You want your bike’s suspension to be totally dialled for the best week of riding EVER! Our courses have a mix of flow and tech and having your suspension set up properly is going to make the techy bits so much smoother.
So we had Sean Estes from Fox come to give our 2025 racers the goods on what’s important when it comes to suspension. Check out this recording to get an expert’s take on the best options for BCBR when it comes to:
• Bike Selection
• Suspension Selection
• Suspension Setup
• Suspension Tuning
Download the Coles Notes of Sean’s presentation, including the bracketing video he mentions.
Check out the Shockwiz tool mentioned in the discussion.
BONUS: We’ve partnered with Fox to give you the chance to win a new fork of your choice. To enter, click here. Contest is open until June 12.
Below is an AI transcript of the call. Please excuse any errors.
hi everyone. Thank you for taking time in the middle of your day to come and chat with us. Our guest speaker today is Sean Estes from Fox and we’re gonna be talking suspension. And the best part about this is that Sean actually did BC Bike Race last year so he knows the terrain that we’ll be seeing in, what is it now?
I think we’re at about 46 or 47 days. And it’s going to be a great resource for us. So just a couple of quick other introductions. Dean’s on the call. I think everybody here knows Carmel and there’s one other person on the call that I wanted to just say hello to. We have Kathleen McKay on the call.
Kathleen is gonna be working with Kent Craig doing the race relations job ’cause I think most of you know that I am actually racing this year, so will not be doing race relations. Kathleen wanted to join the call and just start to get looped in. It’s great to have on the call and I think Ken’s joining a little bit later as well.
But Carmel, is there anything else or can we hand it over to Sean? Is there any other housekeeping stuff? Not that I can think of. If I come up with anything, we’ll tack it on to the end. Okay. And just a reminder to everyone, as Carmel said, to please mute yourself so we don’t get too much background noise.
Sean, over to you. Awesome. Thanks Moniera. Yeah. Hey everybody. Good to be here. Excited to talk about BCBR anytime I get to think about it. Just it’s such a core memory for me, so I get excited. So I apologize in advance if I’m a little giddy. It was just, I’ll just start by saying like it was, I’ve done a lot of bike races in my life, like hundreds and hundreds.
It was the best one. It was the most fun of all. Downieyville was always my favorite, and it always is in a certain way. But BCBR is like seven days of Downieville in a sense. And then it has so many other unique things to it that just all around you just can’t beat the experience. So everybody, if you’re on the call and you’ve never done it before, like everything you’re expecting, it’s gonna be all of that and more.
You’re just so stoked. That being said, too last year was my first and only time I’ve done it, and so going into it coming from California, which isn’t that far away, but it’s pretty different in terms of terrain. I had a lot of questions going into it and I, I’m pretty experienced bike race racer rider, industry person i’m super excited to share, just not only just like general bike setup and suspension setup stuff, but like some of the specific things I feel like I learned that, there’s probably a lot of anxiety and excitement leading into it and you want to, you got a lot invested and you wanna make sure that you show up and you feel ready.
So hopefully I can add some value to that for you today. And take a few things off your checklist that’ll, pop into your head at 2:00 AM and keep you awake at night over these next 40 odd days. Yeah, that being said, like the way I’m looking at this setup stuff is, I think there’s a couple little nuances depending if you’re coming into it like, as more of an XC type of a rider or a little bit more like a trail Enduro type of rider.
So as we go through each of the kind of categories of like suspension advice or recommendations like I. We will spend a little time talking about it from each of those perspectives. ’cause I do think the terrain is quite varied and depending on your background and depending on your goals for the event, you might have, I might have different suggestions for you.
I’ll pause really quickly there. I guess before we go into like specifics and just my understanding is this a a pretty interactive experience and you, we wanna make sure everyone gets the opportunity to get any questions that they do have answered. So briefly pause and if there’s any questions at this point, happy to take ’em now.
Otherwise we can just keep rolling and get to questions later and as we go. If Sean seems to be on a roll, feel free to put your questions in the chat and we’ll loop back to them. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah so that being said, kinda what I was alluding to a minute ago, if you do come from a little bit more of an XD background, and you’re pretty familiar and comfortable on a shorter travel bike, like the modern crop of XD bikes, for anyone who’s on the call who’s ridden them, like I say modern crop, I mean like the kind of one 20 mil travel roughly, slacker head tube angle, like borrowing more geometry from like the trail and all mountain side of things.
If you’ve ridden those bikes, they’re very capable. And if you’re familiar with riding one, then you know your comfort level goes up. So if you’re. If that’s who you are, then you’re gonna feel pretty darn good. Bringing that bike to BCBR and just making maybe a couple of changes depending on what the terrain is like where you live.
And speaking with the team, I understand the course this year isn’t gonna be exactly the same as what I did last year, but very similar, so should be able to speak to that pretty accurately. A couple, for example, a couple just kind of high level changes that I made to my bike going into last year, and I raced on an epic specialized Epic eight which, comes as a 1 20, 1 20 bike.
I put a. Since I have access to these things quite easily, working at Fox, I bump the fork travel up to one 30 just to give me that little more slack head angle, a little more bottom bracket clearance for pedaling through some of the jank. And just a little more travel, obviously to handle the steep and tough terrain that, some of the stages do have a fair amount of.
But that being said, had I stuck with a one 20 fork it would’ve been totally fine too. It’s if you don’t have the easy access to do that and you’re on 1 20, 1 20, I think you’ll be totally fine. And if you’re coming from a little bit more of a trail kind of Enduro style approach like I mentioned earlier, you might feel a little bit more comfortable on like a 1 30, 1 40 type of, travel a little bit more travel might just be more, might play more well to your familiarities, but.
Again realizing that a lot of people, it’s like you might only have one mountain bike. And again, if your goal is I’m trying to finish in the top, 20 in my age group or the top 50, 60, 75 overall, then you know, you’re probably gonna come at it from a different perspective versus like someone who’s I really just am here to have a great time and I want to complete every stage and I don’t want to walk anything, right?
My goals are different. So by all means, if anyone has specific questions that kind of like pertain to like your specific goals, more than happy to talk about those things. Yeah, so that kind of covers like bike selection. I feel like. It’s kinda like cameras, like the best camera is the one you have, the best bike is the one you have.
