It’s a beautiful Friday here in sunny Glendale, Arizona and we’re ready for another great weekend of riding, we hope you’re ready too!

Today’s Tech Tip: Geometry!

Now this won’t be as boring and technical as Mrs. Saula’s 10th grade Geometry class, I promise!

The goal here is to emphasize on your dirt bikes “front end trail” and how you can easily adjust it in favor of your riding style and conditions!

Ground trail is the distance from the center of the tire contact patch (bottom center of the tire) to the point where the steering axis intersects with the ground (if you were to draw a straight line down the middle of the fork tubes looking at your bike from the side). The more trail a bike has, (by you lowering your forks into the clamp), the greater self centering effect it will have on the front wheel. I would suggest this setting to stabilize your front end when doing high speed, more open sandy or rocky terrain.

The fork is slid “up” into the triple clamp making steering sharper and more responsive. This a pretty good all round setting and is where I would suggest to start.

And finally the most aggressive setting with the least amount of trail. Here I would only suggest using this setting if you have a steering stabilizer or your in tight S-turns such as tight gnarly single track and such. You’ll notice that steering will become “busy” especially at higher speeds:

Most important of all is for you to experiment and see what works best for you as it certainly is all about personal feel. Obviously this will vary from model to model as other geometry factors come into play such as how many Millimeters the triple clamps are offset and other factors.

Be sure to use anti-seize or at least some grease on your triple clamp bolts and torque the bolts to factory recommended specs with a torque wrench. If you don’t own a torque wrench, Sears has an in-expensive dial type torque wrench that can be had for under $12.

Well I hope this will provide you with some additional insight into tuning your bike to fit YOU better and make you that much more confident with your set up!

See you on the trail!