Home > baker right-side-drive
baker right-side-drive

We’ve seen many cases, we’ve seen left-side-drive fat tire bikes that have to be ridden with one ass cheek on the seat to counterbalance the needed offset on the bike. That’s what we call halfassed...in more ways than one. DO IT RIGHT. Go BAKER Right-Side-Drive. This is the right way, not half-assed. We introduced RSD in 2001 when the 240 tires came out as a solution to balance big tire customs and it accomplished just that. More than ever with the popular 300 tires and the radical 360’s in circulation, RSD translates to zero offset and a perfectly balanced radical custom.

OFFSET 101: The Evo powered Harley Softail is the design basis for custom aftermarket components like frames, transmissions, and engines.The positional relationships between engine and transmission, engine and frame, and transmission and frame all go back to the Softail. The stock Softail from the factory is a well-balanced machine with no signifi cant weight bias from the left to the right. If a wider than stock rear tire is used on a Softail, the powertrain (engine and transmission) must be moved to the left to allow the 1-1/2” wide drive belt to clear the left side of the rear tire. Moving the powertrain to the left is referred to as powertrain offset. Powertrain offset can be achieved by moving the transmission and/or engine to the left, away from the stock position. The math to explain this is easy; see the fi gure to the right. The stock HD Softail has a 130 size rear tire that is roughly 5.5” wide. The 300 tire is roughly 12” wide, which means there is 3.25 more inches of rubber on each side. This means the powertrain has to move to the left about 3.25” or so.