Changing the settings on your suspension has a huge affect on your bike’s performance.
You can make it more plush, responsive, or playful.
A lot of these settings are fast and easy, while some take some more time.
Today, we’ll do a basic overview of the most common settings and what they do—specifically
the ones you’ll find on an air fork.
The first setting that most riders are familiar with is air pressure, which you’ll set with
a shock pump.
Most forks come with a guide which is based on rider weight, but that won’t give you
a perfect result.
For that, you’ll need to adjust your sag.
When you sit on your bike, your fork compresses a little bit, or at least it’s supposed
to.
This is sag, and it’s expressed as a percentage of the forks total travel.
Most trail and XC forks ride best with between 20% and 35% sag, but you should check with
your manufacturer.
The longer your travel, the more sag you’ll likely need.
You can determine your sag by sitting on your bike with all your gear on, and pushing this
ring to the bottom.
When you get off, the position of the ring will indicate your sag.
The Pike even has a guide printed on the stanchion to make things easier.
More sag makes your suspension feel plush, which helps you maintain control on chunky
terrain.
Less sag can make your fork more responsive, but that’s only beneficial when the terrain
is more moderate or flowy.
If you like riding street, for instance, you can get away with very little sag.
Even with proper sag, aggressive riders will sometimes find themselves bottoming out.
Naturally they add more pressure, which works at the expense of ride quality.
There’s a better way.
These are called volume reducers, or tokens.
The more of these you have in your fork, the less room there is for air.
This makes your fork stiffen up towards the end of its travel.
You’ll hear people call this “progressive” travel.
The opposite would be “linear travel”.
Linear travel, or no volume reducers would look like this.
Green indicates the part of the fork’s travel that’s real supple and squishy, while red
indicates firmness.
As we reduce the volume, or add these expensive pieces of plastic, the travel becomes more
progressive.
Reducing your forks volume is easy.
Just order the right reducers for your fork, let all the pressure out, and install them
on the top cap.
Reinstall the cap and pump the fork back up to pressure.
If you’re still bottoming out, reduce the volume more by adding more of these tokens.
The next setting is the damper, or compression.
You might know this dial as a lockout, or the Charger on the Pike.
Simply put, compression controls how much the fork resists traveling.
This can usually be done on the fly.
Before a long climb, cranking this up provides a stiffer pedaling platform.
For descending, you want it open so that it’s extra squishy.
When you’re doing a lot of pedaling on flat terrain, the middle setting can offer a balance
between pedaling and shock absorption.
A lot of forks, have a low speed compression setting.
This affects how it responds to braking, and small bumps.
If you find that your bike bobs around a lot while pedaling, or dips too much while braking,
you might want to dial this up a bit.
Don’t turn it up more than you need to though, as you still want your fork to absorb little
bumps.
Now for one of the most talked about settings, rebound damping.
This controls how fast your fork returns after compressing.
Close it up and your fork will return slowly.
Open it up and it’ll return quickly.
I think a good way to set your rebound is to open it all the way and ride off some stuff.
Are you getting bucked around when the fork returns?
Close it a few clicks to reduce the rebound speed.
You’ll find that slower rebound makes drops feel really nice, but crank it up too much
and it won’t return fast enough for the next bump.
Personally, I like my rebound on the faster side since it makes for a more responsive
and playful ride.
So now that we have a basic understanding of the settings on your fork, let’s have
some fun.
We’ve seen a few clips of this guy throughout the video, and some of you might recognize
him.
Meet Clint Gibbs, a fellow YouTuber who races XC and Cyclocross.
Today, he was able to clock a time of 2:58 seconds on this course here at Santos.
I thought it would be fun to max out his compression and rebound and record his time again.
First we cranked the compression all the way up, which makes the fork all but locked out.
When sprinting and climbing, this would have been a benefit, but this course gets pretty
chunky in some sections.
For Clint, it was harder to maintain control in the rough sections, and transfer power
to the ground efficiently.
In the end, he fell short of his fastest time by a full 9 seconds.
That’s a lot for such a short course, which shows how much of an advantage suspension
really provides.
Next, we closed up his rebound as much as it would go.
Pretty hilarious actually—Fox lets you close the rebound to a ridiculous level.
This would be interesting.
Surprise surprise, Clint got the same time as he did in the fully locked position.
With a slow rebound, your suspension doesn’t have enough time to set up for consecutive
bumps.
So, it keeps sinking lower and lower into its travel until it finally bottoms out.
So, what about fully open?
In this setting, there’s nothing stopping the fork from returning.
Like we saw this can make the bike too bouncy, and buck you around, but it didn’t have
much of an effect on Clint.
His time was 2:59, only one second slower than his fastest lap.
So let’s say you’re dialing in your rebound and trying to decide between a click or two
either way.
According to our test, you might want to give the faster setting the benefit for the doubt.
So, there you have it.
My goal was to explain these settings without giving you information overload, but I know
a lot of you guys like to get into more detail.
For that you might want to check out Clint’s channel.
He does long form discussions on all sorts of stuff, like XC, Cyclocross, geometry, you
name it.
I left some links to his videos in the description, as well as some charts, articles, and parts
you can use to adjust your suspension.
So before you ask me where to get volume reducers, check the description.
One thing I’d like to mention is that you can apply most everything we discussed today
to your rear shock.
We’ll go over the specifics of that another time, but for now I’d like to know about
your setups.
Leave a comment explaining how you like your suspension to feel, and why.
By the way, for all the beginners who have been asking what the settings are on my Pike,
here you go: Average sag, low volume, fast rebound, and very little low speed compression.
That’s as specific as I’m going to get because telling you exact PSI and clicks would
totally undermine the point of this video.
I want you to go out and dick around with your settings.
You might learn something.
Thanks for riding with me today, and I’ll see you next time.