But if you’re an optimizer and a puzzler and you really want to make some changes or even possibly get a different bike for this just putting out there in terms of optimization, what your options are then as far as what suspension you might wanna put on that bike, if or how you might wanna set your suspension up.
We’ll break, break those things down. So again, like if you’re coming from like that XC adjacent mentality or even down country mentality equipment wise, I would suggest like our Fox 34 SL Fork or our 34 SC Fork, something like that. I think the 34 SL is our brand new one that arguably is a little better because it does have the ability to go up to one 30 where the 34 step cast maxed out at one 20.
Either of those will work great. Again, it’s kinda if you’re that early adopter and you wanna have the latest and greatest and you’re putting everything into this event and you might want to consider buying some new equipment, I’d go for that 34 sl. Otherwise, if you’ve already got something in that one 20 range.
Run what you brung? In terms of the shock I would say like our float SL shock is pretty much perfect. There’s only a couple stages that have extended periods of rough descending where like a reservoir shock would be a big benefit in terms of like oil cooling and stuff like that.
Ultimately though, overall an inline shock is probably the overall best choice. Again, if you’re concerned at all with like time it’s gonna be lighter, it’s gonna have a little bit better pedaling platform, it’s probably gonna have a switch, to, to lock it out or firm it up very easily on the fly for those longer climbing sections.
Or even in some cases there’s some pavement like traversing sectors where you’ve gotta connect, connect one trail to another trail on some tarmac. So yeah, like an inline shock is probably overall the best bet. But again, if you’re like either a heavier rider or a super aggressive rider or you just, again, you really are there to optimize the downhills and just have, smiles per hour instead of miles per hour. Then I would say yeah, resi shock. If that’s e either if you already have that or if that’s what you want, go for that. It again, really comes down to what your specific goals are. One thing I think every rider, regardless of where you’re coming from, is gonna benefit from, is having a dropper post with at least like 150 mils of travel.
Of course, that’s gonna be dependent on how tall you are. If you’re like a really not that tall rider, like you might only be able to get a hundred mils and that you’re probably used to that because as a percentage of your height, that’s probably enough. But just speaking in really broad strokes, like I’m five 10 and I think I ran a 1 75 dropper.
And that was plenty. It was fine. But that’s just one area where no matter what kind of bike you’re on, you’re not gonna wanna skimp because the dropper post is just such a wonderful bit of technology to, up your capability and confidence on some of these. Steeper sections.
And all that being said, I didn’t know what to expect going into last year in terms of I’d heard, some people talking about certain sections of certain stages and hyping themselves up and being ready for it. I never found anything to be like terrifying. There was a, there was some stuff where you’re like, oh, that’s a steep little shoot or whatever.
But I think most of us who, who are coming to a race like this have probably a fair amount of experience with the kind of, the terrain you’re gonna run into. I would say if you’re super worried about terrain, try not to worry about that too much. You’ll find that, worst case you might hop off and run down a section here or there, but for the most part, you’re gonna keep your feet on the pedals and feel just fine doing it.
But that dropper post is gonna give you a lot of confidence. So we covered bike selection and then suspension equipment selection, which kind of then leads into like suspension setup. But again I’ll pause for a minute. I know I can have a tendency to just start going off into the weeds.
So any thoughts, questions, concerns, or even if they’re not directly related, if there’s even just questions for just one race or to another, having that I, I did it last year fire away. Anything anybody’s got don’t hesitate
or crickets either way. Sometimes it just, people need time to think. Totally fine. Totally fine. I just wanna make sure that at least I’m creating some opportunity and not just ripping through everything. But sometimes no questions is good. ’cause maybe it means that we’re covering the bases. So yeah, from bike selection to suspension equipment selection to then suspension setup, which I think is maybe where.
And then we’ll go into suspension tuning. So I think maybe as we get into those, it’ll be like, that’s where like more opportunities for optimization for individuals might come into play and maybe some more questions will come up. So in terms of setup, again, looking at it from two perspectives.
If you’re an XE adjacent type of rider, you probably probably using like a grip SL type of damper, which has a, three position. Very easy thing. If you have a three position type of suspension, whether it’s rock shocks or whether it’s Fox or whatever it is. I think those are great.
They work really well. ’cause you can put it in the middle mode specialized calls that the magic middle on purpose. ’cause it’s like a, it’s a great setting that you can you’ve got enough of a platform to give you efficient pedaling. But in the events like descending and stuff it’s maybe not quite as optimized as opening it up.
But if you just wanna set it and forget it, it’s a really nice way to keep your head just focused on pedaling, keeping the pedals turning and holding that wheel in front of you. So that’s the middle mode on any of the kind of XC focused suspension stuff, I find to be a really, especially if you don’t have a remote lever, just put it in the middle and run it.
Do your best to try to remember to unlock it for a technical descent. But if you forget to, it’s fine. I actually seldom recommend using the lockout. Because you’ll forget it that you’ve done it you’re on the pavement and you forget you’ve done it, and then you go into a Rudy section or something and then you wish that it was unlocked and you’re trying to unlock it and then you crash.
So I recommend just put it in the middle and leave it there. If you remember to open it occasionally. Great. If not, also great. I do see a question in there. Transition spur option of either c, luck or ultimate dvo Topaz. If you’re more of an XE rider, I’d go for the Sid. If you just want the confidence and peace of mind to know that any obstacle you come into, you’re just gonna feel really ready for it.
You might want to go for the DVO, Jonathan. But I, my preference would be, I’d probably go for the lighter set up. The Spurs a really capable, really stout frame probably doesn’t need as much shock because it’s got good geo and it’s got good kinematics and it’s nice and stiff. So I think it’d be just fine with that that SL unless you really, just, like I said, if you prioritize speed, go CL if you prioritize just smiles per hour if that sort of joke is coming through and translating then maybe go with the DVO.
But my inclination would be towards the Sid. Yeah. And then I. Again, similar to that, like what we were just saying, like back to the suspension setup. If you’re a little bit more of an aggressive rider, very similar to the question that Jonathan just asked you might want a different damper, like a grip X or even a grip X two.
