Look at a few sports bikes in the café car park nowadays and you'll see a steering damper bolted on somewhere. Old Brit race bikes started it all with a crude friction damper fitted on the headstock. Turn the big black Bakelite knob and you compressed two friction plates which seized the steering just about solid enough to allow the bikes to charge about on bumpy old unmade tracks on the Isle of Man with some modicum of control. Fully adjustable, even on the move - until they seized solid, materials being pretty crude in those days as they hadn't invented titanium or anodising.

Wind the clock forward 300 years and Suzuki had marginally improved the breed with their cast iron, steam-oil damped model fitted to the original GSXRs .... oh, and still fitted to the latest hot-poop GSXR1000, which is odd. However, the bolt-on boys soon twigged that increasingly affluent bikers would shell out loads of money on something a bit more stylish, so they set about making nice alloy dampers with anodised bodies and shiny slidey bits. Deciding that an old knob stuck on top of the steering head was a bit passé, they opted for a side mounting, running the damper from the frame to the fork leg.

The damper now relied on oil to work its magic, controlling the movement of a fixed rod inside the sliding casing. Adjustment was made by changing the size of the oilway aperture by a remote rod - the smaller the opening, the less oil can pass, the slower the rod can move so the greater the damping effect.

The M.Toby damper - most follow the same basic design

Everyone was pretty happy with this set-up until Ducati entered the fray and turned the steering damper into an essential fashion accessory by sticking it back on top of the bike, just behind the top yoke and running across the bike rather than in line. It meant a more inventive linkage, but boy did it look trick. The location offered the rider the chance to adjust the damping rate on the move, useful for racers especially on the IOM bumpy old TT course. Now the only place to put your damper was on top of the tank.

Pretty soon manufacturers had come up with fitting kits so that we could all disport such dampers. With a bit of bracketry trapped under the headstock nut and various bent bits of metal bolted to the frame the damper was made to work, even though we then had to remove the thing plus bits of bracket to get the tank off for basic servicing of the engine. The advantage with the top mounting is reduced angular motion and slider travel, plus the damping affect is more centrally ... er, centred.

HyperPro fitting for the 2000 R1 - not too sure about this one ...

The rather more conservative Sprint fitting

We now have a whole range of designs and fitting kits from various manufacturers - Öhlins, HyperPro, Sprint, Maxton, Toby ... even a rather posh looking one from an Italian firm who CNC it out of titanium and market it as Matris or ExtremeTech, for instance. All jolly good stuff.

Prices range from around £180/£200 for a Maxton or Sprint billy-basic side mounter (called a "race" fitting) to £250 plus for a top-mounting unit. Or how about a nice shiny M.Toby titanium item - £400 plus postage to you, squire.

Hyperpro have come up with a jolly wheeze that sounds rather good - the Active Control Damper. Their press blurb states: "Active control means that as the steering force increases, so does the damping effect. This results in a smooth easy-handling ride at low speeds combined with heavy dampening during extreme situations. The best of both worlds - truly a breakthrough in dampening design." And who are we to argue?

Scotts rise above all this modernist hoo-ha and offer you this delightful design - smacks of the old BSA friction damper .. Never actually seen one in real life, mind. Why not start a trend and fit one to your bike? It's got multi adjustable everything which can be dialled in as conditions require with a twiddle of the various knobs and levers. High speed and low speed damping plus an adjustable "arc of damping" - not to be confused with the much more damp ark of Noah. It does cost over £400, but being a leader of fashion was never cheap.

And now Honda have turned the whole damping thing on its head with the introduction of their HESD - the Honda Electronic Steering Damper. It works by increasing the amount of damping depending upon road speed.

The PR blurb for the 2004 onwards Blade was that the HESD was a product of Moto GP and developed by none other than Vale himself, so it had to be good.

There have been a few instances of the unit failing, leading to excessive resistance at low speeds. So if your 'Blade's handling like a tea trolley check that HESD.