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This was a good tuning suggestion. I upped the spring rate, LSC, ands HBO and that helped a lot. I still want more HSC but the HSC knob feels terrible so I’ve just been leaving it open.
34 vs 36 forks for your next trail bike? We thought this would be an interesting topic to explore, so we did: https://www.vitalmtb.com/videos/member/trail-bike-fork-selection-34-v-36.
Not sure if this has been discussed in any other thread, but figured this might be good place to get some discussion/insight to my question. In other coil shock applications (cars etc), coil binding is often dealt with by using a flat axial needle roller bearing. I was thinking about testing this on my bike, but figured maybe someone has experience or have good reasons why this would not work. Opinions?
I do understand that mud can easily get in and cleaning and care must be done often.
With MTB's using very high spring rates, using a bearing definitely offers a performance advantage:
i remember thrust bearings were popular for a hot minute maybe 10 years ago now? I actually still have one in my old 40 coil. seems like this solution serves the same purpose but with less complexity.
edit - googled to confirm, sprindex includes a similar delrin adapter to account for spring rotation too. they sell them standalone as well.
Is the push one delrin also or something more fancy (ertalyte, nyloil etc)?
Update question for my Sentinel Saga:
What suspension changes should be made for transition seasons (pun not intended) when it starts to get colder? I thought I was pretty close to having things dialed, but took a week off while it poured rain, and yesterday my suspension felt extremely firm. I tried speeding up the rebound to increase oil flow but that just made it feel like I was being bucked around.
Also, if the Sentinel Saga should make its way to another thread, let me know. It’s just my vehicle for learning about suspension right now.
The easy fix for wet conditions is to wind back compression damping, since your not going as fast you need less damping, and it'll reduce the risk of a slide out from loading the bike too much in a corner (you can only load the bike as hard as the compression+spring force push back at you).
A more complete setup you would also change spring rates front and rear, and therefore rebound too, a bit more sag in the wet can be helpful for some, but it means having a totally different setup.
Easy fix is just winding out LSC a a bit and maybe a tiny bit of HSC front and rear.
lower your tyre pressure 2psi or so
It is not Delrin, and is in fact something very fancy. The red material we use is fundamentally a bronze-filled PTFE product that is designed to act as a bearing, supporting very high loads while having an extremely low coefficient of friction. We machine the material in-house very carefully, as the material alone costs us $278 per foot! 😒
Really cool. I have to ask, is this materially better than two delrins stacked ontop of each other? We do this all the time in the snowmobile (CVT clutch) world with solid results.
Delrin also has a very low coefficient of friction. The red bearing material we use offers better long-term wear and durability, especially in harsher environments.
I like the simplicity in this solution (albeit being expensive material in the first place) and keen to buy a couple of "washers". I could not find it on your website. is it only for shock buyers?
I might add that I went deep into the rabbit hole of plastics yesterday and it is suprising to me that we don't see more use of "fancy" plastics in these kind of applications.
FWIW, if you get measurements you can very likely source what you want online (delrin, not Darren's more fancy version) for a few bucks. Cheap solution if you want to functionally add something similar.
Fwiw, it's likely cheaper to just buy a sprindex and use their bearing/spring adapters to accomplish the same thing. I have used the 11.6 bearings listed above and I can tell you that the sprindex products are not anywhere near as sophisticated... but they do work.
I'd wager you could probably source something along those lines from McMaster or Grainger too. Dims might not be optimized without some dremeling
Appreciate all tips. Still a bit surprised we don’t see more off the shelf options if coil bind up is happening on all coil shocks
What are folks’ opinion on Shockwiz? I’m thinking of renting one to try out since I’m just about at my wits end with the Sentinel.
Personally a bigger fan of just bracketing my settings on a repeatable section of trail. It gives me a better idea of what all the adjusters do and I can apply that knowledge to later rides when I want to change something.
You can get PTFE backup rings in almost identical dimensions which work OK - sometimes the contact area looks a bit small but so does a lot of spring seats out there. I normally just hoard sprindex washers but the PTFE rings have worked fine when I tried them
I find it awkward when shockwiz comes up - I think the hardware is really cool, super well thought out and nicely packaged but the software frustrated me - too much of a black box that hides everything its working out, but then is giving quite advanced suggestions and fine tuning. I would regularly see people struggling with things (normally calibration) but theres no easy way to troubleshoot or diagnose things, ie if you could access the raw data. Even some kind of ai-style feedback loop where you could at least tell it what was going wrong would be useful but I found it very hit or miss. It also gets awkward if I'm recommending them or renting them out and it clearly gives bad data so I turn around and tell the person to ignore it......
Shockwiz is OK, you just need to remember that it does not distinguish between front and rear and it tends to suggest too much sag in the front. Otwerwise it's a good starting point, when tuning the front I always set tunning style to FIRM and it works. Definitely better than nothing because it gets you in the OK spot quickly. However it's too blackbox for me and a real telemetry would be welcome. I ordered BYB and I am curious how it will compare to shockwiz.