Again, I think yeah, someone Amy in there noted like it’s really simple. It’s are you about miles per hour or miles per hour? If you’re miles per hour go the more XC style, if you’re miles per hour, go a little more trail style. Hopefully that kind of helps to draw a little high level distinction.
And let’s see. I already set up hardly ever max out travel in my fork when I ride. Yeah. Yep. Yep. So that’s a great question that we get all the time. And an analogy I like to make is save a little travel for a rainy day. Sometimes you overshoot something, especially racing blind, like you’re gonna be doing A-B-C-B-R.
Think of that extra 10 or 15 mils of travel that you seldom get out of the fork as insurance for that. Oh shit moment where you come into something and all of a sudden there’s a huge, shoot into a G out and you weren’t expecting it. If you’re using full travel outta your fork all the time, in that scenario, you’re gonna bottom out hard and probably go over the bars.
But if you have that little bit of extra travel in the bank, then it could save you and on that rainy day, so to speak. That being said, a lot of writers really do just psychologically want to get as close to full travel as they can. So if that’s what you’re looking for, then what I recommend is, yes, let a little bit of pressure out, but possibly add what’s called a volume spacer.
Chad, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that or if others are familiar with that, but, a volume spacer is a in rock shocks vernacular, it’s called a token, but it’s something you add into the air springing that reduces the volume of the air springing chamber. And when you reduce the volume of the air springing chamber, what happens is.
Because of the physics of how compressing air works, you get more progression in the end stroke. So it allows you to have the fork be a little softer through the initial and middle stroke, but still resist bottoming out on those very hard impacts. So take a few PSI out, maybe five out of volume spacer, and that might solve your problem, Chad, of getting full travel more often.
But I still recommend airing on the side of having a little bit extra in the bank for emergencies. And one little extra bit of advice I can add to that is I see you say you have a 34 sc. So the 34 SC is very optimized for weight, so we didn’t put bleeders on it. Or pressure relief valves and what can happen, especially if you’re flying to the race and you’re traveling with your bike.
Where your bike’s gonna be changing altitude a bunch of times, getting to and from home to the event. A little pro tip is if you have a fork that doesn’t have bleeders, is carry around a really small zip tie, like just the little, plastic cable tie, carry one of those around in your fanny pack or in your SWAT storage or just in your pocket, whatever.
And you can use those. And I recommend doing this every day at BCBR. You take that and you slide it in between the dust wiper on the fork between the lower leg and the stanchion tube. So you pull the edge of the, with your fingernail peel back the edge of the dust wiper slide, the zip tie in there.
And what you’re doing is creating a passageway for air to escape because air builds up in the lower leg of the fork and as that air builds up, the pressure builds up and it creates an unintended secondary air springing effect. And a lot of times this thing that Chad’s talking about where you just can’t get that last bit of travel, it’s because you’ve got your regular air springing in the fork that’s meant to be doing what it’s doing and being a spring.
But then you have this secondary unintended air spring that’s captured in the lower leg in this. Empty space that’s really needs to be there for the fork to compress into. But other than that, it ideally would be equalized to, to the atmosphere. So it doesn’t build up pressure, but when it does build up pressure, the way you can relieve it is by sliding that zip tie in there and it will blow your mind how much more supple and silky or fork will feel if you do this every day before every stage, or at the end of every stage.
You take your bike over and I don’t know if, do you guys have muck off again doing all the, bike washes and all that. So yeah, after you’re done with your stage, highly recommend. Go straight over to the bike wash. They’ll wash your bike for you for free. Soon as they’re done, they give it back to you.
Go do that. They’ve got chain lube there. Put some fresh lube on. Get ready for the next day and get all that out of the way while you’re still relatively have some energy in you before you go and start resting and eating and everything. Just get that done. But make that zip tie trick part of your every stage routine.
And then take that home with you and use that every time you ride as well. Because you’ll find, you’ll be surprised when you put it in there, you’ll hear the air escape. And you’re like, wow, that’s, and then you feel the fork and so much more supple. So Chad’s asking another question about spacers.
Yes. All the forks come with what we perceive to be the optimum sort of baseline setting of volume spacers pre-installed. I think a 34 sc, if it’s at, if it’s at 120 mils, I think it has maybe three spacers pre-installed, but if you read the manual, it’ll tell you could go up to, maybe it’s five or six or seven, I forget.
The every fork manual, which we have all on our website, and every other manufacturer will have that on their website as well, will tell you the maximum number of volume spacers you can have. And if you buy a fork from us aftermarket or the other guys, it’ll come with a bag with some extra spacers.
And generally, if you buy the bike complete, it’ll also come with, when you buy it at the shop or it comes in the mail or whatever, it’ll have a little, in your little box of extras, you’ll have some additional volume spacers. They look like little injection molded plastic. They’re usually bright colored, like little kind of round, about a centimeter or two tall, depending on the size.
But anyway, volume spacers are pretty familiar. Probably for most of the folks, but yeah they’re an excellent tool to play with that. We’ll get into a little bit more as we move into to tuning our kind of fourth bucket, but yeah. Pause there. Do I recommend moving the stanchions?
Yes and no. Your fork has bath oil inside the lower leg in that same area where that air that I was talking about gets trapped, right? There’s oil in there, it’s bath oil, just, a couple ccs of a certain weight of oil that’s going to lubricate everything. A trick that’s helpful if you store your bike at night, if you have somewhere secure to do put it upside down, flip it up on the seat in the handlebars, because then all that bath oil is gonna drain down and sit on top of the dust wiper in the foam ring.
’cause underneath the dust wiper, there’s a foam. Ring that’s like a sponge, right? And it’ll hold that oil. So if you keep the bike upside down, all that oil is just gonna soak everything overnight. And then it’ll be smoother. If you do put a couple drops of lube on your stanchions, cycle the fork a few times, and then wipe off the excess.
’cause you really, it just attracts dirt. The reason for the dust wiper, which is like a scraper seal, is we want to keep the bath oil below that where it’s captured inside the fork leg, and free from the outside elements on the upper stanchion that’s exposed. We want to keep that pretty dry because we don’t want dirt sticking to it.
