I am not a subtle person. Whenever I read some forum post about someone who has a newish bike and has swapped a pair of perfectly good factory shocks for an upgraded pair from a different manufacturer, I know, in my heart, that I just wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

The same is true for the front end of the bike. I’ve had bikes in the past that had little adjusters on the forks for rebound and compression, but if I fiddled with the settings, I couldn’t really notice any change. The forks on my 1972 Guzzi Eldorado have springs and a bit of oil and that’s about it. I know they have springs because I changed them about 100,000 kilometers ago when the factory originals began to sag. Other than changing the oil a couple of times, they haven’t needed much attention since. They compress when I hit a bump, don’t pogo much afterwards, and almost never bottom out. That bike tends to wallow in the corners, but not from any inherent design problem. I often travel heavily loaded, sometimes with as much as an extra 20 litres of fuel in a rack well beyond the rear wheel spindle. I also have a tendency to run with soggy tires which exacerbates the situation.

Don’t mistake my intention here. I’m not suggesting that the latest in suspension technology and advances in motorcycle design are superfluous – just that they’re wastedon me. If the bike starts and rolls along the road without feeling too precarious, I’m content.

所以这花了很长时间,慢慢明白我that there was a problem with the handling of my “modern” bike. For a while now, I’d been noticing an unusual clatter from the front end whenever I hit irregular pavement. It sounded like a loose mudguard, or perhaps something come adrift in the Cavalcade’s voluminous bodywork. But it didn’t like tar-snakes – those linear pavement repair jobs that local municipalities prefer to actually fixing the road – tending to follow them, and I was beginning to find the handling a bit vague. It wasn’t disconcerting enough to be worrying. The bike still went wherever I pointed it – more-or-less – but it didn’t feel quite right. I had to think about how to navigate each corner. At some lower level of my consciousness, it bothered me enough that I was no longer jumping on the Suzuki to use it as my two-wheeled grocery cart, and would take a car instead.

It’s a strange thing, but while I’m lackadaisical about the tire pressures on the old Guzzi, I’m surprisingly conscientious with the big Suzuki. I check them often, always making sure that they’re within a pound or two of the manufacturers specifications. When I went to check the front tire the valve wasn’t accessible and I needed to rotate the wheel. The easiest way to do this was to put my floor jack under the robust front crash bar that runs across the width of the bike beneath the radiator. With the front wheel off the ground it was a simple thing to rotate the wheel but as I grasped it, I noticed a little movement in the forks. Hmm. Perhaps I’d better check. Holding the fork legs I tried to move them back and forwards and, you’ve guessed it by now, there was a disturbing amount of front to back movement. I turned the bars from full lock to full lock. No notchiness. No centreing. The action was fluid and smooth. Clearly, my steering head bearings were out of adjustment. It was a simple matter to slacken off the top bolt, tighten up the adjustment collar until the sloppiness was gone yet the side-to-side movement was still fluid, then tighten the top bolt again.

The following day’s two hundred kilometer test ride for lunch with friends was a revelation. It was like a new bike. It no longer followed tar snakes. It rolled into and out of corners with precision, feeling far lighter and more balletic than any 800-pound motorcycle has a right to. And there was no more clattering from the front end. Once again, it was a joy to ride.

当我买了自行车three years ago it had been inspected by a local bike mechanic, known to be a stickler for any safety related issues. I’m fairly confident that he would have checked for steering play at that time, and presumably, found none. During the 30,000 kilometers I’ve added since, normal wear and tear and the countless tiny road shocks that accompany any ride gradually eased the bearings out of adjustment. It happened so gradually that I simply didn’t notice until it was so bad that it had started to affect my riding pleasure.

And that’s really the point. Safety issues can creep up on us incrementally, and if you’re an unsubtle or insensitive owner like me, you can be riding a potentially dangerous machine without realizing it.

For now, the steering-head bearings are working well, but you can be sure that I’ll be checking on them regularly. It’s a bit of a pain to change them as it involves stripping off much of the Cavalcade’s front body work, but the bearings are readily available and surprisingly cheap. Once the snow flies again, I’ll get at it. For now, I’ll see if I can do a better job of listening to whatever it is my machines are trying to tell me.