Perhaprs I should have included the disclaimer that everything I said pertained solely to highspeed (20km/h+) turns.
A spinning wheel will naturally right itself. This is why a bike with two balanced wheels and steady throttle will actually continue in a straight line without any imput into the handlebars. You can take both hands off (if you're crazy enough) and it will still stay in a straight line.
That's literally the centrifuge effect coming off the spinning wheels. The faster they spin, the more self righting they will do. This is why you're told to put on throttle if you scrape a peg in a turn, because the increased speed will force the bike to right itself even if the handlebar remains the same. Try it sometime, rather then steering out of your turn just power out of it and let the handlebars do what they want. They pull back to a striaght line.
Even better see if you can find a street that has just been graded. Where they run the machine down it and peel off the top level of asphault leaving those absolutely awful running ridges and grooves. Pick a single groove and try to follow it perfectly straight. You can't the bike judders back and forth underneath you. Because the tire presses up against one side (we will say left in this case) of the ridge simulating a lean and will pull itself over the little ridge into the groove on the left. Now that you've cleared it the ridge is pressing agianst the right side of the tire. So you're "leaning right." And the bike turns back to the right slightly.
Perhaps you misunderstood something of what I said, Centrifugal force keeps the bike upright while it's under motion. The spinning of the two wheels causes everything attached to them to stay straight. The point of steering and countersteering is to break the force generated by the wheels so you can lean over and make a turn.
Wedsite Above wrote:Gyroscopic forces, primarily of the two wheels, but also other components whose axis of rotation is in the same direction as the wheel spindles, tend to resist any change in the angle of lean of the motorcycle. Gyroscopic “resistance” to a change in lean angle increases as the rate of rotation of the wheels increases and the rate of rotation increases as road speed increases. A phenomenon known as gyroscopic precession also has a minor effect but does tend to correct the steering if the bike starts to lean. Precession translates a force trying to rotate the axis of a gyroscope in one plane into a force trying to rotate the axis in a plane 90 degrees offset in the direction of rotation of the gyroscope. Whew! What this means for the motorcycle is that a leaning movement to the left, through gyroscopic precession, will tend to turn the front wheel to the left. This is why a quarter rolled on the floor will tend to keep upright: if the quarter starts to lean to the left gyroscopic precession makes it TURN to the left, steering the contact patch under the Center of Gravity.
). The bars are just controls...my legs keep me on the bike.
As for the one-handed turning, it's more often the right hand...no throttle lock, besides, the front brake is right there, too. I have practiced the left hand, too, but the slowing down gets old.
