1980 RC125M
1981 RC125M
During the 1960s and early 70s, many motorcycles came with Leading link forks often called Earles Forks. BMW, Greeves, DKW, Sachs, Suzuki, Honda were big supporters of leading link forks.
Unlike the typical telescopic fork, leading links had the ability to climb over bumps and obstacles without the fork tubes bending backwards. They were lighter than telescopic forks, although they looked heavier. They had minimal Stiction because of the leverage of the backward folding arm. If they had a flaw, it was that some early leading link forks would stiffen and rise up under hard braking, but this problem was easily solved by making the front brake float.
Many MX riders raced with this design. Roger DeCoster is among the ranks of linkage fork fans. Rich Thorwaldson was a factory Suzuki racer whose post race career centered on building swingarms for 1970-’80 motocross bikes. Rich was a former desert racer who believed that leading links could be updated to work on modern bikes. DeCoster raced the 500 World Motocross Championships for Team Suzuki with a set of Ribi Quadrilateral linkage forks, and when DeCoster left for Team Honda in 1980, he convinced Honda to buy the rights to Valentino Ribi’s design.
In the early 1990s, ATK/AMP inventor Horst Leitner developed a prototype set of leading link forks that merged the ideas of Earles and Ribi into one fork design. Leitner hoped to make the forks an option on his ATK 406 and 604 motocross bikes. Four time 250 Champion Gary Jones was the test rider on the project, but Leitner sold ATK, and when he left, the project was shelved, although Horst revised it later on the popular AMP link mountain bike fork.
One factory team even experimented with putting small leading link forks on the bottom of a set of telescopic forks. The idea was for the leading-link arms to absorb small bumps, while the telescopics absorbed the big stuff. It never saw the light of day (outside of the factory).
What happened to the leading link forks? Because of the improvement of telescopic forks the Leading links eventually fell out of favour and were replaced by telescopic forks. Honda built several exotic, CNC machined, ultra light weight versions of the Ribi link design but decided that the motorcycle market wasn’t ready for such a radical looking idea.
Source: Internet
1981 RC125M
During the 1960s and early 70s, many motorcycles came with Leading link forks often called Earles Forks. BMW, Greeves, DKW, Sachs, Suzuki, Honda were big supporters of leading link forks.
Unlike the typical telescopic fork, leading links had the ability to climb over bumps and obstacles without the fork tubes bending backwards. They were lighter than telescopic forks, although they looked heavier. They had minimal Stiction because of the leverage of the backward folding arm. If they had a flaw, it was that some early leading link forks would stiffen and rise up under hard braking, but this problem was easily solved by making the front brake float.
Many MX riders raced with this design. Roger DeCoster is among the ranks of linkage fork fans. Rich Thorwaldson was a factory Suzuki racer whose post race career centered on building swingarms for 1970-’80 motocross bikes. Rich was a former desert racer who believed that leading links could be updated to work on modern bikes. DeCoster raced the 500 World Motocross Championships for Team Suzuki with a set of Ribi Quadrilateral linkage forks, and when DeCoster left for Team Honda in 1980, he convinced Honda to buy the rights to Valentino Ribi’s design.
In the early 1990s, ATK/AMP inventor Horst Leitner developed a prototype set of leading link forks that merged the ideas of Earles and Ribi into one fork design. Leitner hoped to make the forks an option on his ATK 406 and 604 motocross bikes. Four time 250 Champion Gary Jones was the test rider on the project, but Leitner sold ATK, and when he left, the project was shelved, although Horst revised it later on the popular AMP link mountain bike fork.
One factory team even experimented with putting small leading link forks on the bottom of a set of telescopic forks. The idea was for the leading-link arms to absorb small bumps, while the telescopics absorbed the big stuff. It never saw the light of day (outside of the factory).
What happened to the leading link forks? Because of the improvement of telescopic forks the Leading links eventually fell out of favour and were replaced by telescopic forks. Honda built several exotic, CNC machined, ultra light weight versions of the Ribi link design but decided that the motorcycle market wasn’t ready for such a radical looking idea.
Source: Internet
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