Indeed, yes, it absolutely will. That said, it depends on how you ride and how attuned you are to how your bike performs as to how critical (within reason) the handling characteristics are. I knew a guy that was an absolute motorcycle nut - rode all the time. I rode his bike once and couldn't believe anyone would ride such a thing, but he was a happy camper. That said, you may envision just tooling around town, but I'd bet you get out of town more often than you think, and you only need to want to get up a good head of steam once to realize your bike can be scary at speed (talking over 80mph here for a generality.) Modern bikes get away with very steep geometry by having incredibly stiff chassis (not talking suspension here) and very light steering assemblies. Those elements greatly increase the harmonic at which they naturally oscillate so they gain very crisp handling and are able to deal with the wobble with a damper.J-Rod10 said:
I think it is worth a shot lowering the triple trees - a lot of standard and cruiser style bikes can tolerate doing so since the styling department wanted a taller and longer fork "look" to begin with. However, keep in mind that the engineering department afforded the "look" by fooling around with other parts of the geometry - namely wheel diameter, fork offset and axle offset - to keep the drivability within reasonable range. Since your aim is to change the appearance and not the handling (basing this on not seeing anywhere in your posts about wishing to do so) maybe it would make sense to visually lower the machine by fooling with the instruments, bars, controls, fuel tank etc. For what it's worth, when I build a bike for someone, I find out how they ride and what they like and determine the chassis first. There are all sorts of tweaks to fine tune it, but it is hard (expensive) to change the basic chassis without having to re-make all sorts of ancillary bits. Once I have a basic rolling chassis, I fit the bike to its new owner. Seat height and location, bars and pegs. This can take many hours of mock up and several sessions to get sorted. Then its just all the mechanical stuff, and finally the looks. Getting the aesthetics just the way you want them is a monster task if you are critical, so it pays heavily to do it last unless you like doing it over. It doesn't make any sense to get it looking like you want, only to have to do something over because the functionality got lost or corrupted in the process.
