Seeing a few frames that let you tweak the travel, such as Nicolai Helius, Intense Tracer, Ibis Mojo HD, Last Herb.

Is this worth having? Does anyone actually make use of this? Or do people just tend to pick a travel setting and build the bike around that? (And if not max travel do you not just end up with a heavy frame for the travel you’re using?) Do bikes tend to work a lot better in one travel setting than the others?

Also some bikes seem to do it by changing shock length / rockers / mounts, and others just with a change of shock mounting. Does changing more stuff result in less of a compromise and better performance?

(Apologies in advance if this topic has been done before!)

If if involves just changeing shock positions you’ll end up with no/not enough damping in longer travel settings, particulalry if your a big lad. You’d also need a shock pump to alter the spring rate.

They were in favour a few years ago when shocks bobbed and suspension designs were less refined, but now most companies don’t offer it, and a lot that do offer different linkages/mounting plates to make them work properly, eg the scott voltage FR, can be a 8″ FR bike, or with a different set of shock and plate it becomes a slopestyle bike.

I would say it depends how much you like to tinker with your bike in the shed. I view such things as an option for me to fine tune my bike set up more to my liking, and then leave it at that. If you really could own just one bike, and rode very diverse terrain/styles regularly and you weren’t lazy when it came to working on the bike then it would be useful and worth it. Otherwise, assuming you like a bikes geometry then I wouldn’t view it as a neccessity.

It’s not something that would be high up my priority list when it comes to bike shopping.

I remember the Marin TARA range, I think most people left it in the max travel setting… and that was easy to change on the trail with a quick release lever.

I’ve had a couple of Nicolai’s with this feature.

On the helius ST I noticed that on the longest travel option, as mentioned above, the damping was insufficient, and it also meant running very high shock pressure, which ultimately made it unpleasent to ride; On the short travel setting the compression damping was far too hugh, and again the ride suffered a a result.

I worked out that on the low travel setting it had a leverage ratio of about 2.2:1, whereas on the long travel it was a bit over 3:1. For one shock, this is too much to cope with. I spoke to TF tuned about this and they felt that in the short travel mode the Dhx just couldn’t flow enough oil. In the end I settled on the next to longest travel and it worked fine.

I think that Scott also designed the Gamble to run different length shocks, but my problem with this approach is that it starts to get as expensive as buying two different or more specific frames.

I’ve ended up having two seperate bikes, as it became frustrating to try to make do with a jack of all trades: too heavy and slack for most riding, built with too light kit for big mountains and DH.