is going to break away particularly on loose downhill snaking tracks . I know people say put weight over the front wheel but that always makes me feel even more vulnerable if traction is lost. any advice/tips would be appreciated
    thanks in advance
    Bill

    chrisdb
    Free Member

    Man up and get the weight over the front wheel. (within reason) Bend your elbows. Commit.

    shortcut
    Full Member

    Out of saddle.
    Lean the bike.
    Weight on inside hand and outside pedal.
    Look where you are going, so out of the corner.
    Slow down before you start the corner rather than in it.

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    ampthill
    Full Member

    This helped me

    Find a fairly wide area of a similar surface. Ideally gently sloping

    ride onto it a moderate speed, inside foot of the pedal (ideally with flats) turn. The idea is that with one foot off and nothing to hit falling off isn’t to frightening

    Repeat but make the turn a bit tightet

    repeat even tighter

    my plan was to keep going until I fell off. I didn’t but the amount of grip I was getting was way more than I’d have thought possible

    This increased my confidence in turns

    Now for an expert answer…..

    Mikey65
    Free Member

    set the bars up so that the forks are pre-loaded with your body weight which helps the forks work as they should and push into the turns…..I also find it helps to run tubeless at lower pressure which helps with grip..tyre selection helps as well…also stay alert and if it starts to go, pick up the front end….I am not a great rider, but have started saving the front end more…..Light forks seem to help as well…easier to pick it up when it starts to drift

    abductee
    Free Member

    buy mbuk with the video of fabien barel

    chrisdb
    Free Member

    pick up the front end….I am not a great rider, but have started saving the front end more…..Light forks seem to help as well…easier to pick it up when it starts to drift

    Can you enlighten me a little, how do you pick up the front end if your tyre is washing out?

    Would that not leave you with less grip?

    mushrooms
    Free Member

    Find some fast corners and practice on them until you know you have improved. On loose surfaces you will slide a bit you can’t avoid it.

    brooess
    Free Member

    Often on loose stuff when you’re riding fast you can be through it before you realise you’ve drifted.
    Re weighting, putting weight on the front wheel doesn’t necessarily mean moving forward. Go low over the bike ie: head closer to bars but keep weight distributed across the whole length of the bike ie: try and keep your torso parallel with the top tube. So there’s more weight over the front wheel but you’re not taking weight away from the rear – does that make sense?
    What I was told on a skills course and seems to work for me

    Tracker1972
    Free Member

    Lean forward and there is the same amount of weight on the back, but more on the front, so you weigh more when you lean forward than stood up straight? Closer to the centre of the Earth so greater gravitational field? Does this explain what is happening when I get on the scales to weight myself and lean forward to look? (hope so 🙂 )
    The physics of that doesn’t make sense to me, but the advice about attacking, elbows out, weighting the fork all seems to make me get a little lower and not lean back and that does seem to make a difference, so my inexperienced guess would be to try and follow all the advice as it pretty much says the same thing, get down and forward… a bit.
    Is starting to work for me anyway 🙂

    Euro
    Free Member

    Mikey65 – Member

    set the bars up so that the forks are pre-loaded with your body weight which helps the forks work as they should and push into the turns…..I also find it helps to run tubeless at lower pressure which helps with grip..tyre selection helps as well…also stay alert and if it starts to go, pick up the front end

    Eh? That’s just random buzz words made into sentence shapes. Can I have a go?

    Hook up the boost on the preload and drop the ram til your comfortable. If that doesn’t work, dig out the spare tubeless ‘loose gravel’ wheelset from the ‘bak and unsprung the psi.

    charliedontsurf
    Full Member

    Countersteer

    Want to go right, push the right end of the bar forward and down.

    Sounds odd but really works.

    Try it gently on the road to get a feel for things. After a few years on a Ktm 950 supermoto (big motorbike) it’s now instinctive on a mtb.

    Wiki says: Countersteering is the technique used by single-track vehicle operators, cyclists and motorcyclists, to initiate a turn toward a given direction by momentarily steering counter to the desired direction (“steer left to turn right”). To negotiate a turn successfully, the combined center of mass of the rider and the single-track vehicle must first be leaned in the direction of the turn, and steering briefly in the opposite direction causes that lean. Once sufficient lean is established to sustain the desired turn, the rider, or in many cases the bike itself, then steers into the turn to cause the bike to turn in the desired direction and stop the lean from increasing. This technique does not apply to conventional multiple-tracked vehicles such as trikes or sidecar equipped bicycles and motorcycles.

    p7rich
    Free Member

    Loads of great advice. Looks like you’re sorted. I’ll echo the tyre choice advice – pick a front tyre (dpesn’t have to match the back) with a pronounced knobbly shoulder. Paired with the right pressure it’ll be nigh-on impossible to wash out.

    gothandy
    Full Member

    Might sound a little strange but I found riding on icy roads in the winter great practise for getting just the right amount of weight over the front wheel.

    That’s it back to elbows and stuff …

    Oh before I go, I think Ed Oxley said a corner is like a hollow, you’ve got to pump/push through it … and Jedi has some rock’n tips for cornering … looking/feet/body position etc. anyway I’ll leave you to it now.

    thisisnotaspoon
    Free Member

    What ampthill said.

    I did it on a bmx with a big nobbly front tyre and a skinny park rear tyre. Grassy slope, marker near the bottom, the aim was to get round the marker progressively faster and/or tighter.

    The advantages of the BMX is you can lean it so far over untill the inside pedal diggs in, then just step off.

    nosedive
    Free Member

    2.5 super tacky tyre run at 27 psi

    xiphon
    Free Member

    Mikey65 – Member
    set the bars up so that the forks are pre-loaded with your body weight which helps the forks work as they should and push into the turns…..I also find it helps to run tubeless at lower pressure which helps with grip..tyre selection helps as well…also stay alert and if it starts to go, pick up the front end….I am not a great rider, but have started saving the front end more…..Light forks seem to help as well…easier to pick it up when it starts to drift

    You’ve been reading MBUK too much. What a load of waffle.

    kaiser
    Free Member

    good stuff …thanks to all

Viewing 18 posts - 1 through 18 (of 18 total)

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