250 ride
Guy's I have been down this road soooooo many times w/ the vtx guys,
OK, Here is the deal.
First off, every bike is different, hd baggers, sportsters, vtx's, furys, smaller sport bikes, larger sport bikes (1000cc and over) vespas, the raider, m109r, they all ride a little different right out of the box. So anybody that starts talking smack about wider tires is usually generalizing and is so in the dark, most of those talkers have never ridden on a 250-tire bike let alone owned one.
The custom evo based choppers of say 7 or 8 years ago were a completely different animal than the 240 vtx's or the 250 we do on the fury.
Years ago the norm was to move the motor over to the left (on evo based choppers) about 1 inch on the fat (250 back then) tire bikes, thus creating an incredibly unbalanced bike. Yep, they were a cow, but keep in mind they were also stretched out chopper front ends and VERY heavy.
The newer right side drive choppers are leaps and bounds better than before.
Lets talk about wheelbase for a sec, longer wheelbases have a longer turning radius, thus make it harder to negate a tighter corner, this is some of the big tire dilemma on the sport bikes, would you agree that most fat tires sport bikes are stretched out at least 6"....to over a foot? This will have more of an effect on turning than the width of the tire.
Another point some make is "fat tire bikes need more input effort in the bars to make them turn". This is true to a point, again different bikes in the first place. Actually the centrifugal force of the wheel is the cause of this, a solid wheel need more push than a lighter wheel does. It's the weight of the wheel, not tire width. Obviously a wider billet wheel (for a 250 tire) is heaver than a thinner cast hollow wheel.
As far as a harder feel, traction in dirt or gravel or wet roads I think tire brand and compound have just as much or more of an effect on this as does tire width. I am not sure where the "jacked up" comment came from, this would have to do with overall tire diameter, nothing else. Look up the od's on the stock Fury tire and say the Dunlop 250, Avon 250 or the Metz 240, then divide that by 2 for the actual tire height from axel to ground to see of your bike will sit taller/shorter.
By the way the skinny front wheel/tire is more of a concern to me as far as loose gravel traction than the rear.
Now lets talk specifically about the Fury. This bike is such a great handling bike in the first place that the fatter rear tire makes almost no difference at all, this has to do with the weight of the bike, wheelbase, front end geometry, and center of gravity. All of these variables make a difference.
Keep in mind the Fury has over trees in the first place, Honda did a great job looking at the market trends and giving people what they wanted on this one, that bike is so neutral in the corners it surprised me the first time I rode it.
In a nutshell, if my wife who has only ridden 4 years (Minnesota time, that's about 1 year Florida time) can't tell the difference, it must be miniscule.
Her bike is still just as neutral the corners as it was in the first place.
Anybody that wants to get together this summer and test ride mine is more than welcome anytime, that way you can go back and tell the neh sayers to quite trying to blow smoke until the have actually spent some time on one of these bikes. LOL
Riding a Fury with the 250 and riding an old evo chopper with the motor moved over to the next zip code with a 250 are two completely different bikes. There is no comparison!
