Steering damper

[elizilla]

Has anyone installed a steering damper? What's available? What can people here recommend?

My Super10 sidecar outfit arrived yesterday. I met the delivery driver out at the truck stop by the freeway, a couple miles from where I live, and rode it home. It handles very well except for one thing: It tankslaps at low speeds, especially while decelerating but also just riding slowly through town. You can accelerate through it but if you're not in a place where you can accelerate, it's a huge problem.

My outfit has what DMC calls "leading leg" mods to the steering. This is an assembly at the bottom of the forks that moves the axle forward, to reduce steering effort. However it's not like a complete earles fork where everything is different - my forks are normal stock forks, above the axle. So a steering damper that fits a stock bike should fit it.

When I was in design discussions with DMC, we discussed my health issues and the fact that I tire so easily. Their advice was to have it set up with even more trail than they generally recommend for a sidecar conversion, to make the steering effort even lighter. They said it would be twitchy and take practice getting used to, but that long term it would be better for me. I'm guessing that this tankslap is the downside of that decision.

Here are some photos of the fork mods, since I bet you guys will like to see it:

 

[True Grip]

Katherine a German company Off The Road sells a triple clamp for the S10 designed for a Scott's Damper. It's expensive but a fine piece of engineering. If you didn't mind welding a post on the frame in front of the tank you could get their universal mount. I've had the Scott's on a track bike and found it useful. Buddies of mine have said the GRP are good too. I'm sure you can get it sorted.

 

[Bushyar15]

Please post info when you find one!

 

[elizilla]

DMC is making me a steering damper but it's not here yet. In the meantime, we have found something else to try that may have helped.

One of the things I did before I got the sidecar, as I was attempting to keep on riding it as a solo, was to install Tabasco's lowering links. I can flat foot the stock bike even with the seat in the high position, but I thought maybe it would be more manageable if I lowered it. They were still in there when I sent it to DMC and I hadn't given them a thought. But last weekend I was in Tellico Plains, explaining why I hadn't brought it (weather, and the ongoing wobble issue) and one of my riding buds asked if I could perhaps lower the front, to put more weight on it. I can't. But the sidecar suspension adjusts with a push button, and we can raise the rear by changing the dogbones. Raising the other corners should be an awful lot like lowering the front! So today we put the stock dogbones back on, and between rainstorms I took it out for a test ride. I could still make it wobble, but never as uncontrollably as it has in the past. Maybe it helped. I don't know. Some days I have no problems, and other days are constant struggle. I don't think it's the bike; it's me. Perhaps today is just a good day. I'll see how it goes, on my next several rides.

I suppose I could install bar risers, and buy myself some room to drop the forks a bit in the triples. I have some bar risers for it somewhere around here already. The car tire on the rear makes the rear lower than stock, even with the standard dogbones, so it's still a bit high in front compared to stock. I'd ask Tabasco for raising dogbones but really, sidecars handle better when they're lower, so I'd rather drop the front next.

I may have some surplus lowering links available soon.

 

[Bikedude987]

It's not you, it's the bike. If I were you, even considering that you tire easily, I would do one of two things, both using the stock steering geometry (which is very stable ie safe)

Find some wider handlebars, more leverage = less force over larger distance

retrofit a power steering kit designed for something like a polaris RZR. I've never seen one on a bike, but no reason it couldn't be done. You'd probably only notice at parking lot speeds anyway.

A steering damper is great, but only band-aid fixes problems like headshake.

 

[elizilla]

I agree that a steering damper is a bandaid and it's better if I can find something else. If I can slow the steering a little bit by biasing more weight onto the front or installing a different profile front tire, that would be more optimal than a damper. It's only a problem at very slow speeds, even as it is, so it seems like small changes may do a lot.

I think a power steering device would also be a bandaid. A more complicated bandaid than the damper. The wider bars, hmm, I might add them to the list of things to try.

 

[Bikedude987]

No, the PS would allow you to fix the steering geometry properly and still overcome the apparently excessive force required for you to turn the bars at a standstill. Whatever, it's your life.

 

[elizilla]

Sorry if I offended you by not jumping all over this power steering thing.

