Left Hand Drive Bruiser
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Left Hand Drive Bruiser

Yesterday I overhauled my bike. After riding in Milwaukee’s salty streets and the snowy, messy shit we had last week, the bike felt a little too crunchy for my liking. While cleaning out the BB shell and drivetrain, I decided to switch to a left hand drive. Since I can’t do chainring grinds anymore, I wanted to give pedal and crank arm grinds a chance. Jeremiah did this last summer and I know a ton of the Tokyo riders are on it too. No one’s had any issues that I’m aware of. Well, with BMX cranks anyway.

I also decided that I didn’t like the tapered-legs fork. Even though the weight of the two forks are identical, the tapered-leg fork changed the handling of the bike. My guess is that the butting in the crown / bend of the fork blades was thicker than the non-tapered fork. This enabled the legs to be thinner / lighter. Removing weight from the fork ends would totally make the bike’s head tube angle more apparent.

That’s my guess anyway. Maybe if the Bruiser’s HTA was slacker, it’d be fine, but with a 74.5° HTA, the last thing I want is the bike to be twitchy. Last week I went over the bars numerous times doing g-turns and when I’d land fakie off stairs, it was almost uncontrollably twitchy.

For now, we’re sticking the current fork design. I also think with the massive downtube on the Bruiser, the dinky-looking blades were out of context. Anyway, that’s my opinion. I still think this fork looks great on the bike.