Richard Was Busy This Month
Of the three motorcycle magazines I currently subscribe to, Sport Rider invariably delivers the best comparison information and test data of the three, period. I especially like the performance data you provide with your model comparisons. Rather than a lot of seat-of-the-pants subjective opinions, your staff provides graphs and charts to show why one bike is faster or laps quicker than another. As an engineer, this is the stuff that makes your comparisons meaningful and provides objective credibility to your bike recommendations.
However, there is one bit of data that you and your competitors are woefully lacking, that being the vertical and horizontal locations of the center of gravity of your test subjects as a means of explaining their various handling characteristics. Rather, there will be some type of vague reference to lower center of gravity or weight bias toward the front or rear that really tells the reader nothing. I find this omission very frustrating because it would be so easy to get this information with three scales, a plumb bob and tape measure. As the old saying goes, "data talks, and BS walks," or something like that.
Richard Koch
Keller, TX
We have listed center of gravity numbers in the past-way back in '02 we measured some bikes and printed the results as part of our open-class shootout ("Target Fixation," August '02). Since then, we've sporadically measured and printed CoG numbers, especially if one bike was significantly different from its competitors in that aspect. It's easy enough to find the horizontal position of the CoG, and we often list that as a percentage weight distribution. The trouble we found with measuring CoG height, however, lies in the observer effect. Finding the vertical measurement requires raising one end of the bike on a ramp, hanging the bike from a fixture or laying it down on three scales. Changing the orientation of the bike to take these measurements moves the oil, fuel and other fluids to a different position, which we've found is enough to affect the results.
One solution is to drain the oil and fuel before taking the measurements, but then the numbers don't represent the real world. Each bike would be affected differently, skewing the results to the point that they are unusable for the purposes of comparison. Once we realized we didn't have a reliable, accurate and repeatable way to find a bike's true center of gravity, we stopped running specific numbers in the magazine.
lease: 