And then that dirt’s gonna go through the seal. And every time the fork compresses, it’s gonna be like sandpaper on the seal. So if you do lube it, it’s yeah, you want to almost peel back the edge of the wiper, put a little drop. Cycle it a few times. Wipe it very clean ’cause you don’t want any excess oil.
Attracting dirt. Relative novice rider, mostly steeper stuff. North shore, you’ll be very comfortable here if you’re comfortable riding the shore. 36 1 60 DPX two. If you wanna complete the race over biked, you’re over biked, but not a lot, Sean. Like for what you’re going for. It sounds like you’re like a smiles per hour guy.
You’ll be stoked. I would just add some compression damping probably. That what damper is in your 36 fork, if and while you’re. Working on that the DPX two has a little blue compression dial. I would just run the compression in the middle probably to give you a little bit more platform you might run either a couple more PSI of air pressure or add another volume spacer or possibly both, again, to make the suspension stay a little higher in the travel if you’re over biking.
That’s a good way to increase the efficiency of your bike without making any drastic expensive, like part changes, just simply chalk pump up five PSI front and rear. That’ll give you a little so there’s something called sag, right? I think most people are probably familiar with setting sag and that’s the first thing that, that you want to do. And this kind of is a great segue into my fourth category of the tuning, right? So start by setting sag. And this is assuming you, generally speaking, assuming you’re running air suspension front and rear, you can set SAG with coil springing too.
But I doubt most people are gonna bring a coil to BCBR. So SAG is SAG is the amount of compression that the suspension is gonna have just with your body weight on the bike. So generally recommended for like efficiency, something in the 25% range pedaling efficiency for maximum descending performance.
Something in the 30 to 33% range is a little better for like ultimate suppleness. So directly to Sean’s question there aim for 25% sag. If you’re getting, if you are, especially if you’re over biking and you wanna make sure you can get a little more efficiency out of it, but you’re still, still gonna get that, you’re probably gonna still use full travel on big hits, but that’ll help you get a little more efficiency.
And then add a couple clicks of low speed compression damping. If you have a fork or shock that separates low and high speed, it’s a really nice feature to have because you can increase the low speed compression a lot. And what that’s gonna do is, again, give you pedaling platform, but then your high speed is separate.
So it’s not gonna make the suspension too stiff for those technical downhill sections where you’re going fast. So you get to separate those two things and have your cake and eat it too. And just to clarify, a lot of times I think we talk about high speed and low speed, and people aren’t sure what we mean.
High speed doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going fast. But if you’re riding 10 miles an hour on the street and you rode straight into a curb perpendicular, that’s actually a high speed event because the shape of the curb is so abrupt. Being perpendicular to your travel and you’re not, say you’re not even preparing for it at all, you’re just riding straight into it, it’s gonna spike the suspension and cause it to move quite abruptly in that little moment.
So high speed just means like the rate at which the actual shock is moving. And you could be going relatively slow. Say you wheelie dropped off of a, a rock face or a ladder bridge and you’re only going five miles an hour when you wheel drop. But then that landing is just direct with a lot of force because the landing’s flat, that’s gonna be high speed.
So low speed is I’m pedaling and my body is bobbing on the suspension and giving it like a low speed input versus if I push really hard with my hands, that’s a high speed input. So hopefully that kind of clarifies. Yeah. Thanks Sean. Can you hear me? Yeah, sorry to interrupt. Yeah. I’m probably gonna have to go back to the transcript on all of those different concepts that you sure.
Mentioned there, which I’m happy to do. But I guess what I wanted to know, is there any value in changing out the fork or the shock on this bike, or Yeah. Am I really gonna, make enough weight savings to, to have that be something worthwhile? I don’t think so. Like Sean, I would say, like, how are you a competitive guy?
Is it gonna be a bummer for you if you’re not in the top, 20% of your age group or what’s your goal? The big, so for me, sorry, I don’t wanna hijack the whole call, but for me, I definitely, I’m sure there’s a lot of people listening who are asking the same questions, so you’re good, man.
That’s why we’re here. Yeah. I for me, I definitely want to complete it, like you mentioned. I definitely wanna have a smile on my face, but I am like competitive, which I think most of us will wanna race as and get the best po kind of time we can get. And I have time to optimize it, so I, it’s just been playing on my mind.
Yeah. Yeah. I’d say there’s so many variables that come into play. Like I mentioned earlier, I wanna be cognizant of the fact that I work in the industry and I work for Fox. So like for me, making some changes was really easy, right? Like the race shop is downstairs and we’ve got product, and I can go and do all this stuff, it’s six, it can be a cost prohibitive.
You’re already spending like a ton on, all the other, all in. It’s not a, it’s not an inexpensive endeavor. Worth every penny, but it’s a lot. Yeah. So you’ve got access to a couple things and say, so say you got a 36, 1 60 say, it’s like a rhythm series, which is a pretty heavy fork.
If you could borrow a 36 factory series with a, with a grip X damper, like a brand new 36 that just came out, that’s going to drop some weight, it’s gonna improve stiffness, it’s gonna be a smoother, better performing fork. By all means, that’ll give you a little bit of an advantage. But, would I say go spend 1100 US or 1200 US on that just for this for a marginal gains.
Probably not, depends on each individual person’s goals and then their sort of access to equipment, whether it’s monetarily or whether it’s through friends or whatever. But bottom line I think is if you add a couple PSI to your stuff and also another area where you can make a pretty noticeable change is tires.
Rolling resistance on tires is pretty huge and that’s not a huge cost and you’re probably gonna want some tires anyway ’cause they’re consumable. I loved the Maxis forecasters we’re a great tire for BCBR. They’re like a, they’re the most aggressive kind of XC tire that Maxis makes.
But there’s like with an XO casing, they’re pretty darn durable. They’ve got a pretty good bite to ’em. If you’re coming off of minions or acid guys, they’re not gonna feel too sketchy. So that’s a good tip for everyone is tires is a great place to optimize and if you’re an XC or XE racer you’re gonna be pretty comfortable on sketchy tires, so you’ll probably know what to do.
But if you’re a trail rider looking to shed a bit of weight, rotational weight and tires are fantastic for that because it’s the outer diameter of the rotational weight where it matters the most. And then of course the tread compound, a harder compound’s gonna roll faster. So going from a.