I've used it and "real" telemetry options on the same bike to compare.
The benefit of Shockwiz is that it's simple to use. You attach it, set it up, then it gives you easy to read instructions (eg not raw data) on what to do. That's what it does on the surface, anyway.
The problems often start with the calibration process. It's very sensitive and being off means your results will be way off. I usually ended up calibrating 4-5 times and taking the average of the result, eliminating the outliers, before I came to a ratio that I thought worked by taking the most common ratio. Keep in mind it's not using actual measurements of your travel usage and velocities (like other telemetry options do), it's taking this ratio and using formulas combined with pressure readings to derive that data, so it's very critical that this is done right and IMO most peoples problems stem from incorrect calibration.
The other issue is that it will send you on a wild goose chase if you let it. I let it go wild once out of curiosity and it wanted me to have 5 tokens in my Fox 34, which was ridiculous. I added ~6 psi and made it happy on the same trail riding the same way. This is where the simplicity kinda means you need to read between the lines a bit and use some intuition with it or you'll end up chasing trying to make it happy. If you don't understand the relationship between adding air pressure/tokens and rebound speeds, then you are going to have a hard time with it. So you still need some base understanding before you proceed. Sometimes it's just wrong and you need to be able to discern when that is, along with when to discard what it is saying. Point being, it's "simple" but sometimes requires you to know more than it would indicate at a glance.
I also focus on getting it content in this order: air pressure, tokens/progression, rebound, compression. Keeping in mind outliers also, if you get sloppy on a ride and end up flubbing a drop, I would take that into consideration in the results because the device doesn't know any different.
The way I use it is to trust green or yellow as acceptable ranges, red is generally outside recommended. There is also a detections page (or was when I used mine) that will show things like pogo, keeping those in the green means you are within reasonable range. The recommendations page is helpful but more of a guideline than a steadfast rule.
YMMV. I think it's a useful tool but IMO you can get by just as much with bracketing, it's not a replacement for real telemetry. Use the same section of trail, make massive sweeping adjustments and see how they impact the way the bike handles, then tweak from there. You can probably get just as close that way, but if you are like me, seeing it from another perspective is helpful. You might also be surprised that, contrary to 99% of what mountain bikers do, things like adding a lot of compression damping or backing off your rebound can take a badly performing linkage and improve it dramatically. Don't be afraid to try setups that may seem "wrong".
I have also done a lot of Alice in wonderland research and will machine something up next week when I'm back in the office.
I ended up skipping out on the shockwiz and just added a ton of air (minimum recommended sag in the rear, 10 PSI over recommended up front, and things are a lot better. The back end feels soooo much more supportive, while the fork still feels a bit harsh, but I like how high in the travel it’s riding so I’m not sure I want to mess with it too much.
Related suspension question: the common sentiment seems to be that any more than 0-1 clicks of HSC adds a lot of harshness for the Charger 3.1 damper, as well as the current RS rear shocks. Is there a similar effect to going past neutral on LSC, or am I being unnecessarily wary of adding compression there?
Anecdotal but I was able to crank the LSC and it was fine. Im sure someone can give a more technical answer though.
You can also just try it and see what happens, its not a difficult adjustment to make.
I run my Charger 3.1 forks (2 Zebs 1 Lyrik) with HSC in the middle, LSC -2 from middle. My Vivid airs all have HSC set in the middle also I believe (2 of them are running C37 1 is C34). I'm not especially heavy, and not a pro level rider, but I do find that running more HSC helps calm the bike down when going fast in the rough. I'd also add that I run Nokens on the Zebs and 0 tokens in the Lyrik, so I don't get any harsh ramp up from the air spring. I ran less HSC on the Zebs before I installed Nokens. For the shocks, they all have 2 tokens and are installed on moderately progressive bikes (~25%), and I run the HBO fully closed also, as I hate having hard bottom outs.
This one is glass filled PTFE.
Glass filled might be the death for the collar and/or spring. Glass is very abrasive.
For what it's worth, GGB bushings, what is used in shock eyelets, is a steel backed, sintered bronze covered with PTFE. The PTFE transfers to the mating part (reducing bushing) and the teflonized surface then slides over the brass sinter balls.
Besides bushings GGB also offers this kind of material in plates/sheets for axial loads. Maybe they have something appropriate for spring support duties.
As for why is there not as much fancy materials in bikes as there is in other industries, I'd guess cross pollination of engineers with other industries (people entering the industry later in their career) is less than in some other cases, there is less money (and time?) available for development, a lot of production happens overseas so it's hard to bring locally available products and materials into production overseas and vice versa, etc. Automotive development, engineering, design and manufacturing is still a lot more under one roof than bikes are. I guess powersports in general are closer to the automotive way of work than to the bikes way of work.
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