Mine sag to 115mm unless I put on lots of low speed compression damping. Presume I need a firm spring? 12.5 stone plus kit? How heavy are you and what spring? Where is cheapest for firm uturn springs?

I’m 10.5 in the nudd and use a medium… I’d be careful of internet recommendations on this tbh, I got repeatedly told I needed a soft at most, probably an extra soft, but soft was very poor so I can only guess how useless extra soft would have been.

I am 80kg just over 12.5 stone and medium are fine for me on lyric coil forks. I had the U turn model with 160mm before and now use RC2DH 170mm ones. I am surprised you need firm. I use medium on my Totem coil forks too. Once tried firm spring and they are too harsh. Worth calling up TF Tuned for a chat. You certainly do need some slow speed rebound on otherwise the forks compress too much on braking etc…

Im am right on their medium/firm border.

I run a firm. Medium was ok for trail/xc riding, but as soon as i did any drops 3ft+ smooth i would bottom out, same again on about 2ft drops doing them sketch.

With a firm spring, i’ve lost next to no sensitivity and the front end holds up better on steep. It now takes me 4ft+ drop to sketch flat to bottom my forks now.

I’m 13st and use an x-firm in a 170mm rc2dh. I’ve a new firm spring for sale if you want it. AFAIK it doesn’t need to be a u-turn one, the normal ones fit too

How much and could it be made into uturn as I use travel adjust loads

i’ve a medium springm, i weigh ~75kg with all my gear and ride a Dialled Alpine…

i sometimes feel i could have a firmer spring at the expense of small hit sensitivity as with the hardtail i keep my weight further forward, bt whether this is necessary, i doubt it. i’ll occasionally get full travel (well, with 15mm of the crown) and that’s only on a bit hit and/or f*ck up.

edit: mine was originally bought as 2-step, but i got bored of sending it back after it stopped stepping, waiting for ages, getting it back and it going wrong again so i fitted a spring. easy to do. at first the u-turn cap wasn’t available so i used the 2-step cap with an o-ring beneath it to stop it rattling.

I weigh approx 68kg and use extra soft. I tried running the soft spring for a while but would only ever get 130mm of travel at most. You just got to try different springs to find what suits your riding style I think.

similar to deanfbm on the border between the 2 spring

just had coil conversion done by tftuned and after much chat with them recommended going for firm spring and seems spot on

107kg and run coil u turn x firm. It’s fine but I’m not one for huge drops.

I’m about 14 1/2 stone and run x-firm. It works much better for me than the old spring.

I’ve got a firm spring going spare if you are interested?

tomaso is yours a uturn one mate?

Standard spring in the Uturn Lyric that came with my Remedy.
It has compression adjust too.
Works really well on big mountain days.
I’m 88kg and it has about 25% sag.

Do you mean you get 115mm of sag, or that they sag to the 115mm marker on the stanchion?

If the latter, then 45mm of sag on a 160/170mm fork is about right, no?

30% of 160mm = 48mm.

Compression damping should not make any difference to the amount of sag you get (just the amount of time it takes to get there).

I’m 90kg (14st) butt-naked and use a firm spring, so this would also suggest to me that the standard spring is the right one for you at 12.5st.

they sag to 115mm on the stanchion, i thought forks should sag to 20% whilst the rear to 30%?

I weigh 96kg kitted and have a medium fitted. If anything, for trail riding it feels a touch too firm. I have a firm spring and didn’t get full travel – ever.

Is the standard spring a medium? I weigh about 75kg and I don’t get full travel out of my 170mm travel Lyriks.. should I try a soft spring?

95kg with a medium spring on u-turn 160s here.

Like Mildred I never got full travel out of the firm. And found the ride too harsh over small stuff.

If I’m riding bigger stuff I just wind on more compression damping.

12 stone and running a standard (presumably the medium it came with) spring on my 170mm Lyrics.Sag about 50mm. Only managed to bottom them out once so far and that was a 7ft+ drop that went badly wrong…. 😳

cruzheckler
tomaso is yours a uturn one mate?

