That certainly is an interesting start into a post about tone policing. Out of curiosity, did you for example bother checking the Fox part list? The...
That certainly is an interesting start into a post about tone policing. Out of curiosity, did you for example bother checking the Fox part list? The only listed rebound tune for Grip X is called RF (Rebound firm). Like, it's not even a secret.
You do have a point here or there of course, but the way you posted is not the way you'd want the interaction coming your way I'm sure.
I wasn't sure where everything was coming from but a bit of Googling shows there was a suspension guru with the handle Dougal on mtbr that...
I wasn't sure where everything was coming from but a bit of Googling shows there was a suspension guru with the handle Dougal on mtbr that got banned for... Let's say unkind posts. I think @DServy assumes @Dougal - SC is the same person behind the mote or less the same handle and doesn't want Vital MTB to turn to the shitshow that was MTBR before the ban.
"it appears that DServy was banned from MTBR following some controversial or unkind posts. [1]"The plot thickens lol, havent seen anything dickish from Dougal...
"it appears that DServy was banned from MTBR following some controversial or unkind posts. [1]"
The plot thickens lol, havent seen anything dickish from Dougal here, just helpful advice (dont know the past).
I've never been banned from MTBR, Don't even have an account, so don't know where you got that from.
As far as what what Friedrichsaid, I actually agree 100%. There is, and traditionally has been, some crap product out there with thing that don't do what they say or will never work for a given scenario. I think one of my favorite examples is the mythical HSC knob on the first generation GripX2 that was basically a placebo.
You specified it quite well where sometimes things are just up to the job, but I feel an equally valid opinion is asking whether something is the right tool for the job to begin with. Why are you expecting a damper designed for application A to preform equally as good as application B? The fact of the matter is that the products made for the masses of bike riders are trying to provide windows of functionality for an incredible range of rider weight and styles, and that's incredibly difficult. That is fundamentally why I am hesitant to make the outright claims people desperately want to make, and I think people should be wary about the claims of random strangers on the internet.
Take for example your GripX comment and its bemoaned RF tune. As a heavier rider in a 120mm fork it works great. Simply put, the lack of travel makes slowing down shafts speeds and dissipating energy in the return stoke a much more difficult task than it is with my DH fork with 200mm of travel and a heavy front wheel with a DH tire on it. Does that intrinsically mean that damper is bad? Maybe? It certainly is noisy. Would I recommend said damper for 130 lb riders in long travel applications? Probably not, do I think it odd that Fox shoved them in their long travel applications? Probably. Do I think it's even odder than a company like Ibis (who is notorious for fast rebound tunes with their "tractive tuned" rears) put them on ripmos? Yep. Is it a better damper for me in my 34 then the previous one? I think so.
Having spent some time, although not nearly enough, actually recording and looking at suspension data I can firmly say that suspension dynamics is a gordian knot. I've seen tuning sessions where every change we've made to the fork only changed the meaningful data in the shock (due to the rider shifting their center of mass), I've been in sessions where literally nothing meaningful changed in the data but the rider ended up 8% faster on an 4 minute track. These systems are complex and dynamic, so should the discussion around them be as well.
Look, my intent wasn't to derail this thread into the nature of engineering good and evil: suspension edition. It was an attempt to ward off the evils of "guru"fication of the vital suspension forms.
Before this goes the wrong way: Some commentators are plainly frustrated rather than hateful. It becomes clear if you allow for that perspective when reading the respective comments.
To stay with the example: I would love the Grip X to be great for as many people as possible. After all, I guess everyone that is as deep into the matter as the people reading this are asked "What would you buy" from time to time. I think there were potential for this to be true. In my opinion, current fork offerings from Fox are much better than their Rockshox counterparts, but sadly only on the potential level in some aspects. There are great ideas but exectution of some parts seems weird to me. Did the Grip X have e.g. a thicker shaft, say 10mm, and more mid valve as well as base valve tunes available to account for differences in rider weight (respectively spring rate), I think it could be a great product. I couldn't care less about it being noisy.
Long story short: More information is better. Dougals views may be controversial and he may not be as good at stressing positive aspects rather than aspects where the products do fall short (be that objective or subjective, both can happen), but he is one of few people to offer lots of interesting insights. You can, after all, always decide the information does not matter to you.
I hate to break it to you, but both can be true. There can both be utter fanboys of anything (big suspension, tuners, products, what have...
