- Non free to center. There are two philosophies to steering dampers. Free to center and not free to center. Some dampers only damp while going away from center, coming back they have little or no damping. Some dampers have the same amount of damping in both directions. There are pluses and minuses to both designs but we feel the damping in both directions design, if implemented right is the best, here is why. If you are in and corner and you hit something on the inside like a root or rock there is no damping force helping to keep you on track and your bars are free to whip back towards center. Also if you are in a rock garden and deflections are occurring from both sides, especially turning in a corner in a rock garden you are again left with no deflection protection from the outside to the center. Additionally when charging through a fast sandy whoop section and you start to swap a free to center designed damper is only going to control half that oscillation. A non free to center damper is in our opinion much better at high speed oscillation damping.

16. I've noticed that when I rotate my bars, left to right, the damper breaks free at the end of the stroke. Is my damper broke?
This is normal. Roughly 15 degrees off of “0”, or center, an internal mechanism called a sweep brake goes into effect. The nice thing about this is once you hit that 15 degrees going back the opposite way, you have dampening all the way back to center. We believe that there are rocks on both sides of the trail, not just one. Why have a damper that only works half the time? When returning to center, you might think that you would be fighting to go straight. This is the furthest from the truth. A properly installed/set up kit will function just like your stock bike (with out the damper), but have the added benefits of a GPR.