A downhill or a double down minion or something, or an NASA guy going to a exo forecaster front and rear is gonna be a pretty tremendous improvement. That’s very cost effective. Yeah, that’s a great, I was looking at recons, but maybe I’ll recons are great too. Just a little less traction, but also a little lighter.
Okay. So you can do a recon in the rear and a forecaster up front, or a recon in the front and a recon race in the rear kind of graduated, depending how sketchy you want to get. But I would just do, if you’re coming from like a one 60 with big tires and you’re riding the shore and stuff like that, like I would just do forecasters front and rear XO or XO plus.
Good. Yeah and call it good. Obviously inserts never hurt. A lightweight insert in the rear is a nice thing for peace of mind. I probably wouldn’t bother with one in the front. And I’ll just throw a quick plug in. No pun intended. Plugs. I’m a big fan of Dyna Plug. Those things can be such a lifesaver.
They make that mega plug. It’s like a larger diameter one. Yeah, I got one of those. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely the Racer tool that has a, the mega on one side and the regular on the other. That and some spare plugs. ’cause sometimes you need to put two or three in there. That can be such a lifesaver in an event like this.
’cause, one bad stage can ruin your overall, but it, if you have a flat and you have all the stuff you need to fix it in a matter of a minute or two, then it’s a drop in the bucket over seven days. So have a good plug. Dyna plug makes one called the Air Tool that is my absolute favorite.
I think it’s the most innovative thing in the world. You get a puncture, you jam the tool through to plug it, and then you actually crack the CO2 and it fills the tire through the hole. And then when you close the CO2 and pull it out, the plug stays behind and you’re back rolling. I fixed a flat in 30 seconds before with this thing.
It’s absolutely something I would. Put in my kit, I actually have a attachment to put it on the seat post. So it’s like right there front of mind. It gives me such good peace of mind going at every stage, knowing that if I get a flat, I can probably be back rolling in one minute or less. So tires, tire plugs huge hack for everybody.
Thank you. That’s great. Yeah. Thank you so much. Hi. Hire a pit crew, Craig. Yeah, it’s not a bad idea. Not a bad idea. We have chase has raised his hand. Chase, chase, fire away. Sorry, I don’t wanna to preempt anyone that’s in the chat. I thanks for doing this, Sean. So I’m on a, on 130 mil factory with a grip two.
So it’s a couple year old dmic system. Yeah. But you were alluding, I think to where I was, had a few questions on the tuning side, which is, what would you do? High speed, low sea, both damping and rebound just based on, terrain. It sounds like increase a little bit on the low speed and I’m just curious, high speed and rebound, like for terrain and some of the chatter.
Yeah. But also the bigger hits. What do you think. Rebound, I would say the recommended settings on the sticker on all your, whatever fork you have. We go to a lot of work to get those pretty dialed and once I, I feel like the rebound, like you can just go off the chart and you’re pretty in a pretty good spot, but compression is a little, a little bit of a different beast and definitely cranking up the low speed is a good way to get a little more pedaling efficiency without really impacting your technical abilities and your confidence going down.
All the rough stuff and the harder stuff on grip two, the more high speed you start adding, you will get some harshness versus say like Grip X two, our new damper that where we really had some big breakthroughs in like separating support from harshness. An upgrade that would be pretty cost effective would be and there’s time to do it is to do a grip X two or a grip X damper upgrade in your fork, in your current fork chassis.
’cause we have those available. And I wanna say it’s like in the. $200 US roughly price range. You can send it into Fox and we can do it in our service centers. Most, any good shop that carries Fox stuff can do it in-house as well in a matter of a couple of days. But a damper upgrade would be really nice ’cause our new stuff is pretty incredible in terms of letting you have your cake and eat it too, not just separating high and low, but really this big breakthrough.
And like I said, like adding compression damping adds support but does not increase harshness. So like you get the best of both worlds out of it. But group two won a bunch of awards. It was a fantastic damper until we had this breakthrough, we didn’t know what we were missing and it’s pretty incredible and you’ve already got it.
So you could totally be great with that too. And just add a couple clicks of low speed. Probably keep the high speed pretty open still ’cause I feel like on that damper better to air towards less harshness, frankly. Then maybe just a quick follow up. I’m on an element and so 120 mil, like DPS, so again, a couple years old, but I typically run it fully open.
And I’m hearing you suggest maybe like the mid setting for the three pause. What do you think there? I would, I’d probably, you’ve got some time between now and then. I’d go out and do some rides and leave it in the middle and see how much you really notice it. It’ll a lot like increasing the low speed on the front.
You’ll notice a little more harshness like on roots and bumps and stuff when you’re climbing. Like the tire won’t be as stuck to the ground. The rear tire won’t be as stuck to the ground. But every time you go to put power into the pedals, you’re gonna get a little more of that power transferred into forward propulsion.
So it’s a bit of a trade off, but since you have some time, I would, we always recommend something called bracketing. And I’m gonna drop a little document when we’re done that kind of recaps the like kind of Cliffs notes or Kohl’s notes for all you Canadians version of this and has a link to a YouTube video that we did with majority on bracketing a couple years ago.
But bracketing is a really simple process that you can apply to anything where you do back to back testing of two different things. So if you’ve got like a loop near your house that you know, that you write all the time straw it and run it in the middle setting try, a loop that’s got some climbing, some descending, like a little bit of a mix of things.
It should be ideally like five minutes or more, so that it’s, the longer it is the more you can weed out signal to noise in your data and run it in open as a full lap, and then run it in middle and see which one’s faster. But I think you, and then compare how it feels too. ’cause I think feel.
Feel is one thing, and then data is another thing. And then balance those two in your own mind as you make your decision for which you prefer for race day. Appreciate that. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s see. Any other, nothing else in the chat yet, so that’s good. If there aren’t any more questions, I’ll jump back into the general settings.
So yeah, start with sag like we talked about earlier, like 25% on the like firm side, 30 to 33 on the more supple side. Something like that. And then once you’ve set sag, like that’s setting your air springing pressure, talked about it a bit earlier, then it becomes a question of air springing volume.
