The GPR Steering Stabilizer
Steering stabilizers have long been a part of the racing community and are commonly found on performance motorcycles from all motorcycle manufacturers since the early '90s. In early 2000, Randy Norman approached his father, Ralph Norman, with the idea of building something that would help keep his front end under control while blasting through the desert on his dirt bike during a off-road rally.He wanted something different than the standard push-pull dampers, though, and his father's background in aerospace engineering allowed him to experiment with some different ideas.
What they cam up with was, at the time, the scarcely known rotary-style damper that connects directly to the steering head, and GPR was born.
At its most basic, a steering stabilizer is suspension for your motorcycle for left and right. If you're going to be running big horsepower on your motorcycle, suspension always needs to be addressed to put the power safely to the pavement. The front forks and rear shocks handle the front and back, and the steering stabilizers help dampen the effects from side to side that might occur under hard acceleration, large pot holes, speed wobbles, or the dreaded tank-slapper.
A tank-slapper occurs when the motorcycle shakes violently from side to side and can literally rip the handlebars out of your hands and throw you completely off the motorcycle. Steering stabilizers are good in this case as safety tools and can help reduce the amount of wobble. In that sense a stabilizer is much like a seat belt – you don't need it until you do…
How does it work?
Fluid is squeezed through different ports in the steering damper as it's transferred from side to side. By adjusting the damper's resistance, the amount of fluid and size of the holes it has to squeeze through is changed, making it harder or easier for the handlebars to move left to right.For most motorcycles installing a GPR stabilizer is a completely bolt-on application that can be done by most competent mechanics.Tag: GPR Steering-Stabilizer Stabilizer Steering Handling Control Damper Safety Tank-Slapper Randy Norman Ralph Norman
