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**Spacer Reach & Stack Calculation (64.5° Head Angle, 20mm Spacers)** * **Reach Reduction (Horizontal shift closer to rider):** 20 mm × cos(64.5°) = 20 × 0.4305 = 8.61 mm reduction in reach * **Stack Increase (Vertical shift higher up):** 20 mm × sin(64.5°) = 20 × 0.9026 = 18.05 mm increase in stack

How's the balance on the bike? If the back end is comparatively soft it can end up rocking your weight back and unloading the fork. Which makes it difficult to get full travel. The carpark bounce tests are very good at exposing if one end is soggy or too firm. Wind off your damping so it has less effect first.

Downhill algorithm just released for the astars airbag system!

Shock set up plays a huge roll there. Higher initial leverage ratio doesn't inherently mean it uses travel easier. It might, but it also might not be that different. But yes, if your suspension is less supportive at a given point in travel it will feel softer on a whole with anti-rise forces added in. That's driven by a combination of leverage curve and shock setup.

So theres a few things - Most riders, even the best ones spend for more time on the rear brake so it will get hotter faster, and this only gets more pronounced on steeper/faster tracks. The terrain is a lot more uneven and loose which makes it tricky to apply maximum front brake for every corner, plus a rider can shift their weight backwards much more than a car or motorcycle can. The other thing is polymers have a non-linear relationship between load and friction, which means there are diminishing returns to loading the front wheel under braking. ie if...

A 32"/27,5" is basically a full 29".

martin on the scooter. instagram only right now. raw incoming.

Anti-rise alone, no impact. How stiff a bike is perceived to be at a given moment is a combination of many things. Feedback from the chain when you're hard on the brakes is more noticeable especially when it's trying to ratchet your feet back. If you're braking hard and the sensitivity of the suspension is impacted by both chain growth and higher anti-rise then maybe if you decrease the impacts of chain growth the stiffness on a whole falls in a range that you're happy with.

My ideal range would be something starting around 100-120% and dropping to somewhere around 0 by bottom of travel. Hard to put a number on it since such a wide range can really work, but I definitely don't mind over 100% around top of travel as long as that drops off to at or below 100% by sag.

Ditto. I ride and set my bikes up for riding moderately steep to steep trails. I've had bikes with 100%+ (Guerrilla Gravity), a bike with ~50% (Levo Gen 3), and a few with it in the ~60-70% range. That's the sweet spot for me for a constant-ish AR suspension design. Too high, and you pack down the rear over successive hits (like brake bumps). Too low and you've gotta add a bunch of LSC to the fork to counter the pitch forward effect. Somewhere in between strikes a decent balance. Like @CascadeComponents says, one of the nice things about a...

Shout out to Neko for testing this question about high vs. low AR, and I loved the test results because they were so undefinitive and subjective. Neko and Asa liked lower AR values (70-75%) and Angel liked higher AR values: "The better rider you are, the higher AR value you might want. If you're braking really intentionally, late, and hard with both brakes, I can see why you'd want the bike to squat, even though it loads the spring and feels stiff, the position is definitely more confidence-inspiring when you need to brake hard and late. If you drag your...

I agree about the unavoidability of Strava, but I drew a different conclusion about how to respond to that reality. Instead of working extra hard to hide the trail, keep it secret, and try to avoid people who use Strava from finding out about a trail, I think illegal trail building should be built in such a way to anticipate, plan for, and hope for people to find out about the trail. The question should be: if this trail is going to be discovered by the authorities no matter what, how can I build it so that it's worth maybe...

One big tech not and one small tech note from World Champs pit bits- As y'all mentioned, Schwalbe now makes a 32" Radial Gravity Pro Magic Mary, which is a big deal because that makes it the first truly heavy duty 32" tire from any brand. Previously Neko was running an EXO+ Dissector up front on his 32" Frameworks DH bike at Mountain Creek. He said the EXO+ front tire felt fine and didn't bug him, which is nuts, and makes me suspect that the 32" front wheel could actually feel really really good with a proper DH tread, casing...

While I would love a USD boxxer, its probably a hand dyno for the shock service guys

USD dual crown in the Rockshox pit? From pit bits.

So, I think I finally have enough time on it to develop an opinion. Is it a better fork than the 38 gripx2? Yes. Does it have a much narrower sweet spot than the old fork. Very much so. So, I've kinda thrown everything at the fork in trying to make it feel good. Tokens in, tokens out, less sag, more sag, tons of HSC, no HSC, so on and so forth. If you did this with the old fork you could still get something that was more or less rideable. Not so with this fork. I think, in large...

Ahh yup...OK It could be the fork but it is unlikely to be directly caused by too much progression, its normally tyres (width/casing/pressure), friction or initial spring rate (in that order). I would suggest zero spacers (which I think you already have) and then probably increase the pressure until it gets worse (in a different way) or you are around the recommended pressure (or it gets better!). Try lower tyre pressure if you havent already, then bracket the damper settings - it would be handy to drop the lowers and grease the dust wipers if they haven't been already as...

The SixFinity mules from 2016 and 2019 are super cool to see. That's a looooooong time ago, and I didn't realize they've been kicking this idea around for that long.