So if you’ve got your SAG set where you want it, but you’re still finding that you bought ’em out sometimes then you want to add, you want to make note of what air pressure you had in your fork or shock, but then you want to add volume spacers. So that’s like volume spacers, like I alluded to earlier.
They let you adjust the air volume, which air volume combined with air pressure is how you balance having the right sag, but also having, which is initial stroke, but also having the right end stroke. So we’ve, some of us have probably experienced this before where like your bike feels pretty good all around but then it bottoms out.
So then you add pressure to, to reduce that, get rid of that bottom out, but then it doesn’t feel great just when you’re pedaling around. So that’s like the trade off. The way you manage that is by adjusting the volume. So you start with sag, get that kind of where you want it, and then if that’s not giving you what you need in terms of end stroke or mid stroke, then you add volume spacers.
But really important thing here, and I just use my phone for this these days ’cause we all have ’em in our pockets, but open up your notes and your phone and create. A little notebook essentially of your settings. So what is my fork pressure? What is my shock pressure? What are my clickers set to as your baseline?
And go ahead and note what you currently have, right? Like first thing to do is you’re auditing this is my current setup. Put a shock pump on it. What does it say for your fork? What does it say for your shock? And bearing in mind when you screw a shock pump onto your shrader valve, you’re gonna lose a couple of PSI.
So if you put it on your fork and it says 85, probably safe to say you had 88 to 90 in there before you put the pump on it so that it gets a little tricky. That’s just a little asterisk to keep in mind when you take a shock pump off. You don’t really lose pressure. It’s really only when you put it on, because when you put it on air is escaping and filling the tube all the way back to the gauge.
But when you take it off, the minute you thread it off, the shrader valve is spring loaded and closing. And so that air that was already in the tube is just escaping out into the atmosphere, not the other way around. Just a little fine tuning thing because a couple of PSI actually does make a difference.
But to get back to the point of it, it’s like baseline your settings, find out what you’ve got, right? What is my pressure, what are my clicker settings? And a note on clicker settings. We always recommend when we say five clicks, that’s starting from closed. And the reason for that is rather than starting from open, the reason for that is because mechanically inside of the suspension, like the components, it’s like a, it’s like a fancy watch.
It’s very precise and. Closed is closed, meaning there’s an actual valve, like a spigot for your faucet or whatever, right? It, when it’s closed, it is closed. So the minute you open it, one click, it’s now open a consistent repeatable amount. Whereas open is open varies from one due to manufacturing tolerances and assembly tolerances.
Open is different on each one by a little bit. So for consistency’s sake, which is the goal, you start from closed and you count clicks. Fully closed itself, like with the knob is like stiff, doesn’t count. You back it off until you feel a click like a DT 10. That’s your first one, right? So that other one that’s zero if you will, doesn’t really count.
And I know this is getting into the weeds, but these are the rare opportunities we get to talk about this stuff that I know is the kind of stuff that. We get told over and over again on social media and other places, like this is the stuff that confuses people. So thinking we’ve got everyone here, we’ve got the time.
Could be helpful. So from closed, mark your settings, get your baseline written down, and that way every time you’re fiddling with stuff, if you get way off track and you’re like, man, my bike feels like garbage. You can always go back to what you had and start over again. But going back to what I was alluding to with bracketing, the idea there is you get your baseline and generally speaking, the sticker that we put on the fork on the back of all of our forks is a sticker that has recommendations for baseline settings based on your weight for the air pressure and all the clickers.
So set up there. Start there. Then bracketing is this process where you change one thing at a time and you keep track of it. So if you’ve got all your baseline settings right, you go do this little test loop like I was describing to Chase. It’s like your five to 10 minute loop that you have near nearby, that’s, that you’re familiar with.
And then you take one setting like compression, high speed compression, and you adjust it two clicks, and then you do another loop and you go, did that feel better? Did that feel worse? And if you’re not sure. Go back to your baseline and then go two clicks the other direction, repeat it, and then that should give you like a feeling of, okay, no, that did feel better.
Oh no, that did feel worse, right? And the reason we say two clicks is because one click is such a small increment that you’re probably not gonna feel it, but two clicks you should be able to feel. So two clicks, either direction, and then that should give you, okay, yeah, less compression is generally feeling better.
So let’s try four clicks now. And you go no, that’s too much. Let’s go back to two. And then once you’ve got that high speed compression where you want it, then you would do high speed rebound or something, right? But you’d pick one at a time and you do each thing in that way. And you can apply this to tire pressure.
You can apply it to the reach on your brake levers or the contact point on your brake levers. If your brakes have that adjustment you can apply it to all your different clickers. You can apply it to air pressure in your suspension. It’s a pretty cool tool. It’s time consuming, but it’s very scientific and very repeatable and if you take the time to do it, you’ll end up with a setup that works really well.
Like I said, I’ve got a video that we can share that really breaks it down in great detail. I find bracketing to be super helpful. And of course the key is you gotta write it down ’cause otherwise you will forget. Any questions on bracketing? We did have one question in the chat. Jonathan was asking, did you say that the first actual click is fully closed or did I get that wrong?
Yes, I think so. Jonathan, so fully closed is where you always wanna count from, but what I was trying to get at, and I’m trying to think if I actually have so if I have a shock right here and it’s got this is a compression dial, I’ll turn it all the way firm. It actually already was all the way firm.
And at that final setting, it may not actually be in a detent, it might just be like mechanically shut because it’s like a screw. So you want to go to all the way closed, then back it off until you feel a click, and that first click that you feel is your first click. But the fully closed setting is not actually, you’ve gone past that click.
If that makes sense. Again, like the mechanics of how these things work inside, introduce some sort of challenges to in a perfect world, it would just turn all the way righty. Tidy and that would be the end, right? But because of the mechanics of it, you’re actually overclocked a little bit at that point.
So all the way tight and then back it off until you feel a click and that’s your first click. Hopefully that helps. Okay. And there’s one more question in there is all of the close to the minus or slow. Okay. So that’s gonna depend on the manufacturer and on the actual clicker, whether it’s rebound or compression.
But I think if I’m hearing right Craig, the question that you’re asking is when we get a lot, which is like in the case of rebound especially is plus making the rebound faster AKA plus in that sense? Or is it adding rebound damping plus and making it slower? And for fox suspension, the answer is the ladder.
