How To Set Up Any RockShox Fork | Everything You Need To Know About Suspension Fork Setup

mountain bike forks have got a bit of an unfair reputation at least in my opinion for being difficult to set up but it doesn't have to be that way so today i'm going to set up a set of rockshox forks and take you through the process a lot of the theories we're going to talk about could obviously be applied to different brands though so there should be something in here for everyone [Music] in england we have an old saying that knowledge is knowing that tomato is a fruit but wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad and it's kind of the same with our suspension so many people get hung up on the definitions or kind of intimidated by all the jargon but we don't really need to focus our energy towards that the important thing when thinking about suspension is getting it set up for the user which in this case is you so yes we will be talking about all the different elements of our forks but this is about how they ride and anyone will be able to tell whether they ride better or worse and that's all we're going to focus on today so for this setup you're going to need some basic tools so i've got some allen keys here we have a cassette tool as well as some bottomless tokens and a shock pump i can't really get my head around it the fact that somebody would be willing to spend say 800 pounds on an upgraded fork without setting up their current set correctly because it only takes about half an hour and i would also say that my logic would suggest they're probably not going to spend about half an hour on the new set either so let's just take it back to basics look at what we're running and get it set up to maximize the performance of our suspension when i used to work as a mechanic on the races so world cups and ews we'd actually set up the rider's bikes using a similar sort of theory boiling it down to two main components better or worse and it's as simple as that really now we'd probably take a little bit longer and maybe their demands would be a little bit more finite but we can definitely take that theory to all mountain bikers and let them benefit from it so i'm not going to go into definitions too much today or talk about the technical explanations of how our suspension units work but if you are interested in that i went into it like a fox into a chicken coop not so long ago so i'm going to leave a link to that video in the description below now before we do anything to the suspension unit we need to get some basics straight so the first things first and it's absolutely vital you need to be sure to back off any adjustments to leave them in their fully open setting an easy way to remember this is it's just like a tap so all the way to the left is going to be in its most open setting so do that to the compression and rebound adjustment the second thing is if you dress up like a medieval knight to go mountain biking then don't set up your forks whilst wearing a pair of flip-flops in your pants because you need to be roughly the same weight now for instance sometimes i ride in knee pads sometimes i don't you don't need to be that particular but if you're going to wear five kilos of protective kit then it's worth putting on now assuming we're setting up this fork from brand spanking new and let's go even further and say that it hasn't got any air in the chamber whatsoever now you can spend quite a bit of time pumping up and getting on and pumping up and getting on or you can make your life far easier and using the chart on the side of the leg to basically put you in the right ballpark in terms of sag now this isn't perfect but it provides a really good starting point to make the finer adjustments you can even go one step further on the back of your crown there you will find a serial number for your fork you can plumb that in to rockshox's website and it will give you some really good base settings including rebound now if you don't have that that's not important it's just a nice way to save time i'm also going to leave a link in the description below to that website if you want to use it so now that we've got that base pressure it's almost time to inflate our forks but before i do that i just thought i'd talk you through how the air springs in these forks work because it should help you set up your forks more consistently once you have a bit more understanding now this seal here this is a replica of what's inside this fork is absolutely airtight to that tube so no air can get past and that's really important obviously when we're dealing with really large amounts of compression the last thing you want to do is to be burping air so that is a very very tight seal but here there's another tight seal because this sits like this and you've got your positive air chamber which is a lot larger and at the bottom you have your negative air chamber now these want to sit at the same pressure but obviously you've only got one place to get the air inside the fork so what happens is you inflate the fork say you inflate it to 100 psi and as you do so that air chamber is getting more and more pressurized and obviously it can't get past here and so it's gonna impact the size of the negative air chamber and you might see a fork even getting a little bit longer so what you need to do is equalize the two chambers there is a very simple but ingenious solution to how we can equalize these two chambers there is a small dimple on the inside of this tube around sags around 20 30 of the stroke and what that does is as that seal reaches it it just goes past the dimple and let air migrate from the positive to the negative chamber it's at that point you might see your forks suck down as that negative air chamber which sits just there comes up to pressure now it's really really important because if you set that to 100 psi once it inflates the negative the positive will probably drop to say 80 psi and then of course you need to top it back up to 100 and then you can equalize again and it will probably drop to 95 and then