So the wrecked bike i'm working on, its steering alignment is pretty bad (see Picture). I really have no idea how to re align it. Is it possible the fork tubes are not bent? If they are fine i'm guessing i just need to fix something with the triple tree or something. Is that right? I looked in the Clymer Service Manual and he doesnt have anything in there i could find. Any advice and knowledge would be greatly appreciated.

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i can't really tell by the pic how off or where the problem may be.

when you roll the bike, does it roll straight? or does it start tracking to the right or left? are the forks clamped evenly?

i would take the forks off and run a good straight edge around the fork tube to make sure they are straight. also see if the free length of the forks match up with each other. is there any frame damage?

does the rear wheel line up with the front wheel?

can't think of anything else right now.

 

So I finally got to taking off the front wheel and the fork tubes. The tubes are fine. One of them is a little bent, its a gap of about a couple mm's. My service manual says it can be within 2 mm's so i think im good. But i figured out why the steering is off. The upper and lower triple trees don't line up with each other and if you push the handle bars all the way to the right they'll still move all the way to the left. I've looked in the manual and it doesn't really tell you how to correct bad alignment. I'm guessing i just need to loosen the nut on top so the triple tree's are loose, and i guess i could re-center the two by re-inserting the fork tubes and then tightening everything down again? Or is the triple tree done for and i need one? any info would be awesome.

 

you could try your idea of re-aligning the forks and clamps and see if that fixes your problem. it's kinda rare for the tree to be out of whack because the fork tube will give first before the clamps will hence the bending. i am not very keen on using a bent fork but if you feel comfortable about it then good luck. if you find that the either the top or bottom clamp is gone, then you can pick up a replacement on ebay pretty cheap since there are quite a few of both always being listed.

 

I tweaked my front end much worse than that, in order to put the front wheel straight, the clip-ons were at full lock to the right.

I took the tubes out of the trees, checked with a straight edge and all. I couldnt beleive it---forks were good! not even an indent in the tube.

to fix the alignment problem, I loosed the top nut on the triple tree, (had to go buy a bigger socket), this allows the toptree to move independantly from the bottom tree. I also put a straight edge on the trees to make sure they didnt get tweaked.

once everything was loosened up, I slid the fork tubes into place, but just tightened the clamps enough to hold them, but still loose enough you could move them by hand. then I mounted the front wheel and axle and torqued the alxe and axle pinch bolts. this made sure that they tubes were set correctly at the bottom.. then I moved to the trees/forks. line them up so everthing is parrallel and straight.(measure as best you can- I cant remember exactly what I measured, but I took several measurements to ensure everything was squared up). Then I torqued the top nut on the tree, and the clamps holding tubes. Then I went back down to the axle and pinch bolts, loosened them up and retorqued them again just to make sure I didnt bind anything.

It took a little while, but I wanted to be damn sure it was all solid and straight, and it was.