Okay you motorcycle guru's. I need some input here.
I was going to cut the neck and rake the bike a bit more, but I looked at what it has for trail before welding everything together and found it has a pretty excessive amount with the current setup. It looks to have a 7 5/8" trail.
I hear that for a trike, trail should be more like 3-4"? Is that correct?
The way it looks right now, I'll need to find some different forks that have the axle mounted on the leading edge. This should reduce trail a little bit. Then shortening the forks and removing some rake would help as well, right?
I have already shortened the internals on these forks 2" and also slid the tubes through the tripples about 1 1/4" as well. I really cant get much more out of these forks.
Any ideas?
It's hard to see here, but I have a string running in the center line of the neck, all the way to the floor.
The level shows centering of the front axle.
The vice grips are just holding the string right at the center line of the neck.
And here is the trail number.
I decided to run the numbers through a rake and trail calculator and found my string wasn't in the exact right spot.
Here are the numbers:
Front tire-26.75"
Rake-43* (I know, that's a lot)
Tripple clamp offset-2 1/4"
Fork legnth-28.5"
Triple tree rake-0"
Total trail- 9.4"!!!!!! WOW!!!
Next, I punched in to see what I could get the trail to if I built a set of tripple trees with a larger Tripple clamp offset. I found that 6.5" got the trail to 3.58". Now THIS is a workable number.
I could also make raked tripple trees, but that would require absolute precision on a mill, which I have access to, but I'm not that skilled on it. It would be much easier to build a normal set of tripple trees with straight holes for the fork tubes, but with a larger offset from the neck stem to the fork clamps.