I mean, I suppose I am also neglecting the option where I pay another $1500 for round trip shipping, plus whatever DMC wants for the do-over, to get the trail adjusted differently, and fine tune the balance between oscillation and steering effort. Why not do that? The cost and the difficulties would be in the same ballpark as a power steering widget, and at least with this I've already found a vendor who is willing to do it. Since it's a do-over they might even give me a discount, but I'm not expecting them to work for free - they're a small shop, not some big company with deep pockets where it barely changes their bottom line. And I'd have to do all that as well, if I wanted this power steering thing, because the power steering is only half of what you want me to do. And while I may be mechanically inclined and own plenty of tools, the crawling around and wrestling with the wrenches isn't going as well for me as it used to. I have to either pay people to do this stuff, or ask my friends to do me favors, and I hate to be the little crippled girl asking people to carry her around all the time.

I'd rather put on the steering damper so I can go ride, even if it's a bandaid.

Having the damper won't prevent me continuing to try other things. But I'm going to start with the less expensive/difficult ones: Fiddle with the shock adjustments and tire pressures. Adjust the steering head bearings. Fiddle with the toe-in and lean-out. Different front tire. Wider bars, even - bars are cheap and quick enough to swap, but adjusting the length of the wiring and the hydraulic hoses might be enough cost and headache to put it on a par with replacing the suspension, which is also on the list.

The potential for tinkering is endless. But riding season isn't.

The steering damper has shipped and should be here next week.

 

[GearheadGrrrl]

No need to send your whole outfit back to DMC- This should be fixable in Michigan or anywhere. The damper DMC is shipping you is probably a VW Super Beetle part, available at any decent auto parts store for less than $100. The only thing custom is the bracketry, which is probably simple stuff like a clamp to go around the fork stantion and some mounting point on the sidecar. Oftentimes you can just use a longer bolt on an existing hole on the bike. This is simple visualization, experimentation, and gabbing- not at all hard to do.

 

[markjenn]

I'm curious..... was the "leading leg" mod done solely because of your desire to lighten the steering or is this mod customary with sidecars? Have you considered just removing it and returning it to the stock front end? Even just as an experiment, it would yield valuable insight.

Take this FWIIW, but I'm also in the camp that adding a steering damper to fix fundamental steering stability issues is probably not a good idea. It truly is a "band aid" to reduce the tendency of the front end to go into oscillation under unusual circumstances, but depending on it to make the motorcycle fundamentally controllable is asking too much. And a strategy of making geometry changes to lighten the steering that have to be countered with a steering damper to make it heavier again doesn't make sense to me. But I freely admit I know almost nothing about sidecar setup.

- Mark

 

[elizilla]

The better sidecar setups all have the trail modifications. Because sidecars make the steering super heavy. This is my third sidecar outfit and all three had it. But trail modification is a spectrum where my Super10 is pretty far out.

The Ural came with leading link forks from the factory, but the change to the trail was not as much as it should have been. It still had a wobble very similar to this Super10, even though its steering was heavier than it needed to be. My Ural was a 2008 and had a friction damper that didn't help much. Starting in 2014, Urals came with a factory damper similar to what I'm getting for the Super10. I haven't ridden one, but I'm hearing good reviews.

The older used BMW I bought that had already been set up by a prior owner, had been modded similarly to the Super10, and had similarly light steering, but did not wobble. It didn't have a damper; it was just amazingly well sorted. Some past owner had clearly loved that bike and had worked hard to get it perfect. Too bad the bike was a beat-up hideous torture rack POS.

Don't worry, I'm not going to send it back to DMC - we'll work on it in my garage. I was just getting snippy over the power steering diversion and making a bad comparison of how much hassle either one would be.

 

[GearheadGrrrl]

I agree on the power steering- It'd be a major engineering challenge and a nonstarter. I'd be tempted to try it without the leading legs- While reducing steering effort is great, they tend to reduce the damping effect of trail... There's a reason they build dual sport bikes with so much trail! Also, from looking at my S10 it looks like the forks could be pushed up in the triple trees 20mm or so, that might shift enough weight forward to fix the problem.

 

[elizilla]

The steering damper arrived, we installed it, and I had a test ride this morning. Works great. All craziness is gone, bike steers easily and comfortably without any wobbling at all.

I'll stop here for now, and try it without the damper again when the new front tire arrives. But I might just be a damper convert.