steering dampener

Old an just don't know. what is the deal with steering stabilizers? How do they work? :side:

Steering dampers work through hydraulic pressure ,which can be adjusted ( as you go,usually) they fit twixt the frame and the forks and are used if you have a flighty front end. As far as I know,they are for the gentleman/woman who likes to cane it (drive very fast) and are not normaly needed for more sedate travel.
If you have a wobbly front end at low velocity, I would think that there is something not right with the bike and you need to look into that and sort it out rather than stick a steering damper on.
(There is a saying about fixing the cause,not the sympton but I cant remember it.)
Then again,if you want to ride it like you stole it and need to tighten up the handling a bit,then a steering damper could be just the thing youre looking for!
Good luck.

RIGHT!
You should not need a steering dampener on this bike.
Maybe if you were club racing this bike with a +110hp engine in an frame designed in 1971 with super sticky tires, that would be a different story.
If you have head shake, it is MUCH more probable it is from damaged steering head bearings in the triple tree.

My KZ1000 started doing this many years ago. If I was driving at say, 55MPH, and I'd snap the throttle closed, sit up on the seat lean back and take my hands off the bars... it would take off in a mild head shake.
I noticed I could feel a very little bump spot in the bars when coming off and going to center if I put the bike on the center stand and had someone hold the rear tire down to the pavement with the front tire off the ground.
After a week or two of it, I yanked the triple tree apart and removed the damaged head bearings and replaced them with conical roller bearings for something like $15.00... it has NEVER done it again in the last 22,000 miles.

Steering dampener:
I am not a mechanical engineer..... sometimes the front wheel isn't in alignment with the rear tire and they are moving around that single track!
All the dampener is, is a little shock absorber that slows the oscillation down by quite a bit every time the fork tubes try to move off center, relative to the frame center line and rear tire.
It has dampening in compression and rebound.

Why would you need that?
It has a lot to do with forces generate by acceleration, deceleration, torque, rake and trail of the front and swingarm with suspension parts... all relative to the frame and what you are sitting on, supposedly the stable part of the machine.
The frame, front tire, fork tubes, swing arm and rear tire are "winding up" and releasing "torque energy" and out of sync with what the others are doing.
The little steering dampener absorbs those oscillations on the front end and tries to "dampen" the effects of it all.
When you are moving forward at any speed, to steer, you are not moving the triple tree much at all... you are slightly pushing an opposite angular moment arm into the tire through the bars and the wheels gyro effect, causing the bike to lean over and subsequently fall into a turn. Overly simplistic but that is the general idea.
Go down the road (SAFELY) with one hand on the throttle and push the handle bar out, down and to the right (like you were trying to steer the front wheel to make a left turn) and the bike will turn right! Pull the handle bar to you, (like were trying to make the front tire turn right) and the bike will fall into a left turn.
How you get the bike to lean over like that is a mute point. It has to lean over in order to turn. All these parts get flexed to some degree or another. When ever there is a force in one direction, there is an opposite and equal force in the other. Dampening can help there.
All that stuff going on with a big torquing, high horsepower motor in a inadequate frame design.... and you can have all kinds of issues with the front tire being out of sync with the rear tire... your only two contact areas from your fanny to the actual road!
My old two stroke H2 750 was a stinker for frame flex and would scare all hell out of me at times... and it came with a shimmy dampener that was only modestly effective.

Steering dampeners are not really meant to deal with resonant oscillations from steady riding at high speed, known as a tank slapper when it's at its most extreme. But they are meant to reduce the effect of headshake. This is when there is a brief, but strong, twitch of the handlebars caused by the front wheel hitting an uneven surface, while under hard acceleration, such that there is very little weight on the front wheel.

A steering dampener does reduce a tank slapper, but other things should be done to fix this condition. For me it was replacing the rear tire. It has been documented that worn rear tires, especially wider ones, can cause a tank slapper.

Headshake, can happen even if everything on the bike is in good condition, as it is often a result of the road surface. But you should always be periodically checking the condition of the steering and everything else on the bike.

I was given a steering dampener in a parts swap.
I decided to give it a try, even though my C2 does not have any wobbles or other issues.
I find it does add more stability to the bike.
Hitting road snakes, or anything else in the road, the steering dampener helps.
I usually have it turned up to it's stiffest setting, unless I'm doing lots of parking lot maneuvers.

HaHa! you nailed it! Ive owned my bike 39 years Ive never had one. since I like to crain neck a little more these days Im going to try one on and cruise on and be more sightfull of those chuckholes in the road and watch when half the mountain is sliding off and taking cold patch and pavement with it good reasons

why does most people have the adjuster knob on the right side of the bike wnen the left side you dont have to let off the throttle to adjust tension??

That's where it mounts on the Z1/KZ.
Steve

Put em on, just for looks, Hell, ad another, run 2????
Old picture in the Winter 10 years ago.

clamp on fork tube, drill out reflector tab?

There is a hole in the bottom triple clamp.
Steve

9er rider wrote: clamp on fork tube, drill out reflector tab?

If you use the reflector tab to mount the dampener to the frame , you will have to reinforce it with a welded in triangle gusset or it will bend and soon fail.
I use the tabs on my bike but added these gussets

when I did my whole frame.
Hope this helps
Dave