I hate to break it to you, but both can be true. There can both be utter fanboys of anything (big suspension, tuners, products, what have you) and designs that are objectively really poor. Designs where you have to wonder how they passed any testing.
Before getting into such issues, suspension setups of less experienced riders tend to have a lot of room for improvement. I think that's due to mostly two reasons:
- A heap of "tutorials" are put out by people that are at least bad at explaining and maybe even bad at understanding the concepts behind suspension setup. - The concept of how the internal valving will only work for a certain spring rate range is extremely undercommunicated.
If you are not aware it's a realistic scenario that your rear shock (rarely fork damper) is never going to perform well with the spring rate you want/have to run, that is a problem. This is not helped by AI guides that provide you "precise clicker positions" for shock models without having any resources about the internals.
The next issue then is more of a design thing, e.g. clickers on your suspension which do not do what they say on them, pistons with ports that are too small for their job, oil that is too thick to be temperature stable, ... It is absolutely fair to point these out, especially to people who have not yet bought their next suspension product. And it is absolutely possible to recommend models from big suspension that require the least amount of work to get into a happy place.
The real problems start, however, if people feel like their favourite toy is being attacked. That is where the conversation always goes sideways. This also usually is the point where people start flexing their riding skills to prove points that just can't be proven that way. I am not sure how one should go about this, though.
The rebound tune question about Grip X is a perfect example. It is objectively true the rebound tune is going to be too firm (i.e. slow) for a good portion of riders, however large that may be. It is also true that for spring rates that the rebound tune works well for, the fork will lack compression damping. Yet you call that "shitting on hard engineering work".
This has to be up there on the list of most polite way of saying that big suspension typically has to be tuned to work well regardless of how many dials you can play with. The base tunes are all over the place, one generation is almost slope style level firm, next gen of the same fork comes with basically no compression damping at all. Why? No one cares to explain, feel free to guess. Or maybe that's how it came to be? They are guessing?
I wasn't sure where everything was coming from but a bit of Googling shows there was a suspension guru with the handle Dougal on mtbr that...
I wasn't sure where everything was coming from but a bit of Googling shows there was a suspension guru with the handle Dougal on mtbr that got banned for... Let's say unkind posts. I think @DServy assumes @Dougal - SC is the same person behind the mote or less the same handle and doesn't want Vital MTB to turn to the shitshow that was MTBR before the ban.
"it appears that DServy was banned from MTBR following some controversial or unkind posts. [1]"The plot thickens lol, havent seen anything dickish from Dougal...
"it appears that DServy was banned from MTBR following some controversial or unkind posts. [1]"
The plot thickens lol, havent seen anything dickish from Dougal here, just helpful advice (dont know the past).
I've never been banned from MTBR, Don't even have an account, so don't know where you got that from.As far as what what Friedrichsaid, I...
I've never been banned from MTBR, Don't even have an account, so don't know where you got that from.
As far as what what Friedrichsaid, I actually agree 100%. There is, and traditionally has been, some crap product out there with thing that don't do what they say or will never work for a given scenario. I think one of my favorite examples is the mythical HSC knob on the first generation GripX2 that was basically a placebo.
You specified it quite well where sometimes things are just up to the job, but I feel an equally valid opinion is asking whether something is the right tool for the job to begin with. Why are you expecting a damper designed for application A to preform equally as good as application B? The fact of the matter is that the products made for the masses of bike riders are trying to provide windows of functionality for an incredible range of rider weight and styles, and that's incredibly difficult. That is fundamentally why I am hesitant to make the outright claims people desperately want to make, and I think people should be wary about the claims of random strangers on the internet.
Take for example your GripX comment and its bemoaned RF tune. As a heavier rider in a 120mm fork it works great. Simply put, the lack of travel makes slowing down shafts speeds and dissipating energy in the return stoke a much more difficult task than it is with my DH fork with 200mm of travel and a heavy front wheel with a DH tire on it. Does that intrinsically mean that damper is bad? Maybe? It certainly is noisy. Would I recommend said damper for 130 lb riders in long travel applications? Probably not, do I think it odd that Fox shoved them in their long travel applications? Probably. Do I think it's even odder than a company like Ibis (who is notorious for fast rebound tunes with their "tractive tuned" rears) put them on ripmos? Yep. Is it a better damper for me in my 34 then the previous one? I think so.
