- Setting up mountain bike suspension
can seem a little bit overwhelming
but it's actually fairly simple to get good base settings.
Today, I'm gonna show you how to set up
your mountain bike suspension in 10 minutes, every time.
(upbeat music)
One of the things that can seem so hard
about setting up suspension
is the fact there's a lot of different adjustments
available to you on virtually
every modern suspension design.
So we've teamed up with SunTour to make this video,
they've given us a brand new fork
and a brand new shock and they fitted them to my bike.
Now I've never set up SunTour before
so I'm gonna do that right now to show you
just how easy that process can be.
There are three main adjustments you need to make
to your suspension in order to get it ready
for off road riding.
There's the sag, there's the compression
and there's the rebound.
The sag refers to the amount the suspension moves
under your body weight when you sit on the bike.
The reason you need sag is so the wheels
can track the contours of the ground.
When the wheels are on the ground,
you have traction and control.
Compression refers to the amount of damping applied
to the shock absorbers under the compression.
The reason you need this is to slow that movement
down and to absorb impact.
Rebound refers to the way the damping forces
are applied to the shop absorbers
when they return following a compression.
Now, before we get started it's a good idea
to get to know your equipment
and know where you can find those adjustments.
We'll start by having a quick look at the suspension fork.
So this fork is SunTour's Durolux,
it's a 160mm fork.
Like most suspension forks, at the moment, it's air sprung,
now the air spring is accessible by cap
on the top of the left hand leg here,
that's pretty common position on most brands,
although you might find on your bike
it has it on the right leg instead.
It's typically a little cap,
you unscrew it and there's a Schrader valve underneath,
this is the same time of valve
that you'll find on your car tyres.
Next up are the compression and rebound adjustments,
compression is always blue, a rebound is always red.
Compression is normally found on the top of the leg,
and rebound at the bottom of the leg.
As far as actually adjusting the damping goes,
clockwise adds more and anti-clockwise
or counter clockwise takes it away.
There are typically two types of compression adjustment
available on forks,
there are loads with a multi-position lever
or those like this one that has a dial.
Now out back I have the SunTour TriAir Shock,
this has three points of adjustment,
it has air, compression and rebound.
Again, the compression is a blue lever here
and rebound is a red dial.
Now this particular shock has 55 millimetres of travel,
which at the rear wheel that translates to 150 millimetres.
Now just before we get started
it's important to say make sure your compression
adjustments are fully unwound or fully open
and make sure that the rebound is backed off,
you don't want any of this damping to affect the sag setup.
(upbeat music)
We're gonna start by looking at the rear sag.
Now, find yourself somewhere away from traffic,
fairly flat that you can repeat this process
nice and easily,
car park will be fine, section of fire road like this,
anything nice and simple.
Now the general rule of thumb is between 20 and 30%
of the available travel, you set up as sag,
now this can vary on some bike designs out back
and of course with rider preferences.
Some people prefer it slightly softer
and some will like it slightly harder.
On this particular shock there's 55 millimetres
of shock movement,
so between 20 and 30% equates to 11 to 16 1/2 millimetres.
Now you set the sag by inflating the shock with a shock pump
at the Schrader valve that's based at the top of the shock
and you measure the sag by pushing the O-ring
up against the seal and sitting on the bike
to see where it pushes it to
and whatever that amount of space is,
measure with your trusty tape measure
and that's how you can work out if it's the correct
sag or not for your body weight.
So you get the O-ring,
push it up to the seal on the shock,
then you're gonna sit on the bike
and bounce up and down a bit,
just to let it settle.
So you're basically taking your weight off the floor
so your weight is on the bike.
Once settled, push that O-ring back up again,
move the O-ring up against that shaft
and carefully dismount,
try not to disturb it too much
and it quite simply, where the O-ring is,
that's how sag you have.
Now like I said, I'm looking for between
11 and 16 1/2 millimetres,
so at the moment there's 18 millimetres
so it's a touch too soft for me.
SO now's the time to get the shock pump out
and make some adjustments.
(upbeat music)
Now, something that's really important to say,
is when you disconnect the pump,
depending on which type of shock pump you have,
you may lose a tiny bit of air
and it's something you need to factor in
when you're actually inflating it in the first place,
you might need to go slightly firmer,
put a few more pounds in there
just to compensate for that.
Again, push the O-ring up to the seal,
sit on the bike,
let it sort of settle a bit,
okay, so it's about there and then carefully climb off again
and measure once more.
(upbeat music)
Now, in a ideal situation you would lean up on someone
to do this or perhaps against a work bench or similar
but you can do it like this out on the trail.
If you get over the bike,
you have one pedal down,
put all your body weight on that pedal,
lean over the front of the bike
and then your O-ring will move,
you will compress that fork.
Note that I'm on a slight up hill here
so it's not gonna make me roll anywhere
and that's a pretty good indication of my body weight
on the front of the bike.
If I take the tape measure out and I measure this,
at the moment here we are 45 millimetres of sag.
Now I actually prefer my front end a little firmer,
so I'm just gonna put a little bit more air in here.
(upbeat music)
So there we go, that is the sag at the rear
and the sag at the front set up.
