Adjusting Front Suspension Spring Rate on Downhill Mountain Bikes

Video Transcript

"MICKEY DENONCOURT: For downhill riding, most people are using forks between 5 1/2 inches and eight inches of travel. Obviously, the more travel you have, the more things you can roll over without really having to use a lot of body language and--body English I guess I should say. Body English and skills and stuff like that to really absorb terrain. This bike right here is fairly short travel fork, 5 1/2 inches and the main rule of thumb that you want to do when you're setting up suspension on the downhill bike, is you want probably at least 30% sag in your front suspension. So this is an air fork. I've got an air cap up on top here. If I take this cap off, there'll be a Schrader valve in there that use a pump to get the spring rate right. But what you want to do, as you can see, I've got this O ring here, I mean not O ring, the ZipTite here that I use to make sure I'm getting the proper amount of travel. So I get on my bike and what's my riding position, and you see I'm getting about two inches a sec or inch and a half a sec which is about the appropriate amount of sag. And to make sure that my spring rate's right, besides the amount of sag that I'm getting. I want to make sure that at the end of every run, I looked down, and this O ring is moved all the way up to the top of the travel range. You want to make sure that you're bottoming out your suspension at least two or three times every run. That means that it's setup right. So, in the next little clip, we'll talk about how to adjust the various settings on your fork to make it perform optimally."