Lol, you'd be surprised. It's something that had to have come naturally in the past, cause I never thought about it. But this morning I nearly bailed on a turn because I was thinking about the best way to cs thru it so much, I nearly turned too late.

 

Don't rely on your instincts -- they will leave you in a ditch because your natural instinct is to look at an obstacle and to use body weight to navigate a turn. Practice, practice, practice with the CS ... you'll find that you don't have to do the Ricky Rice Rocket leaning crap near as much. Just press on the bar in the direction you wanna go and voila ... you're there

 

umm no, its part of riding a motorcycle

 

The way I usually explain countersteering is this...... Picture a motorcycle completely upright & in neutral. If you turn the handlebar to the left the bike will fall to the right and if you turn the handlebar to the right the bike will fall to the left. TADA! the easiest way to comprehend it.

 

I don't think it has all that much to do with gyroscopic precession. You countersteer a bicycle at low speeds, and Jerry Palladino teaches you to "dip" your motorcycle to set up a u-turn by turning to the right to start the bike leaning left. U-turns are done at walking speeds, so I can't imagine there's all that much gyroscopic force on the wheel. It's inertia that sets up the lean. You do the same thing on a bicycle, and I really can't see a lightweight bicycle wheel generating much gyroscopic force at low speeds.

It seems to me that a bike leans the same way as a car. Turn left, your car wants to roll to the right. It doesn't roll over because the right wheels act as outriggers. In a hard left, you feel your body leaning to the right, too, and anything on the dash goes sliding to the right. As the front tires go left, inertia pushes the rest of the car and everything in it to continue in a straight line, which, because the car is turning left, feels like a lean to the right. If you turn the motorcycle's handlebars hard to the left, you and the bike will lean to the right. Actually, without the "outrigger" effect of the car's extra two wheels, you will go flying off in a classic high side crash.

In countersteering, you turn the bars left to make the bike's inertia lean it to the right. I'm always surprised by how little pressure it takes to lean my bike and me, a 750-pound package. It really doesn't feel like I'm moving the bars more than a few millimeters, but the bike leans over immediately.

For people who think they don't countersteer, search the net for a video of Keith Code's "No Bull****" bike. It has a second handlebar bolted on, but not connected to the steering mechanism. Riders put their hands on this second, immobile bar, then try to turn the bike by leaning. The bike keeps going straight. A lot of people don't realize that they're countersteering a bicycle or a motorcycle because it's so subtle at speed, more a matter of pressure on the bars than actually turning. If you turned the bars as much at highway speed as you do at walking speed, the result would be an immediate high side because inertia makes the machine (and you) want to keep going straight no matter which way the front wheel is pointed.

Craig

 

Wow, this post practically saved my life 4 days ago. I just started riding a 3 weeks ago, and having been learning as I go. I was on a curved entrance ramp that merges into a 2 (that becomes 3) lane from the left (i'm in the US). Right before the ramp meets the expressway that it leads to the curve gets considerably sharper. While the curve tightened, the bike maintained it's line. I quickly started moving out of my lane to the right and into the next lane and directly into the path of a semi. Before I knew what was going on I was already in the striped triangle between the lane. I applied a little pressure to the handle bars and was able to tighten up the line enough to back into my lane.

If I had been in that situation two days earlier I might have ended up underneath that semi.

Big thanks to both you and your dad!

The curve:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&sour...=UTF8&t=h&z=17

(please excuse me if i'm butchering bike terminology here...i'm still learning...lol)

 

Consider urself blessed there weez. My biggest fear is wiping out in front of a semi.

 

HI everyone
Thanks for updating.