Yes

i use firm spring and get full travel once or twice off 10ft+ drops each day. tried x firm but i had to have no compression settings at all

I’m 11 stone, soft spring in one set on the hardtail, currently medium in the set on the full bouncer. I find the springs are quite progressive and very soft at the start – both forks sag a very similar amount, its the travel after that where the difference comes.

they sag to 115mm on the stanchion, i thought forks should sag to 20% whilst the rear to 30%?

Nah, 30% would be about normal for a fork, especially a longer travel fork like a Lyrik.

Sag should also be about the same on fork and shock, unless you particularly want to slacken the head angle.

Useful guide at Loco, here:

Loco tuning fork sag guide

hmm may go the other way and try a soft spring then with more compression damping

11 and a half stone and use a soft spring.

Was getting hardly any travel on a firm or medium

15 stone and ride extra firm.

anyone have a spare soft spring (uturn) going??

cruzheckler – I’d stick with the spring you have (unless you’re really desperate to spend £50!). The sag is as close to spot-on as you’re ever going to get with a fixed-rate coil spring.

Sag (i.e. spring rate) is by far the most important variable in setting up any suspension system.

It is also, as mentioned above, completely independent of compression damping settings.

My background is in mechanical engineering and I find that a lot of people have a fundamental misunderstanding of how suspension works. I’m now a full-time bike guide and spend a lot of time fielding questions like:

“My forks sagging about 10%, can I borrow your shock pump to put more air in?”

“I’ve bottomed my fork out today! That’s never happened before! Do you think it’s broken?”

Plus the classic:

“I really struggled on that last section….. do you think I should add another couple of clicks of rebound?”

So, money where mouth is, here’s Stevo’s super-quick guide to suspension:

1. Get the spring rate right
Spring rate is the most important thing, if this is wrong, no amount of tweaking the other knobs will get the fork/shock to work properly. The best way to make sure the spring rate is right is to measure the sag. Ideally, do this with all other damping wound right off. Doesn’t really make any difference, but might lead to confusion.

Sag is a STATIC measurement. Sit on the bike, feet on the pedals and stay there until the fork comes to rest. Bounce up and down if you like so that the fork has pushed you back up and you’ve taken any stiction out of the equation, but the sag should be measured once you, the fork and the bike are completely still.

Sag of both forks and shocks should be in the region of 30%. If you’re racing XC and want the fork to be a bit “tighter”, you can go for 25%. Downhillers might want to push it out a bit towards 40%. But 30% should be the starting point for most people.

With a coil spring, the spring rate will always be linear – i.e. it will always take the same amount of additional force to compress the fork another mm whether it’s right at the top or right at the bottom. With air springs, unless there are cunning designs to vary the volume of the air chamber, the spring rate will change exponentially through the travel. i.e. at 50% travel it will take double the amount of additional force to move the fork, at 25% it will take 4 times the extra force, etc. Air springs therefore are “progressive” and will strongly resist bottoming out. All of this becomes more complicated with rear shocks as the suspension design chosen (even a single pivot) can result in the amount of leverage applied to the shock changing throughout the stroke. For example, a frame designer might use a design where the leverage increases through the stroke, thus balancing to some extent the progressive effect of an air shock. Alternatively, a decreasing amount of leverage might help to resist bottoming out on a coil shock.

2. Rebound Damping
Rebound damping controls how quickly the fork pushes you back up after a hit. Generally, this is achieved by allowing oil to flow through a constriction. Turning the knob changes the size of the constriction. The smaller the gap, the more energy required to force the oil through it and therefore the slower the fork movement. The fork will always push you all the way back up to the sag point though, even if your damping is set very slow. The tricky bit is that with very slow damping, the chances are that you’ll hit another bump before it gets back up, so there won’t be time for the fork to get all the way back up. On fast, repeated hits therefore, you may find that the fork gets lower and lower – this is known as “packing down” and means that the damping is set too slow. At the other end of the scale, if the damping is set too fast, the fork will spring back in an uncontrolled manner and will feel very “bouncy” and, to use a classic cliché, like a pogo-stick. General advice would be to err to the side of having too little damping (i.e. rebound slightly too fast), so that the fork doesn’t pack down and your effective head-angle doesn’t drop too much. Conversely, on a rear shock, too slow is better than too fast as the bike will then sit-down into its travel, again avoiding sudden steepening of the head angle.

