Fast Eddie
VIP MEMBER
- Joined
- Oct 4, 2013
- Messages
- 21,594
This is only an opinion, I have no qualifications in chassis design...
I believe a fork brace has to be extremely heavy duty and stiff before it does any real good at all. Even then, with bikes like ours which are, when compared to modern machinery, already low on power and generally very bendy, I don’t see what even a stiff brace does.
The tubular brace shown has very long bent tubes, welded to a thin plate, secured to the forks by spindly fasteners, I fail to see how that can possibly add strength to a Norton over and above the cast steel yokes and solid steel wheel spindle already in use.
Just because we think we see things twisting pushing the forks down in the shed does not mean they are going to twist detrimentally in use. In fact, the freedom to move a little may even allow a kind of ‘self alignment’ to take place under hard braking.
Most serious classic race bikes in use today do not use fork braces, and they did not use them back in the day either. Even Peter Williams who was (and still is) obsessed with chassis stiffness, did not use a fork brace.
Apart from one or two top class lads on here who race at a good level, the rest of us could not possibly tell the difference with or without a brace... unless there was something else wrong that the brace covers up for. I’ve ridden on road and track with and without various forms of brace and cannot tell any different.
Furthermore, a badly fitted brace is likely to do more harm to the handling than the theoretical upsides of even a good and well fitted brace.
I imagine it’s a different ball game at Moto GP / WSB level, but those boys are on a different planet to us old blokes on our old Norton’s !
I believe a fork brace has to be extremely heavy duty and stiff before it does any real good at all. Even then, with bikes like ours which are, when compared to modern machinery, already low on power and generally very bendy, I don’t see what even a stiff brace does.
The tubular brace shown has very long bent tubes, welded to a thin plate, secured to the forks by spindly fasteners, I fail to see how that can possibly add strength to a Norton over and above the cast steel yokes and solid steel wheel spindle already in use.
Just because we think we see things twisting pushing the forks down in the shed does not mean they are going to twist detrimentally in use. In fact, the freedom to move a little may even allow a kind of ‘self alignment’ to take place under hard braking.
Most serious classic race bikes in use today do not use fork braces, and they did not use them back in the day either. Even Peter Williams who was (and still is) obsessed with chassis stiffness, did not use a fork brace.
Apart from one or two top class lads on here who race at a good level, the rest of us could not possibly tell the difference with or without a brace... unless there was something else wrong that the brace covers up for. I’ve ridden on road and track with and without various forms of brace and cannot tell any different.
Furthermore, a badly fitted brace is likely to do more harm to the handling than the theoretical upsides of even a good and well fitted brace.
I imagine it’s a different ball game at Moto GP / WSB level, but those boys are on a different planet to us old blokes on our old Norton’s !