So if you’re adding rebound compression rebound damping, excuse me, plus then you’re slowing it down. So the more rebound damping you’re adding, the slower the rebound stroke will be. If that’s the question.
And Craig, feel free to unmute yourself if you wanna clarify. Yeah. Sorry guys. I’m just like traveling on a train just now, so it might cut out. No worries. But yeah, it was basically, it was just to understand, so all the way to positive is that slow. So the faster the rebound back to closed is that you’re saying in the case of rebound, fully closed is gonna be the slowest so that’s as if it is, yeah. Generally speaking, one or two clicks. Yeah. Generally speaking, like we refer to, the, like rebounding, compression as circuits, and really they are circuits. And what that means is oil. The way almost all suspension works right, is oil is flowing through a circuit or through a valve.
And we’re controlling that oil flow to control the damping. And the smaller the flow, the smaller the hole, the slower the oil is gonna flow through it. So the slower it’s gonna compress or rebound. So when you’re adding damping, whether it’s compression or rebound adding meaning righty tidy you’re turning clockwise you are slowing it down, whether it’s compression or rebound.
When you’re turning left and loosening it, you’re opening the port and allowing more oil to flow through and allowing it to move more quickly.
Does that help? That makes sense. Factual. Yeah, it’s good for sure. Nice train ride by the way. Looks pretty out there in the countryside. Yeah, it’s not bad. Scottish Highlands, good visit. Oh yeah, a lot. You guys have been getting a lot of sun over there these last weeks, huh? Yeah, it’s brilliant. Lovely.
It’s almost like BC looks like California or bc. Yeah. Very nice. Dean, I see a hand up. Oh, you’re at you’re muted. Oh, yeah, you’re on mute. Dean.
I don’t know if, I don’t think I can unmute you, but maybe, no, I’m trying. Okay. There we go. Okay. Carmel and Minera like to mute me wherever they can at meetings. So they’ve heard enough from you, Dean. Yeah. So just a question about compression. What are your thoughts? If I get the air right, I’ve been running like no compression.
A little bit of rebound. Okay. It just, it feels more active. Yeah. Is that something that, is that a setup that you would recommend for people? Or is it thoughts, you wanna keep the tires glued to the ground and you want your suspension to rebound relatively quickly so that it’s ready for the next thing, right?
If it’s too slow, it’ll pack up. You go down three bumps in a row and each time your fork is shrinking because it can’t rebound fast enough, then you’re packing up and you’re getting harshness and that’s not good. But if your rebounds too fast, then it feels like you’re riding a bucking bronco and it could send you over the bars.
Generally speaking, rule of thumb for me I find my friends who are like pros, they run their rear rebound pretty fast. ’cause they know exactly where to put their weight and weight the bike and use the body as damping. I am expert. I’m not pro, so I’m not that good. So I run my fork pretty fast.
If I push it down in the parking lot, just push down and release the hands. I want it to come back pretty darn quick. Not so fast that it like tops out, but I want it to come back pretty snappy. Whereas the rear, I want a little more damping in the rear on the rebound. So I want if I compress the seat and let go of it, I want it to come up a little slower because I don’t want to get bucked over the bars, so a little faster rebound on the fork and a little slower rebound on the shock is a pretty safe place to, to start.
But you’re always trying to find that sweet spot of as much rebound as your riding style and ability can take, because then you’re more ready for the next thing. Okay, so but that’s rebound compression. Yeah. Compression is tricky because like I mentioned earlier to, I believe I was talking with Chase about this, like technology has changed a lot in the last few years.
So if you’re on like the newer Fox Grip stuff, like grip sl, grip X and Grip X two. They have a really high level ability of adding compression without adding harshness. But if you’re on like the older stuff or some of the other competitor product, generally speaking, the old paradigm was as you add compression damping, you are adding some harshness.
So you always, you’re it’s always a trade off where you’re like I want the support for pedaling efficiency, but I add too much support and then it feels harsh in the descending sections and I lose confidence and I lose traction. So you gotta put it in the middle, but if the new stuff, you can have your cake and eat it too.
Like I said earlier, if you’re, if you have the means, I would recommend one of the most cost effective things you could do before the race is get a damper upgrade if you have the means. But depending on what you have, it’s, I’d give you a different answer depending on what your stuff is.
Yeah. I have a brand new like it’s. My Fox the new Fox 38, but again, okay. Just so probably has Grip X two. Yep. Yeah. Then you’re in a good spot, man. I would run a lot of compression. It’s hard to tell, but you look like a pretty tall guy. I’m a dwarf. I’m five nine and a half.
Oh we’re this, I’m five, nine and three quarter, so I got you by this much bud. Yeah. But the internet data, I rounded it up to five 10. It was really worked for me. But anyway, you’re done. It’s personal, yeah. But I just Joe Murray, I was on a trip with him and he said, let the compression flow add 30% rebound.
And I is it a personal thing, like for you, how much percentage, like if it’s three clicks out of 10, like how much percentage rebound in compression are you generally running? Again, you’re talking three clicks from closed. Yeah. Okay, open. Sorry, open I go the other. Yeah. See, I would never count clicks from open just ’cause open’s.
Inconsistent, closed is very consistent. Okay, so seven clicks in that case, if it was 10 or whatever, right? Yeah. Again, with the new X, with the grip X two man, you can run that compression all the way closed and it’s still not gonna feel harsh, but the fork’s gonna sit up taller and it’s gonna preserve geometry better.
So I feel like that damper’s kinda the holy grail right now and it lets you have your cake and eat it too. So since you have that use, the compression, what your buddy was talking about to me more applies to like grip two or like some of the older charger dampers that was 5, 6, 6, 7 years ago.
Yeah. You run into a problem where you started adding too much compression and now you’re lose, you’re gaining too much harshness and you’re losing a tire grip to the ground. And your hands feel that. Yeah. So just what I’m hearing too, from this conversation, try things. Try things. Yeah.
And another, another kind of cost effective upgrade for BCBR. It’s not exactly suspension, but it’s suspension adjacent is bars a lot of the new bars on the market, like the race face, a bar, the one up bar, the title bar. Of course on partial to race face ’cause that’s one of our companies.