3. Compression damping
Compression damping works in the same way as rebound damping, but affects how fast the fork descends. Given that any bump on the trail is likely to last only for a short time, slowing the response of the fork to this may mean that you use less travel for the same size of hit if you increase the amount of compression damping. Compression damping therefore helps to reduce the chances of your fork bottoming-out, but will reduce the “plushness” of the fork as it effectively makes the fork feel a little stiffer. If you’re bottoming out harshly all the time though, you’ve probably got the spring-rate wrong and no amount of compression damping will help.

Many forks have different settings for low-speed and high-speed compression damping. The theory is that impact forces from the trail hit the fork faster than pedalling forces. e.g. if you hit the classic “square-edged hit” then you might get all the force from that impact over, say, 0.1s (equivalent to hitting a 0.5m long obstacle at 5m/s). Pedalling at a cadence of 60rpm means each pedal stroke lasts about 0.5s, i.e. 5 times slower (very ballpark figures, but you get the idea). By having separate compression damping circuits that react differently to different speeds of movement, you can try to smooth out the pedal forces while still allowing the fork/shock to react to trail impacts. Very personal thing, but my suggestion would be to use as little compression damping as possible, both low and, particularly, high speed.

Think that’s enough without getting into the huge variation of lock-out/platform type systems!

thanks that is dead helpful

nice post stevo!

When setting coil forks up you turn off all compression damping to sort the sag.
Do you then set up the rebound and THEN the low/high speed compression or the opposite??

Usually best to set sag, then rebound, then compression damping.

The compression damping doesn’t affect the sag, so you don’t really have to turn it off. If you have it set really slow, the fork might take a while to sag properly and you might not get an accurate reading. As above, wait until everything has completely stopped moving before you measure the sag.

Sag, with comp off, then rebound then comp.
Follow the guide link I mailed you earlier 😉

and here: http://locotuning.co.uk/tech-info.html for anyone else 😀

Already posted your link plus my own waffle above Loco!

stevo that was at @Cruz, have been chatting on the mail too 😀

I don’t know yet as the compression failed soon after buying them but currently firm spring and I’m 16stone. It seems fine for me. When the forks are back I’ll dial in a few turns of high speed compression and take it from there.

TBH I bet if you go one spring down from what he manufacturer recommends I bet you wouldn’t go far wrong?

Interesting to read the variations of input on this.

I am 12 – 12.5 stone in the buff.

I ride Lyrik 170mm DHRC2’s. First few rides I bottomed the fork out way too many times for my liking when using the medium spring.

I switched to the firm spring and much prefer it for my style of riding. I think your riding style is as key a factor as weight.

My ‘normal’ rides around Bristol (if there is such a thing) are a real mish mash of (in no particular order)twisty woodland singletrack in 50 Acre & Leigh Woods, some of the groomed AC stuff and then a healthy dose of some steep technical stuff and some decent sized drops (4- 5 feet) back in Leigh Woods.

Not sure if that helps at all. I guess what I am saying is that if the medium does not feel right when riding then you should try a firm spring and see if you like that better. If it feels ok then I would not overly worry about the sag and just ride. (my sag is closer to 20% now for example)

hora – Member

TBH I bet if you go one spring down from what he manufacturer recommends I bet you wouldn’t go far wrong?

They recommend soft for me, which didn’t work at all on anything but the most gentle of descents, so going down to extra soft would be useless.

They recommend medium for me

Soft would have been hopeless

There’s no reason to go for any spring other than the recommended one. The only difficulty comes when your weight is right on the border between 2 springs – do you go up or down? Think it then comes down to riding style. If you’re into bigger drops, etc. go firmer, if you want to keep the fork supple, go softer.