you repeat so it's really important that both these air pressures are the same and it's going to help you set up your forks more consistently if you do that process properly so to set them up cycle the fork through its travel and i promise you you'll hear it and that's the air migrating now in solidarity with the viewer i'm actually going to take my fork right back to basics as well so here i have that top cap which can be easily removed with that cassette tool and it's a great place to access because you can change the amount of bottomless tokens that you run so a really good place to start for a 29er is with two at least i think it is and with a 27.5 or 650 just with the one this is because it gives you somewhere to go should you want your fork to be a bit more linear as opposed to progressive what that means is the more of these bottomless tokens you install the more bottom out resistance you're going to have now that's really good because it means you can stop your fork bottoming out and blasting through the travel without having to run you know exceptionally high pressure or a high spring rate so you can still have a fork that tracks the ground nicely and offers good small bump compliance i would say however as a word of caution here i think sometimes people end up chasing their tail with these they add lots of bottomless tokens so the fork's very hard to bottom out and they want to run low low pressure to reap the benefits of that small bump compliance but the initial part of the stroke is so unstable they have to end up running lots of compression and that small bump compliance goes out the window so we want to set up our site properly irrespective of the amount of these we have in and from my experience of my style of riding i like to kind of ride trails like this for a bike like this it's about 20 of the stroke and you've got those markings on the side of the fork don't forget once you have your sag set at 20 that's when we can come back to these tokens if you're out riding and you never reach full travel then you can perhaps remove one similarly if you blast through full travel all too often you can add one what these tokens enable you to do is essentially have your cake and eat it too they mean you can have some small bumps compliance as well as big hit resistance and that's really really important to ensure our bikes offer the stability we need when we're charging hard so with your base pressure installed we can actually go and remove them now you might have noticed that i've actually changed my spot and that's because we need nice level ground to do this this means that it's more repeatable more consistent and it's going to give you like i said better results now the way that we set our sag is important but it's not a perfect science the best thing is to find something that is repeatable and consistent for you so that might just be sitting down like this if that's what you're used to dealing with then that's no bad thing personally i like to get my shoulder length against a tree and just push that o-ring down now what we would want to be is holding the brakes because that's going to bind some tension in the bike although we want some initial bounces just to kind of get the forks settled and into their stroke what we don't want is to do any bounces after we've set the sack so i'm going to bring it back a bit reset my pedals do some bounces release the brakes push it down and in that kind of rough and ready position let's kind of get my there's my head over the stem there and then we're going to gracefully dismount like i said we're not going to bounce and lose our point we're just gonna hold it there and we want it to be about the 20 mark so how's that looking well for me it's actually it's a little bit soft so i'm going to add a little bit of psi trial and error and eventually you get it right i like to run 20 20 and that's because how the bike will ride dynamically it's gonna keep the front end a bit higher you can run your bike at 30 sag on the forks anywhere really between 15 and 30 is kind of the operating range some people that will really suit for me it's just it's just not going to be it's not going to give me much stability and um i don't like the feeling of feeling like kind of dropping at the front so i like to keep them quite high up and high pressure so i'm just going to reconnect my shock pump now as we do this the pressure might be slightly lower than what we remember that's no bad thing nothing's gone wrong all that's happened is that as you have disconnected the shock pump it's let the air out of here then you've you know you've had your pressure so you've gone back and you've said it was 100 psi you've reattached it it's 98 psi where's that gone then it's because as you reconnect the shock pump the fork chamber is having to inflate the hose again and so that's kind of a net loss but i'm just going to add i'm going to go from my base setting which was around 100 i'm going to take it i think to about 110 and this is why it's really important to use the same shot pump every time because truthfully like i said accuracy is kind of arbitrary consistency is king there we go then i'm just gonna disconnect it there and repeat the sag and then gracefully dismount what do you know so i'd say that's probably about twenty two percent sag 23 sack i'm gonna add five more psi and then i reckon it'll be mint so that is my air leg all set up with my sag at 20 which is just how i like it now from here on in when you're adjusting the pressure in your fork i would say once you have you know your saggers and you're sitting at that mark then you can add a psi here take it away and you can find yourself being a lot more accurate and a lot more precise using the psi measurement as opposed to trying to measure half a mil of sag which is particularly difficult especially when you're by yourself so if you wanted to make the fork just a little bit softer i would advise going down two psi as opposed to coming back and trying to run one mil more sag so now it is time to set up