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I think a lot of people get caught up in viewing the shock and spring as one unit. You can look at them as separate entities and the impact of a flex stay makes more sense. The total spring forcing the bike back to top of travel is the combination of the flex stay and the spring on the shock. The damper controls rebound of the entire rear end, so as long as the rebound tune is good for the combined spring rate you’re good.

The flex in the RT cannot happen unless the RT moves through it's travel, so at no point is the flex undamped. Think of the spring force of the flex stay RT as an extension of the air spring in the shock, and thus connected to the bike.

One of the local XC racers who I worked with races U23 WC went to a training camp last year in europe with a flex stay bike and i started getting messages about how she should set up the suspension as her and her coach couldn't figure it out. She was racing on a medium frame, but she was over all just too light for the way the flex stay was tuned and she just could not get along with the bike. Allegedly, that bikes frame flex was tuned for 140-190ish expected rider weight for best results. So that bike...

The ride characteristics flex stay bikes give is subjective. Not everyone likes them which is clearly your point of view, but you don’t speak for everyone. I have the flex stay Stumpjumper and an Evo. They both have their pros and cons. If I am riding a flow trail or something that’s not too rowdy, the flex stay feels awesome as you get so much energy back for what you put in. On the other hand it gets overwhelmed quickly in chunk and that’s where the Evo does better and if I had one, an Enduro would do better again...

It really depends on the flex stay design. Some stays have more rebound than others. You'll notice newer designs from Cannondale and Rocky Mountain with a thinned out portion to minimize this spring effect. These frames don't need special shock tunes AFAIK. I have the flexstay stumpjumper which has a pretty beefy stay so Specialized used a digressive tune on the DPS shock to tame it. I tried a off the shelf Fox Float and the snap back was too much.

So a flex stay is a basically an undamped spring, right? How is that controlled/adjusted for in the rest of the bike, or is it too small an effect to need compensation?

Agreed on all counts. If it's repeatable, it's as valid as it can be, but it's not a very meaningful target in itself, it's a byproduct of having the necessary spring rate for the loads you put on the bike and the ride quality you're looking for. Worrying about the precision of the sag measurement like that is utterly pointless if you're ignoring the factors that actually matter when selecting spring rates. On that note, we have a few different ways that we calculate spring rates for the Telum on any given frame (tuninghub.vorsprungsuspension.com) - if you know what you...

How do you choose which words to Capitalize and do you by Chance wear googles around your neck while wrenching?

Sag is a reference point. Do yourself a favor, cut your sag O-rings off and live free! This was actual advise from Mr Vorsprung himself in a Gondola in Queenstown. It's even more irrelevant on a moto with the whole tape measure and sharpie mark on the rear fender that anyone can do for free.

No, we haven’t been measuring sag wrong. Any method of measuring sag that is repeatable is an acceptable way to measure sag. As it is something that must be tuned as opposed to setting to a specific percentage, being able to repeatably measure sag is the most important thing. You can do this seated and measuring at the shock just fine. If someone wants to measure it with a whole bunch of kit that’s fine, but telling everyone they are wrong and do it wrong is silly. It is definitely worth noting that on more progressive bikes you shouldn’t be...

This strikes me as excessive. Sag is a relative measurement anyway, there’s very little value in actually knowing the number. I guess you can get a little more precision out of it, and it could be cool to have as a team or a shop, but it’s pretty expensive for an individual

Fair question. Money is definitely one reason why we haven't bought an Intend to test ( or 2772 reasons). In a perfect world, I would love for Vital to buy all of our test products at MSRP, like Consumer Reports used to do (Consumer Reports is now a dead husk of their former self). But buying all our test products would require either a) more revenue from advertisers, or b) moving to a subscription model and charging viewers, which other bike sites have done (Velo, Radavist, etc), or c) more $$$ from advertisers AND charging viewers for a subscription, which...

We love the silence of Onyx rear hubs, but at PUSH, we recommend not using the front hub. The only customers to complain about excess flex have been on Onyx hubs and switching hubs solved the issue every time. We've looked into the issue and I've personally tested a hub, but we couldn't find anything that stood out and it rode completely normal. At this point it seems like it's a case-by-case issue, but we are going to continue to research the topic.

They were correct then and they're correct now. We've gone from 1800g fox 36s and 1800g non boost wheel sets on our 26" enduro bikes to 2400g fox 38s and 2200g boost wheel sets on our 29" enduro bikes. Where do we go once we have 32"?

I'm pretty sure that this is the gondola in Sölden, Austria. They have the Elements 007 advertise on them, which is located there. Here is a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Naulv6O8yfw

We can rebrand it October 3 2025, when we will have the decisive answer as to whether more companies will be shutting down in the next 12-24 months from the time of original posting.

MTB-adjacent news; the Warner Bros/Discovery Omincorp/financial dumpster fire that currently holds the rights to the UCI World Cup Broadcasts is being unpicked at great speed. Hopefully this makes watching World Cup broadcasts even more of a confusing and expensive endeavour, as seems to be the grand plan going forward.

Can we move this to the suspension thread please