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Old 03-06-11 | 07:46 PM
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Brian Ratliff
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Joined: May 2002
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From: Near Portland, OR

Bikes: Three road bikes. Two track bikes.

Every little bit will help, however, 75deg HTA is like that of a track bike; those usually have forks with about 30-35mm offset. 60mm trail is considered by framebuilders to be more or less neutral as far as the balance between responsiveness and stability; most racing frames are built a bit short of this to make them a bit quicker handling. 57mm is pretty common on both road (73deg, 43mm offset) and track (74.5deg, 35mm offset) bikes.

In the early days of cycling, bikes were designed with no trail as it was believed that the wheel "flop" (the need to lift the mass of the bike to straighten out the wheel) made the bike sluggish. Then, gradually trail was introduced as bikes got lighter (negating the effects of wheel flop) and people realized that steering stability came with increasing trail. I read somewhere that early "modern" italian bikes, which is what you have, were sometimes built to be very twitchy.

A good primer on trail, though oriented to track bikes is here.
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Last edited by Brian Ratliff; 03-06-11 at 07:57 PM. Reason: added link and corrected info
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