the damper and actually removed one from a similar rockshox fork just to kind of show you and isolate what's going on now with this damper here i have turned the rebound fully closed so all the way to the right and against my admittedly puny arms puts a very very good fighter rebound circuits can be unbelievably strong and provide a huge amount of resistance to the bike going through its stroke so it's not something to be ignored or just forgotten about setting rebound is absolutely vital because it can stop the bike bucking you can stop it kicking you and it can mean the bike tracks the ground the wheel following the contours into any holes or dips it needs to whilst providing lots of traction and that's particularly important under braking similarly if we crack on all the compression adjustment you'll see why it is so important that it's so hard to compress yet again this is just my hands going at it not my body weight so it's maybe not as not a watertight experiment but one thing it does illustrate is that's full compression i can still just about get it through the stroke but it does show how much resistance a rebound circuit can provide and that's because we put a huge spring rate in these forks and whilst compression only has to complement that spring rate and provide additional support a rebound circuit has to do a huge amount of work if you imagine me taking that top cap off that fork now it gets about 20 000 feet that's what the rebound circuits got to contend with okay so it's really really important because what these dampers enable us to do is have the wheel tracking the ground all the time as best as possible so let's get into this fork particularly and set it up now going back to earlier on i spoke about that rockshox website giving you a rebound tune as standard and that's because of course rebound is relative to spring rates the more pressure you run your fork the more clicks of rebound you're probably gonna have to run as well now some fork manufacturers even provide recommended compression settings from stock and that's done off a couple of different aspects things like spring rates your body weight really how much how much resistant the fork has to provide with rockshox folks i find in my experience it's best to leave the compression settings open and then add as needed so what we're going to do is we're going to set the rebound first so if you're using the recommended settings from the rockshox website it is worth bearing in mind that in mountain biking we tend to count our clicks from fully closed so remember like i said it's like a tap so dial it all the way in so all the way to the right and then back it off the number of clicks they recommend i thought however i would do mine without that recommended setting just to talk you through my process now this fork is actually fully open at the moment which is no good at all it's almost a verging on something we call top out top out is a mechanical noise or feeling the rider gets as the fork reaches or the suspension unit reaches back to full extension it's not nice on any level and can contribute to a lot of unwanted noise and feel out on the trail now what i would recommend doing is putting your clicks right in the middle so go through the full range count the clicks and then just go to the halfway number that's a really good place to start for me i normally work in two clicks just to find the right ballpark and then i'll go back so actually i think i've been a bit too hasty i might actually open up back one click so that's my base setting now if you wanted to this is a great place to write these settings down i like the nerd i am i have a little spreadsheet document as a leftover from my racing days and it's a really good place to keep tabs so that's largely the fork in a really good place now so what we're going to do is go up and do a run and then come back to it now this one basically just needs to be a little bit of this a little bit of that it doesn't need to be anything crazy and you don't need to be absolutely pinning it because you're not pinning it all the time you just want something that's about a minute long easy to get to the top and you can have fun on [Music] so [Music] so that was the first run and you know like i said want to break it down to better or worse you know if you're teaching a child to speak i suppose that's the first step towards articulation just better worse good bad you know you can worry about writing sonnets about suspension at a later date right now we're just talking about better or worse and so for me riding that i felt my gut instinct and that's what we're going off here gut instincts that was a bit too fast on the front i felt it meant that a couple of different things but i mean i could never really get into the travel and it felt a little bit unstable so i'm actually gonna close it off two clicks so to the right if it helps you got the turtle there two clicks slower and then we go and we get another running simple [Music] don't worry about riding the exact same line every time and don't be afraid of mixing it up this will only increase your understanding of how the fork feels [Music] that was actually so good way better but what we need to do is we need to uh let me ref back we need to get to a place where we find out what the limit is and then we back off half a turn that's not a dead end just because it got better what we're actually gonna do is we're gonna close off another two clicks and if that's worse then we can come back we've got goldilocks middle ground but what we don't want to do is just be like yeah that was good we need to get to a setting and take it to a point where it becomes worse and then bring it back that's the only way you can really establish you've got the right compromise in your settings so another run i know when i'm out riding i make mistakes all the time so your bike needs to be set up to cope with all of your riding warts and all not just your perfectly dialed lines so if you do make any mistakes on these ones don't worry about it because that's