Adjusting Front Suspension Damper Settings on Downhill Mountain Bikes

Video Transcript

"MICKEY DENONCOURT: So, with your front suspension and with your rear suspension, the most important thing to do first is to make sure your spring rate's correct, that you're getting the right amount of sag and that you're consistently bottoming out your suspension unit. Then from there, you sort of tweak the settings of the damper, the thing that controls the movement of the fork to make sure that your bike handles the way you want it to. So, most forks that you'd use for this application have a rebound damper and a compression damper on all the RockShox products which are one of the more popular suspension companies, rebound dampings on the back, on the bottom of the fork, the compression dampings on the top. Start off with your rebound damping, you start either, you want to develop a baseline somewhere, probably starting at full fast which is rotating to the inside. I don't know if you can see there, but we've got picture of our rabbit for fast and a turtle for slow. It's very ingenious. But what you want to do, is you want to set up your rebound so that it's--your fork is coming back quickly enough that you're getting most of the travel that you need between bumps, but not so slowly that when you hit a really big hole, it stay in the hole. So you set your rebound first. And then your compression damping is basically--compression damping is the resistance of the fork to compression which makes sense. So, here, I have my compression damping turned up really hard. You can see it's really pretty hard to compress the fork, and as I turn the compression damping to a lighter setting, makes it considerably easier to compress the fork. So, compression damping, a lot of people use it as a substitute for the right spring rate, you don't want to do that. Basically, what compression damping does is it add's stability to the fork. It's low speed compression damping, so it's more like gradual undulation and stuff in the trail. When you hit something really hard like it squared its rock, you don't really have adjustment of those settings. So compression damping that somewhere on the lighter and the things, low speed compression is going to make it easier for you to compress your bike and push it around and stuff like that. And a higher setting is going to make a bob less and probably keep your bike a little bit more stable. It's going to be less likely to dive. I prefer setting somewhere in the middle. So that's the basics of damper adjustment on your bike."