All we need to do now is get some good base settings
for our rebound and our compression
and we're good to hit the trials.
Okay, now it's on to the rebound control.
Now this controls the extension
or the extending of the fork and the shock
following a hit.
Now this has quite an important affect
on the handling of the bike,
if you have too little rebound damping in place
a bike can feel very bouncy,
quite like pogo stick-ish
and it can feel quite uncontrolled.
If you have too much damping though
then it's gonna feel quite harsh
because the fork and the shock won't extend fully
before the next impact.
Now that is something known as packing down.
Now what you're looking for
when you're setting up your rebound,
is it to be as fast as possible without packing down.
Now before we adjust the rebound
it's important to say that the heavier a rider you are,
the more air pressure you're gonna have to have
in your forks and shocks
and therefore the more rebound damping
you're gonna have to have to control it.
So, what I might have on this bike
won't necessarily be the same
as what you will have on your own bike.
What you're looking for is a nice, fast performance.
You don't want it so fast it feels
out of control and kicks you
and you don't want it so slow that it sticks down
after repeated hits.
On this shock there's nine clicks of rebound,
so I'm gonna start by having four clicks from fully open
and I'm gonna work it out from there.
Now, there's a couple of things to bare in mind with this
is that if you have a new bike
and you're setting up for the first time,
the back end of your bike won't necessarily
be as smooth as it will be after a few rides.
The shock bushings, they will tend to wear in slightly
and be slightly smoother after the first few rides,
so you might still need to increase
the amount of rebound once you've initially set it up.
A good way to check,
make sure you're in the right ball park,
is to set your O-ring against the shock seal again,
ride off an obstacle, about a curb sized
and remain seated in the saddle.
Now if it's too slow,
it will just return back to the sag point,
if it's too fast it'll bounce around
and if it's about right,
it will go past the sag point a little bit
and then just settle,
that's really what you're looking for
for a good base setting.
And for the front forks,
a good way to get the same sort of base setting
is to return that O-ring to the fork seal
and with just the palms of your hands rested
on top of the handle bars,
you wanna compress the fork to about your sag point
and then release as fast as you can.
And what you're looking for is the wheel
to not come off the ground.
If it's too fast the wheel can come off the ground
and if it's too slow, you will know about that,
so literally just this process.
Now on most suspension forks you will have a single
red adjuster on the bottom,
just for adjusting that rebound.
On this particular fork, the Durolux by SunTour,
there's two, there's one for high speed
and there's one for low speed.
What they recommend doing is running
the high speed all the way in and just making the adjustment
with the low speed to find your base setting.
Don't forget these are base settings,
this is where you start figuring out
how your bike reacts to off-road terrain,
you start with a good base setting,
then you go and ride and learn your bike,
learn the trails.
As you get to know your bike,
you get to know your suspension fork
and shock a bit better,
we're gonna make some revisions to your setup.
(upbeat music)
Now the last adjustment you need to make
for your base settings is compression.
In this case we're looking at the shock
and you have a lever here,
now this controls the low speed compression.
Now most people refer to open, mid and closed
as the typical settings
but what this actually refers to
is the amount of damping you're getting from the shock.
In fully open, you're actually getting about 20% damping,
when it's on the mid-way, about 60
and then about 80 when it's fully closed.
Now this doesn't mean it's locked out
but what this means,
you're getting the maximum low speed compression,
so it makes the bike a bit more efficient
when you're climbing so it's not gonna move around too much
under your body weight, very effective to have.
Now you're probably gonna find for riding most stuff,
you'll be on the mid setting
and if you want extreme comfort or lots of traction,
you can have it on fully open.
You only really wanna engage the fully closed section
when you're on perhaps climbing a high road
or even for urban riding.
Now the same thing applies to your fork,
if you have one of those multi-position levers,
this one has two dials on here,
it has high speed and low speed.
Now if your fork has high and low,
start by fully opening the high speed,
leave that one alone for the time being,
that is something you'll learn
as you start riding a bit more
and you understand the characteristics.
The low speed is the one you need
to make your initial adjustments to
to get your good base setting.
So what you wanna do is figure out how many clicks
it's got and go in for about a third of those clicks.
Well there we go,
that is how you set your suspension up in 10 minutes
with sag, compression and rebound.
All you've gotta do now is go and hit those trails
and get to know your bike.
Don't forget, these are just the basics
that you can do to get a good
base setting for your suspension,
as your riding improves and you start to learn
your bike a bit more,
naturally you're gonna make some improvements
and some incremental changes.
If you're in to jumping you might want add some more rebound
to slow the bike down and make it feel
a bit more controlled and predictable.
If you're in to your downhill racing and riding,
you might wanna experiment with high speed compression
to really take out those massive hits
and of course if you also like jumping
and you want the bike to ramp
towards the end of it's travel,
rather than having a more linear feel,
you can experiment with ramp control
by adding air volume spacers in the forks
and in the shock.
All stuff that we're gonna get in to
in our next suspension video.
If you wanna see SunTour forks being used
in a very different video,
click down here to see Blake absolutely smashing it
on the Surrey hills with SunTour Polygon rider Sam Reynolds.
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