And I know the engineering we put into the error bar in terms of the compliance, we found a really sweet spot for compliance. But hand fatigue and risk fatigue is real after seven stages of all out racing. And a good compliant modern style bar is a pretty sweet thing to, to have. And if you say you’re coming from XC and maybe you want.
Just like adding 10 mils to the fork, maybe adding 10 mils to the rise of the bar gets you into a position where you have a little more elbow bend. And what that does right, is you have more e equal amount of room to push as you have to pull versus if you’re running a really low front end and you’re all here, you have room to pull, but you have no room to push.
And that’s how you go over the bars. You go off a two foot drop and your arms are already like this and you just are straight onto your head. But if your arm is bent a little bit, ’cause you have a little bit more rise in your bar, then you have room to push your front wheel into the hole and ride out of it.
Okay. You can get compliance and you can get a little bit of rise out of a bar upgrade and that’s gonna cost a few hundred bucks instead of thousands of bucks. So just quickly on that, is that when you say compliant? So that’s a carbon bar is what you would choose. Race space makes a turbine alloy bar that’s compliant too.
The extrusion is done in such a way that it kind of mimics like a carbon layup to where you can get that compliance in the right plane. But as far as I know, race Space is the only brand doing an alloy compliant bar. And it’s, the turbine bar is the only one. The era is the carbon one, but Tidal One up and a few others make carbon compliant bars.
And of course there’s a few random companies making like titanium bars and stuff that have some compliance too. And would you personally run the Carbon or Alloy? I run carbon. I trust it fully. I know we, I know our stuff is tested to extremes and I run the air bars and I ran a 20 mil rise error bar.
Seven 60, or actually I think I ran seven 60 or seven 80 for BCBR. I forget what I ran. But it was really nice and it just takes the edge off. The fatigue does help your small bump a little bit and like I said, I think it’s a very cost effective upgrade you can make. Okay. I thank you. Yeah, for sure.
Thanks for all your help today too. For sure. Stoked to be here. And Sean, I know we’re getting close to running out of time, but I see we missed a question from Alan asking, I think this sort of goes back to to keep testing what you’re doing and he says, how will a novice writer know what suspension is doing and what would you recommend to diagnose wide to make suspension better?
Yeah. And so I see somebody dropped in a reply to the shock Whiz. Shock Whiz is a pretty cool tool. The co competition makes it not Fox, but I’ll give them credit where credit’s due. It’s a pretty cool tool. It’s a little do Hickey. You can buy that you attach to the air valve on the shock and it therefore can read the air pressures.
And then it has an app and you can ride and do some runs and it can give you suggestions. Like it can say, oh, you’re using all your travel a lot, so we recommend adding five PSI or adding five PSI in a volume spacer. Or it’s oh, it’s sensing that like maybe, yeah, you’re rebound. It because it has an accelerometer in it, right?
The rebound is very snappy and maybe you want to turn that down a little bit. So that’s a pretty handy tool. It costs money. There are places I believe that rent them. A lot of shops will rent them to you if you ask. So that’s one way to get it without having to invest too much money in owning it.
But again, that’s a pretty advanced option and maybe even more confusing or cost prohibitive than is necessary. Like I said earlier, I’m a big fan in, in looking at the recommended settings on the back of the fork, there’ll be a little sticker with a chart and it’ll say here’s what air pressure you should run based on your weight.
And there’s a range, and so like I generally, I. I generally lean towards the higher end of the range, frankly, ’cause I think you don’t want it to be too soft. And then it’ll say run your, we recommend starting with your rebound at four clicks from fully closed the compression at, seven clicks from fully closed or whatever it may be, right?
It’ll be specific to your product and which adjusters you have. So start with those recommended manufacturer baseline settings, and then do what I was saying earlier, that bracketing exercise. And I’ll go ahead and just drop the video, the YouTube video link in the chat for easy access, but it will also be in the in the little document that we share with you all as well.
But this video breaks down this process in great detail. And yeah, get your baseline recommended settings in, and then bracket from there. Like I said, it’s a little time consuming, but if you dedicate like a couple hours to going and doing this once and writing everything down as you go, it’ll make such a huge difference.
Amazing. That’s amazing. Thanks so much Sean. Yeah, I think we’re getting just about ready to wrap up here. I know there are gonna be loads of questions. I do believe we actually did record this call today ’cause I know I certainly have to go back and look to get into some of the details. And then I think the only thing left to do is up via draw.
Okay. Woohoo. Amal, did you wanna say something? Nope. I was just gonna say we, we gotta remember to do the prize draw. Yeah. This is a very, so up prize today is a Fox four, which we’re very excited about. The only caveat is that it is race pickup only. So if you are not gonna be at race you are gonna have to confess that and we’ll have to draw another name.
So let’s go Kamel. Okay.
Big money, no whammy.
Okay. Are you’re so close. How close? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Amy by a click on My name’s Liz Lemon. Actually, isn’t that the right name? Oh, okay. That’s that’s a screen name on there. It’s someone who always seems to win. Is Adam Ika still here?
I know she was here. She says up in the chat she says, gets in the chat. Okay. Excellent. So it’s I confirmed it’s Winter’s Choice inventory dependent. So whichever Fox Fork you want and we’re happy to help help you. Figure that out. If if you’re not sure, oh, on the trainer, nice at a girl focused eyes on the prize.
Somebody’s in it for the miles per hour, so I’m guessing too sweaty to open the video. Love it. We’ve all been there. Just let us know which model you want and like I said, if you want any help determining that we’re obviously more than happy to do so you can just send me an email when you’re off the train and had a shower and then I can, if you know the answer, by all means, just send me an email with what you want.
And if you don’t know the answer, Sean, do I connect it with you to Sure. Make that choice. Yep. Yep. Excellent. Thank you very much and thanks so much Sean for taking the time. We really appreciate it. The recording as well as Sean’s handout will come out in a newsletter as long as well as that newsletter link for the bracketing exercise not newsletter, YouTube link for the bracketing exercise.
Awesome. Thank you all so much for the time. Have so much fun at the race. You’re gonna love it. It’s awesome. Enjoy. Awesome. Thanks very much everyone. Have a good afternoon. Cheers.