Got Backed Into, Possibly Twisted Forks?

I'm trying to find out what I need to do.
I took the bike to work as normal Tuesday morning. Tuesday night as I was leaving, I noticed my handlebars were skewed slightly to the right; having them centred makes the bike steer to the left.
I notice yesterday that my front fender is now rubbing on the tire and there is a scratch/gouge on the fender where there wasn't before.

There is no new/different fairing damage, so I'm fairly confident it wasn't knocked over and then righted.

Is there other damage I should look for? Is it overly dangerous to keep riding like this until I can get it fixed/looked at?

Thank y'all.

Not good for the tire/fender, at least. Maybe take the fender off for now, and give everything a good tug to make sure it's still firmly on there. If you're lucky nothing will be really bent, and the bars will just be knocked out of alignment, or maybe the bolts attaching the bars are stretched/bent. If the top fork clamp is askew when you're travelling straight, then your forks are now either misaligned (not too hard to fix) or bent (will need replacement). I would think it would be pretty hard to bent the forks without knocking the bike over, but nothing's impossible I guess.

Going by your tiny thumbnail, it's a ZZR600? Some other things to look for would be mounting tabs on the fender to be broken off, wowed rotors, turn signal lenses are actually still attached (they could be sitting loose in the fairing), if you lock your steering check to see that the lock still works, etc

Sometimes you actually bent parts, and other times they just shift out of alignement. When someone comes to me with a crashed bike that they think the bars aren't straight on, the first thing I do is loosen up the front end and try to let any unaligned parts out of tension and back into alignment. In a lot of cases especially with dirt bikes, just loosening the top tripple clamp pinch bolts and the stem nut, will fix what looks like a totally twisted front end back to straight. Other times it can be a bent fork, bent triple top bottom or both, a bent handle bar, or even a bent frame, or any combination of all of them....

When I was involved with doing an insurance claim a few years ago, it was for my friends girlfriends 08 CBR 600RR. She parked it downtown and someone backed their car into it knocking it over. Here bars were crooked, but it was just a bent handle bar and the forks twisted in the tripples slightly. For the bars being crooked all it took to fix was a $100 handle bar and loosening the front end letting it all go back into alignment and then tightening to spec. That was the cheap part, being an insurance claim we are obligated to change everything that was damaged, so since her fairings, headlight, radiator, etc was also damadged it was $5500 claim...But thats another story..LOL

Just put the front wheel up to a telephone pole, and bash the wheel up against it in the opposite direction.
It will take several tries, you may even go too far the opposite way, then go back to doing it the other direction, until the bike rides straight with the bars centred.
There is no way things are actually damaged if you did not crash or there is not damage to the rest of the front end.
This happens all the time to a lightly dropped bike.

re the danger, if your bike is out of alignment and you have to hammer the brakes expect it to go sideways. I saw a rider go down under those circumstances. Apparently the bike handled better after the crash. So.......if you're feeling really lucky....

Thank you for the replies. I finally have a day off, so I will be trying to correct it/possibly order parts tomorrow.
Is it going to be possible without a front stand/chock?
Will I have to loosen both triple clamps?

If you try my suggestion. You do not need to.

Low rider said:

Just put the front wheel up to a telephone pole, and bash the wheel up against it in the opposite direction.
It will take several tries, you may even go too far the opposite way, then go back to doing it the other direction, until the bike rides straight with the bars centred.
There is no way things are actually damaged if you did not crash or there is not damage to the rest of the front end.
This happens all the time to a lightly dropped bike.

Click to expand...

+1

That's what we did when we rode enduro bikes. worked great.

might need to loosen the axle too.

MattJ1983 said:

Thank you for the replies. I finally have a day off, so I will be trying to correct it/possibly order parts tomorrow.
Is it going to be possible without a front stand/chock?
Will I have to loosen both triple clamps?

Click to expand...

Try what these guys are saying. Loosen the axel, fender, lower triple clamp (everything south of the uper triples). Then put the front brake on and pump the front wheel a few times. You might need to put the front wheel up against a wall/post and give it a jerk. I had to do this a few different times with my ex500.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSunBRB6-r8