Okay, greetings. It's Navila Pomo, day 9. And here we are. We're well underway in Navila Pomo. I've been talking about various aspects of motorcycle engineering and motorcycle riding. Yesterday I talked about ergonomics, so I thought today a good follow on from that would be a body positioning. A good place to start is to talk about how motorcycle steers. Now unlike a car, when you turn a car steering wheel to the left, that makes the wheels turn left, which makes the car steer left. On a motorcycle though, it operates on the principle of counter steering. That is, if I want a bike to move left, I turn the handlebars to the right. I don't turn the handlebars to the left or turn the wheel to the left. The motorcycle will steer by leaning. And to give the motorcycle to fall into that lean, to fall into the turn, counter steering is used. Now these motions are actually quite subtle. They're hardly discernible when you're riding. You don't physically yank the handlebars to the right. They're almost unconsciously moved to turn the counter steering and the bike will lean into the turn. Okay, so how does the motorcycle lean over into a turn without falling over? Well, the properties of centrifugal force will keep the bike from falling over and continue through the arc of the turn. Now it all seems centrifugal force in action. In a tumble drive for example, when it spins around and encrobes, it will cling to the outside or at the fun fare maybe, whether the swings will go round and round and they'll fan out. So a motorcycle will use this. When a motorcycle leans, there's obviously a finite amount that a motorcycle can lean and that's determined by the profile of the tires. It can't lean off the edge of the profile. It will fall over or lose traction and then skid off. At a certain angle of lean, a certain amount of speed that can be carried through. So a rider can affect the speed he made travel through the arc of the turn by shifting his body weight inside and down. And what this does is it moves the center of gravity inside of the turn and it lowers it, which effectively means that the motorcycle can travel fast the rate of speed at the same lean angle through that diameter of the arc. Now like I said, motorcycle racers will do it to an extreme. They'll hang all the way off the bike and they'll be down in the crouch and the knee will be touching on the on the tarmac and they'll use that as a guide to feel how far the bike is over. They'll use it to push back up if the bike goes into a slide. It's a somewhat way of controlling the motorcycle. So on the street, it doesn't need to be quite as extreme but even a small amount like say, it's a half a buttock to the inside of the turn when you're moving left or right. Just a small amount. A couple of inches will actually improve the feel of the motorcycle as it goes through the turns. It'll give the rider increased feel or comfort and confidence when you can feel that that bike went over. And it doesn't need to be much but it does really help in the rider when he's turning. Another way the rider might use body position is that he will hunch up over the front of the bike over the tank to keep the weight of the front of the bike to stop the bike really under power. Again, this is more typical in racing situations. Also, for shifting his weight back under heavy braking to keep weight off of the front wheel and keep weight on the back wheel so the back doesn't doesn't come up. Okay, so that's been a brief look at counter steering and body positioning for a for motorcycle riding. I hope you found this interesting. I hope you learned something. If you like what you see of course as always, at the link in the description. You can follow all my motorcycle ramblings or otherwise at the link in the description. And of course, facebook.com slash link angles too. I'll see you tomorrow. I'm going to go and hang it up. Hey, one part? Don't forget! Make sure the back wheel doesn't come up and make sure the front wheel makes sure the front wheel doesn't come up from doing an endo and a wheelie. Bye!