I'm thinkin' it's something besides what brand of tires you're running. Air pressure, steering bearings (my official guess), fork/shock issue?
I would agree normally. In this case though, I have been over the bike with a fine tooth comb. I spent the last two evenings checking all of that and some. I've got the service manual and have checked torque specs and assembly procedures for everything I could think of and/or had apart recently. Innitially I thought I had a tire pressure problem. We stopped and checked them a couple of times. I also considered the roads, but they weren't the problem as the other rider I was with was also on an FJR (running a full set of Azaro's) and he wasn't having any issues. Then I considered that maybe it had just been a long winter and I needed to go back to the cornering basics and just get back in the groove. That didn't help.......either that or I never found that groove.
So that leaves me wondering about the tire combo. The new storm is supposed to be some special silica compound and I wonder if its just not different enough not to work well with the Bridgestone compound. I wanted to bring it up because the bike really pushed (or drifted wide) in the corners. There wasn't much I could do about it. It felt just like a flat tire. I just felt like it was on the edge of falling over all the time. The back tire stepped out pretty nicely on me at one point. If you look at the tires, you can tell I was leaning them over pretty far, but it didn't matter, I just slid wide over and over again.
Currently I don't have any curvy roads in my future, just up and down the highway to work. I'm going to go ahead an polish off the 020 before I put the new Storm on the back (everything is fine in a straight line or a gentle curver). Once I do that I'll find some tight curves and see if my theory is correct. In the mean time I just wanted to make people aware that its possible that the Storms may not play well with the Bridgestones. If I'm right and thats the problem, it was responsible for me cutting a weekend short because I didn't want to have a head on collision with a car in the left lane or end up in a ditch on the right.
If you are planning to mix and match this tire, just be careful and aware until you know for sure your bike handles correctly. Better safe then sorry. In the mean time, I'll keep looking for other problems until I can get back in the corners with a complete set of Storms on the bike. I won't know for sure until then.
