Ride your bicycle through a puddle, then make a left turn. Be sure to lean the bike over as much as you can. Then go back and look at the tyretracks you made. At the beginning of the turn the track of the front wheel splits away from the other, to the right, then turns back towards the other track and crosses over it…
Incidentally, as regards turning with no counter-steering whatsoever, I’ve found the only way to get close to this is to shift my arse right off the saddle and hang off the side of the bike like a human sidecar. Even so, I couldn’t swear that I didn’t give the bars a barely detectable nudge just to get it started.
I don’t know if anyone else in this thread has tried one of those trick bicycles with the steering reversed. Once, at a fair back in England, a guy was offering rides on one for 20p a go. He was also offering 5 pounds to anyone who could ride it a ridiculously short distance (not more than a couple of metres). Nobody seemed to be having much luck (myself included).
It sounds like a piece of cake, but believe me, every single tiny automatic correction you make (the ones you don’t normally notice) is reversed, so if you - completely involuntarily - try and correct a slight tilt to the left (by countersteering to the left), the wheel turns right. But rather than turn the bars back the other way, you reflexively push the bars even harder to the left. The front wheel rolls out from under you. It’s exactly like not being able to ride a bike at all. You simply fall off.
I think a couple of goes on one of those would convince even Sailor.
:dubious:
This only works if you have different tread patterns on the two tires. Otherwise there’s no way to determine which is the front and which is the rear tire.
And I have different tread patterns on my two tires.
I observed no pre-deflection to the opposite side. Never, in a dozen or so attempts. If there was such a deflection, it was of a magnitude smaller than the width of my tire-- smaller enough to be unnoticeable. Where I did see misalignment like that was when I tried it at very slow speeds, and had to correct a lot for poor balance. admittedly, I was on old pavement that didn’t have a completley smooth surface; it had a lot of tiny pits in it. (Only place I could find a puddle big enough).
But, except when I was going too slow to balance, the two tire tracks are perfectly lined up with each other, until the turn. At this point one goes off to the direction if the turn, and the other follows a few inches later. They cross over, then rejoin into a single line parrallel to the original – I have just made a second turn, in the opposite direction. There is no observable amount of pre-deflection to either side. Only two tracks leaving the straight line in the direction of the turn, one just after the other.
Nonetheless, I do believe that countersteering can work. I do it a lot at slow speeds, sometimes. I turn the bars a good ways to the right, which causes my Centre of Gravity to be to the left of the bike’s path. Then, the bike falls around the circle, and with a little acceleration, I can recover from the turn having completed a significant arc-- 180 degrees, give or take as required.
Am I always subconsciously making counter-corrections? Maybe, but not of sufficient magnitude to show up in that puddle experiment.
I have looked at the link provided by WhiteyFoo and I now understand the issue better and concede that, indeed, we have all used that method of turning, especially because it feels cool. I think the term “countersteering” is pretty unfortunate because it does not describe (at least to me) the technique well but the graphic and text explain it well (unlike many of the other pages). When turning like that it feels a lot like an airplane banking to counteract centrifugal force and when I have described it, not knowing there was a name, I used the term “banking”. My quarrel is still with the premise that it is the only way to initiate a turn. That page specifically compares both ways and I will note they are both extremes and there is an infinite continuum of intermediate possibilities. You can turn by just turning into the turn and that is the intuitive way which beginners would use. “Banking” takes a little more practice.
I should note, of course, that in my carefree days of bikeriding as a child (when I traversed many a puddle) I did observe the ‘jog right, go left’ behaviour of the front wheel tracks. I attributed this to countersteering then, and it leads me to believe that:
Countersteering is possible, effective, and slick, but it is not the only method of steering.
Slight derail here - but actually you CAN determine which is front/rear. Since the rear tire does not turn, it must always be pointing towards the (approximate) center of the front tire. So, draw a line which is tangential to either of the tire tracks at a given point. If the line does NOT intersect the other track, then it must be the front tire (which can rotate to point in any arbitrary direction).
I remember this from a brain teaser which had a nice example image of tracks. Cannot find it online though.
Now, don’t be silly. Of course I am not denying gyroscopic effects. The idea that it is what keeps a bicycle going straight has been debunked and a debunking debunker has been cited already in this thread: http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mbicycle.html
I don’t think any further cites are needed. Just adding my 2c that a few years ago, I read about counter steering, and having ridden bikes since I was a kid, thought it was bullshit, and had no memory of ever having done it myself. Got on a bike later, and was forced to admint I was wrong. I noticed I was counter steering within seconds of setting off.
