I was able to take a short test ride on the day I finished my work. I can tell you that after dealing with poorly operating, non-compliant forks for so many years it was a real pleasure to have a properly working front suspension on my motorcycle. Even with the BMW heavy-duty springs in there, after the alignment the ride had become far more compliant, even one-up with the stiff springs the ride was softer and smoother. It felt like the highway had been repaved and most of the bumps and ripples had been smoothed out.

      The feeling I got as I went down the highway was much the same as when you put new shock absorbers on your car. You didn’t realize how bad the old ones were until there was something against which you could compare. I knew the old set up was poor, but didn’t realize just how easily they could be improved and how much better they could feel. How good did it feel? It was only a dying battery (that caused me to turn around and return to home after only about twelve miles) that kept me from ending up on the coast, or who-knows-where! T

      The ride was sweet to say the least. A subsequent ride also proved to demonstrate that it was far less fatiguing to ride the RT now.

      That brings up a good point. Although I get wordy at times, and this article seems quite long, aligning your forks it is not that difficult of a job. Care must be taken for safety’s sake, and you have to be detailed oriented and patient, but if you have replaced steering bearings or have had the forks apart before, then this job is most likely within your capabilities. I wrote about as much detail as I could so that if you get stuck or run into some sort of difficulty, you may have hope of finding the answer in here somewhere.

      I hope that you have learned a bit about fork adjustment and alignment and I certainly hope that your forks are now working better than you imagined could have been possible. The only bad thing about this is that you won’t get to ride your bike. When you are done with all this you are going to be raving about how well your forks now work and everyone will want to ride your bike to see for themselves!

      Finally, I would like to personally, and publicly thank Duane Ausherman for his inspiration and the sharing of his knowledge. He brought his fork “parallelness” gauge to my "Airhead Tech Day" in October of 2001, and his showing me how it worked and how far my forks were out of alignment was an epiphany. I finally could quantify the error and also learned what to do about it. His simple gesture of bringing his tool along has made my motorcycling experience so much more pleasant that words do not express it thoroughly enough. I will think about him on every ride I take from now on- THANKS, DUANE!