Curing head shakes?

i have an fe 550 04 and to fix this problem i put stiffer rear and front springs in and also put a 20 mm spacer on my rear shock shaft. this fixed it and later on i fit a steering damper to help it a bit more.

I agree with Taffy on this one. My son's 03 400 is very stable without a damper. There is a noticeable diff between the location of his front axle and my 04 550. His is about a inch farther out than mine. Which seems to be the stability diff. I forget rake or trail.
my 1 1/2 cents.

I have noticed the 03 and earlier bikes are much more stable at speed. 04 and above seem to be a little twitchy to me. Still no head shake mind you, just a little less stable at speed. Prior to my 04 bike I had never considered installing a damper. Putting a damper on the 04 may be necessary to get that stability back at speed.

On my SM this past weekend I'd get headshake 60 mph and above.....I lowered the triples down the forks till the re bound adjusters almost touching the bottom of the handlebars....problem solved....the bike also turns in better as well........
Time for a thread relating to triples....this ought to be interesting .....hold on :twisted:

brian

what's wrong with this thread? everything is here, everyone is putting their information down?

you wouldn't have confidently dropped your forks through at the weekend if you hadn't read the above thread. not in my opinion anyway.

a little teamwork and recognition wouldn't go amiss.

Taffy

You have a point Taffy, but for archiving sake it would be nice to be able to access a thread that gives clear specs on the Rake and trail......
So we can see the differences between the years....at least we know what we have to start with....some of the newer Bergs (2005) appear to have a slightly more vertical angle to the forks, the bike feels like it turns in better and has no shake at high speeds....
Learning from the above comments and talking with guys in the pits it appears that the basic set up has to be done correctly(sometimes hard to do).....having said that alot of people suggest more pre load on the rear in order to weight the front down more helps in stability and turn in......another area of interest is shortening up the wheel base for that better turn in via shorter chain and flipping the adjustment blocks...???
Does increasing the wheel base help in stability ?
Is it possible to have great low speed handling and have great high speed as well......I see alot of dampener on bikes because the owner claims that its set up perfect for low speed turn in but in order to get the shakes out a dampener is required....In my world I would rather get the low speed turn in dialed in and just weight the front with body movement at high speeds to get stability......I have 90 mm of laden sag.....I really don't want to go stiffer....My front end is set at halfway for re bound and compression.....I just have to stop changing too many things at once....and be more patient ..........Berger made an interesting comment about the feel of different years of bikes.....which brings me back to the question......rake and trail between years, If we want to modify the bikes in set up etc it would be nice to know what Mr Husaberg has done, head angles, triple clamp offsets etc etc KTM has this information and is in their specs.......