As a streetbike & especially a hooligan machine for a street squid (not that I am condoning that...) the HESD rocks, but on really aggressive Sunday morning rides or at the track it makes the steering effort way too high. I've had quite a few pucker factor elevations from not knowing if I was gonna be able to steer the bike into a turn at triple digits or not... Some of that extra effort needed was the set-up of the bike not being optimal (geometry etc), but most of it was the HESD damper putting unnecessary force on the front end.

The Ohlins unit & mount kit from Dan Kyle are just what the experienced rider needs. Typical Ohlins quality & functionality make it just do what it is supposed to do no questions asked & you save a good bit of weight too when you compare it to the weight of the HESD unit.

NOTE: many others have reported that they had no problems with the removal of the HESD unit other than the MIL lamp coming on.

The problem I incurred is when I disconnected the HESD it caused the ECU to register a fault, kick on the Malfunction Indicator Lamp (MIL) & put the bike into "Limp Home Mode" . The solution I was told was to use a 75ohm resistor on the harness side connectors to the HESD, well all I could find was a 48ohm & a 100ohm so I tried the 100ohm first. It worked great until about 50mph when the high speed valve would normally be triggered on the HESD & then it would kick on the MIL again, but it did not put the bike into Limp Home Mode. While this worked it still bothered me that I had to ride around with a red idiot light lit up on my dash so I talked to some of the techie guys on my RC51 forum & was told how I could use the 48ohm & 100ohm resistors in pairs (series & parrallel etc) to get the 75ohms needed, but then something else hit me... I ultimately decided to mutilate the HESD damper itself & just use the servo motor out of it so I pulled out the air-compressor & cut-off wheel & in seconds I had ground the special little bolts right off the servo on the HESD & then took just the tiny connector/servo hooked them back into the wiring harness & tucked them down between the frame & the airbox. No more issues...