valuable information too so that was worse um so which is great because i found the limit what it felt like if i was to articulate what i felt like was going on was that you know these kind of little o-rings here these travel indicators are really really good for helping us you know see what's going on with our fork in a way that we that we couldn't you know we couldn't see max travel used in that instant we need something to refer back to because often if your rebound is too slow it can often mimic other issues for instance it might mean because your rebound's very slow you're never returning to full travel so your travel indicator is sitting right there and you'll be thinking i need to add more air pressure or a few clicks of compression but that's not necessarily true that's not what's happening the only way to find out for sure is to experiment like this and just do repeated runs and you're training your sights and once you do this on a couple of different bikes and a couple of different places you'll find yourself a waxing lyrical in a way you never could before because you actually have you know empirical evidence of the things you've experienced and you'll be able to quantify what these things mean which is vitally important so that was worse so i'm actually going to go back and open up one click to go to that goldilocks setting as discussed and we can see how that is so off we go [Music] oh that felt that felt mint nice to be fair which is great we're there hey rebound done next we're on to compression so now that we've got the rebound in a place where we really really want it and in fact i want to actually show you a very quick very quick magic tricks in regards to our rebound and i'm going to clap my hands and i'm suddenly gonna have a damper hey presto here it is so what i was talking about earlier on it's a really good way to illustrate it if we get lots of hit you know maybe for whatever reason you know riding rough trails getting hit and admittedly this is with my quite puny arms against you know 100 psi in a relatively small chamber but what it means is that you can never return to full travel so your bike could be working almost towards the end stroke almost all the time and would have almost nothing to do with your spring rate or your compression settings the problem is is that rebound circuits because they have to resist such a high spring rate like we discussed earlier on can sometimes be so powerful they provide a red herring and actually point the finger where the blame does not lie now you might have noticed with other manufacturers they do provide a set amount of clicks as a base setting for your compression adjustment now like i said in my experience the rockshox stuff i tend to run it more on the open side of things and then dial in as needed it's also worth noting that this damper i have in the fork doesn't have a high speed compression adjustment so what that means is we're just going to set the low speed and then that's largely you're done if you had a high speed compression adjustment such as this damper though you could after setting the low speed then go about setting the high speed and yet again you don't really need to understand about velocity and spring rate and force all you need to be able to do is quantify better or worse cut and shut but anyway that's me yammering on enough i said i can't you know you shouldn't articulate about suspension now i'm not shutting the hell up but we're gonna put dial in the compression adjustment two clicks and go and give it another one [Music] [Applause] now that felt pretty good i think it was better in its original setting though but because i went two clicks dialed in i can back it off one and we'll go up and we'll give another one simple as that that's all you need to do [Music] that was pretty good actually i reckon that's the one that's really really good now that is my suspension setup actually dare i say it myself to really suit my own needs as you can see i'm using almost kind of full travel at some parts so you could experiment with adding a bottom out token or bottomless token sorry what that would do is make it harder to reach those parts and it kind of really is that simple to be honest with you if you ever find yourself getting to a point where you need to climb down from perhaps you know go back to sag sag is king in that regard and you know you'll find from you know when you get a bit more experience like maybe 20 sag is a bit too firm for you maybe 25 more suits your writing style so it's you know it's trial and error to a degree but if you find what that sag range is for you then stick to it and also another really good tip once you have your pressure you can actually use a silver marker and on the inside of this cap here just make a note of it and then yet again if you ever want to go experimenting you have some settings to come back to i would also very much suggest writing them down somewhere because you will forget i don't care who you are you'll be adamant you won't but you will and then you'll be annoyed at yourself but that is it that is how to set up your mountain bike thank you very much for watching and i hope i've been able to shed some light and show you that it is actually quite an easy thing to do and doesn't have to be intimidating now thank you for watching please don't forget to like and subscribe and we'll see you next time cheers guys

Channel: GMBN Tech

Views: 398,177

Keywords: how to, suspension setup, suspension set up, suspension, forks, shock, sag, compression, rebound, rockshox, adjustments, set up, setup, how to set up rockshox, rock shox, gmbn tech, mtb tech, bike tech, mountain bike, Bicycle (Product Category), MTB, bicycle, gmbntech, GMBN, Global Mountain Bike Network, mountain biking, Downhill, XC, Cross Country, Enduro, MTB skills, bike skills, mountain bike skills, bike, bike riding, cycling, gmvn, Ҙ, 4100, ᐶ, scbpgmbn15, 1o, 1a, ኽ, 1w, Ꮖ, Ң, ፕ16, ҩ, ҧ, ҭ, ҽ

Id: 42qZnhQXN7k

Length: 25min 46sec (1546 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2020