Fork break-in observed

29/12/22 12:18 Filed in: Gear

If you read all these stories, then you know I recently got my long-awaited new Slash. I put a Shock-Whiz on the fork before taking her to Thredbo last week. Riding every day in the bike park is a good workout for any part, especially suspension. The Shock-Whiz began telling me I was running too much air pressure and too much compression damping - especially the non-adjustable high-speed compression setting. By the end of the week, without doing anything to the fork (except ride it) the Shock-Whiz was telling me that these things were right in the centre of the range.
The difference was the wearing in of the seals with use.
I would assume not only the fork bushings and dust seals, but also all the o-ring seals in the damping cartridge all loosened up slightly, making the fork's action smoother.
This suggests that setting up a fork shouldn't be "finalised" until it has had at least 20 hours of use. I don't know if the Zeb will continue to loosen up with further use, or if it has plateaued now.
The other thing I take away from this experiment is that I am close to what the Shock-Whiz tells me without its input. I've been adjusting suspension on vehicles (cars, motorbikes and bicycles) for a long time. I learned something it seems. The Shock-Whiz did get me to add one click of LSC before it was happy.

For anyone interested in the Shock-Whiz as a tool, I can recommend it. Even if just for observations of the suspensions activity during a ride. It notes all manner of good and bad shock behaviours during a ride (packing down in the travel, deep compression events, air time is logged, pogo behaviour, etc) which assist with dialing in the correct settings. The answers it provides are NOT definitive because there are so many end goals in the set-up matrix (soft to firm suspension feel and active to planted behaviour): perfection in one set-up window can be terrible in another one.
Lots of people borrow or hire a Shock-Whiz to do set-up on one bike, but I really think the value is longer term. It teaches riders the relationship between a click on a dial and the behaviour on the trails in subtle ways that are hard to feel.
I learned that the break-in process lasts longer than I had assumed.

Michael Hanslip Coaching

If you want to go faster, you have to pedal harder

Fork break-in observed