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 damper is 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...