Not something I’m familiar with but heard about…what do the above do? A few people seem to be getting the forks and shocks modded on their Whyte T130 bikes. Extending Fox 34 from 130 to 150, adding tokens and bands to Fox shocks so they are ‘a million times better’…I’m one yet to do this mainly because I like it as it is and I don’t know what his black magic they whisper of us…please enlighten me. Must-do or load of bollix?

Gas Laws.

You are reducing the starting volume in your shock air chamber, this changes the properties as the volume is reduced during the compression. It means the pressure will increase faster changing how the fork travels.

With any of this an understanding of how your suspension feels and how you want it to feel is important

Tokens and bands are basically the same thing in forks or rear shock. The suspension is using air springs. the Tokens and bands are used to reduce the volume inside the air chamber. This change of size is used to effect the way the air pressure increases in the air chamber. This changes the feel of the spring in the way it ramps up as it travels through its stroke.
It can give the spring the feeling of ramping up as it gets to the end of the travel to stop bottom out but keep the nice supple feel the is good on small bumps at high speed.
Some old shocks / forks suffered with a lack of ramp up, so they either blew through the travel when run at low pressures to try to get nice small bump feeling, or you had to run them with so much air to prevent bottom out that the small bump suppleness was gone.
The new air forks shocks have come on a long way to get a good balance, and now riders can add / remove tokes , spacers etc to try to tune the suspension to what they feel works for them.

It can give the spring the feeling of ramping up as it gets to the end of the travel to stop bottom out but keep the nice supple feel the is good on small bumps at high speed.

All air shocks have a ramp up towards the end of the stroke as a result of the handy equations above, the bands/tokens increase that.

I wrote this a while ago – you may find it useful (or not): https://www.facebook.com/notes/bird-cycleworks/tech-talk-tuning-air-forks-with-tokens/553229671529254/

The same applies for rear shocks in general.

I’ve just got a 2007 orange 5 that I would like to handle small hits better.
So far I’ve not managed to bottom it out . Should I be reducing air pressure before playing with reducers?

Whats your current sag setting?

Just checked and it’s just over a third.

Over a third sounds a bit keen to me, definitely try fiddling with pressure before using tokens. Drop it to actually a third to start with. A shock pump with a good gauge helps!