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Johan! Loved the article. I especially like that you took the spacers out for the sake of testing to try to get the air shock feeling more "coil-like." Have you tried cranking low speed compression on the coil shock to give you more of a platform for jumping (make it feel more like the air shock)? Seems like a lot of the dead/not poppy stuff could be mitigated with a nice stiff low speed platform to push into.

After some reading, adiabatic is a fancy word for "air spring element heats up under use." The question is: what causes heat build up? Obviously lots of rock smashing for tens of minutes will cause heat build up, but everyone already knows this and it's not what Mandell and Dunc-Dawg are talking about here. After a little more googling, the adiabatic process is a consistent element of all air springs at ALL shaft speeds. It's the big, scary word that hides the reason why air suspension is progressive in nature. As positive spring chamber volume is reduced during compression, rising...

Great analysis and insight.

We're not talking about damping circuits and oil here, we're talking about the relative reactive-ness of the different spring materials. What Mandell said was that steel reacts equally at all shaft speeds, air does not.

I don't understand. If the adiabatic process occurs at high shaft speeds, why would that affect a low shaft speed moment like pushing into a jump face? By poppy I assume we're talking about jumping. Similarly, small bump impacts are high shaft speed moments, so by this same process wouldn't an air shock always be rougher on small bumps? Not saying they're wrong, and it sounds like their blind testing indicates riders can always tell a difference between air and coil. Just saying it doesn't make sense. Maybe pushing into a lip is a high shaft speed moment?

Make bikes heavy again.