It is hard to perceive from the POV of an observer. I don’t even think the wet tyre tracks test would show it. But even without an open mind to it (I was sure it was nonsense), it was very obvious to me that I was doing it. It’s very quick, but it’s there.
Just to illustrate milk milk lemonade’s point, take a look at the picture of the speedway racers half way down this page and tell me countersteering doesn’t work.
There are other ways to get around a corner of course. If you simply steer in the direction you want to go you will eventually get there by following a wide arc but you’re likely to end up in the bushes on the far side of the road rather than around the corner.
Motog, that bike is skidding around the turn, not countersteering. The front tire is turned to eventually straighten the bike out, and to maintain some control.
OK, you’re going along, perfectly balanced in a straight line. You want to turn to the left. How do you make your body lean to the left? The only way to accomplish this is to move the tires’ contact patch to the right, by steering that way. There is no other way to start your lean. It might be subtle - you may just stop the minute corrections in one direction only - but there’s no other way to begin the lean other than countersteering.
It might be possible but it’s really difficult. You have nothing to push against. If were easy to shift weight that way, a track stand (balancing a stopped bicycle) would be easy.
UncleBill I am always happy to be corrected and concede that my knowledge is more of road bikes and road racing than of flattrackers, but I had always believed that the pose typical of the rider in the photo I linked was simply a countersteer and rearwheel drift combination - albeit a hugely exxagerated one to suit the track, surface, corner radius and speeds - as is used all the time in road racing.
I’m not saying that I don’t believe you but it’s difficult to let go of a long held belief quickly. Do you happen to have a reference to something that would alleviate my ignorance or are there any people out there with flat track knowledge that can confirm or deny?
I tried this on the way home from work yesterday after reading this thread on my peugeot 100cc scooter, and again on a racing (pedal) bike in the evening. While I could feel the effect in both cases, is was much more pronounced on the (much heavier) scooter. I’m guessing that it would come into play even more on a real motorbike, which would be heavier still. On the racer, which is very light, the effect of countersteering was very slight, hardly noticable even when looking out for it.
Re-reading that, I realise I should point out that I wasn’t actually reading this thread while on my scooter, cool though that would be.
Only if the bicycle is stationary. If both wheels (i.e. the front wheel) is locked straight ahead, it’s impossible (or certainly beyond the capabilities of the average cyclist) to balance, especially at low speed, when balance is extremely dependent on steering input. Anyone who’s ever ridden on the back of a tandem (where the handlbars are just fixed to the front saddle stem and serve no useful purpose) will know that the first time they tried it it was very hard to resist the temptation to try and steer.
It’s possible, however, to lean a bicycle without turning. For example, when you want to really get some power into your pedal strokes and you raise yourself off the saddle and physically tilt the bike’s frame from side to side. Even here, you are maintaining downward pressure over the contact patch of the tyre by pushing down on the pedal on the opposite side to which the bike is leaning at any one time. Another thing: you are not shifting your weight, but keeping the centre of gravity constant and moving the frame of the bicycle relevant to it. (By the way, I don’t know if this tecnique actually helps to increase accelleration, or just seems to.)
Also, when riding a motorcycle in a sidewind you tend to lean into the wind slightly, even when going in a straight line.
In both these cases there is a counter-force preventing your lean from becoming a fall.
Another argument against the idea that you steer a two-wheeler simply by throwing your weight about is the fact that you occasionally see very petite young ladies riding enormous motorcycles. Obviously they aren’t using brute force to control something several times their own weight (nor are male riders for that matter, although some may prefer to give that impression).
Having done a lot of road riding and a bit of off roading, I have to believe that flat tracking is kind of a special case. I don’t know if, in this long thread, there has been a mention of the simple way to look at countersteering - the effect of trail in the front end geometry. Since the axle is in front of the steering head, turning one way moves the center of gravity to the opposite side of the line between tire contact patches, i.e. leaning.
Flat trackers countersteer to initiate the turn but then a strange thing happens. They become more horizontal than vertical. The steering raises and lowers the center of gravity. I’m not sure if it’s countersteer as much as it is affecting the tire grip and the effective “oversteer” and “understeer” of the skidding bike.