Having spent some time, although not nearly enough, actually recording and looking at suspension data I can firmly say that suspension dynamics is a gordian knot. I've seen tuning sessions where every change we've made to the fork only changed the meaningful data in the shock (due to the rider shifting their center of mass), I've been in sessions where literally nothing meaningful changed in the data but the rider ended up 8% faster on an 4 minute track. These systems are complex and dynamic, so should the discussion around them be as well.
Look, my intent wasn't to derail this thread into the nature of engineering good and evil: suspension edition. It was an attempt to ward off the evils of "guru"fication of the vital suspension forms.
It was just copy and pasted from google. Dougals advice mirrors the "Healthy Alternatives" in your link". Why would you be upset with somebody following the advice you shared in the link. That is what I was thinking in my head.
I don't know what the backstory is either, this is what I gathered by searching the Internet...
I've never been banned from MTBR, Don't even have an account, so don't know where you got that from.
As far as what what Friedrich said, I actually agree 100%. There is, and traditionally has been, some crap product out there with thing that don't do what they say or will never work for a given scenario. I think one of my favorite examples is the mythical HSC knob on the first generation GripX2 that was basically a placebo.
You specified it quite well where sometimes things are just up to the job, but I feel an equally valid opinion is asking whether something is the right tool for the job to begin with. Why are you expecting a damper designed for application A to preform equally as good as application B? The fact of the matter is that the products made for the masses of bike riders are trying to provide windows of functionality for an incredible range of rider weight and styles, and that's incredibly difficult. That is fundamentally why I am hesitant to make the outright claims people desperately want to make, and I think people should be wary about the claims of random strangers on the internet.
Take for example your GripX comment and its bemoaned RF tune. As a heavier rider in a 120mm fork it works great. Simply put, the lack of travel makes slowing down shafts speeds and dissipating energy in the return stoke a much more difficult task than it is with my DH fork with 200mm of travel and a heavy front wheel with a DH tire on it. Does that intrinsically mean that damper is bad? Maybe? It certainly is noisy. Would I recommend said damper for 130 lb riders in long travel applications? Probably not, do I think it odd that Fox shoved them in their long travel applications? Probably. Do I think it's even odder than a company like Ibis (who is notorious for fast rebound tunes with their "tractive tuned" rears) put them on ripmos? Yep. Is it a better damper for me in my 34 then the previous one? I think so.
Having spent some time, although not nearly enough, actually recording and looking at suspension data I can firmly say that suspension dynamics is a gordian knot. I've seen tuning sessions where every change we've made to the fork only changed the meaningful data in the shock (due to the rider shifting their center of mass), I've been in sessions where literally nothing meaningful changed in the data but the rider ended up 8% faster on an 4 minute track. These systems are complex and dynamic, so should the discussion around them be as well.
Look, my intent wasn't to derail this thread into the nature of engineering good and evil: suspension edition. It was an attempt to ward off the evils of "guru"fication of the vital suspension forms.
Before this goes the wrong way: Some commentators are plainly frustrated rather than hateful. It becomes clear if you allow for that perspective when reading the respective comments.
To stay with the example: I would love the Grip X to be great for as many people as possible. After all, I guess everyone that is as deep into the matter as the people reading this are asked "What would you buy" from time to time. I think there were potential for this to be true. In my opinion, current fork offerings from Fox are much better than their Rockshox counterparts, but sadly only on the potential level in some aspects. There are great ideas but exectution of some parts seems weird to me. Did the Grip X have e.g. a thicker shaft, say 10mm, and more mid valve as well as base valve tunes available to account for differences in rider weight (respectively spring rate), I think it could be a great product. I couldn't care less about it being noisy.
Long story short: More information is better. Dougals views may be controversial and he may not be as good at stressing positive aspects rather than aspects where the products do fall short (be that objective or subjective, both can happen), but he is one of few people to offer lots of interesting insights. You can, after all, always decide the information does not matter to you.
This has to be up there on the list of most polite way of saying that big suspension typically has to be tuned to work well regardless of how many dials you can play with. The base tunes are all over the place, one generation is almost slope style level firm, next gen of the same fork comes with basically no compression damping at all. Why? No one cares to explain, feel free to guess. Or maybe that's how it came to be? They are guessing?
It was just copy and pasted from google. Dougals advice mirrors the "Healthy Alternatives" in your link". Why would you be upset with somebody following the advice you shared in the link. That is what I was thinking in my head.
Post a reply to: Suspension Component Technology/Functionality Discussion