I have received some info from Chumba HQ regarding different suspension designs and leverage ratios and also a link to an interesting piece (maybe!) from Trek here http://trekmountain.typepad.com/king/tech_talk/ and in particular an image showing the different ratios of a few different designs and the effect this might have on shock choice and how a bike might ride.

This got me thinking, do you guys actually care about all this info? Do you base buying a bike on any of this sort of knowledge or do you prefer to just test ride?

all the manufacturers have clever graphs to show how their apples are better than the comptition's bananas. I've been to product launches by Marin, Trek, Giant and Specialized and they are all clearly the best.

I've been to product launches by Marin, Trek, Giant and Specialized and they are all clearly the best.

True, but the explanations seem pretty spot on don't they?

Why not ask Alan from Chumba? Or are you trying to dig him out of the huge hole he dug himself over on mtbr.com?

A lot of people don't care about that stuff in the graph. Alan does, even though he hasn't got a clue what he's talking about.

oooooo… purty lines… I likey me

Looks similar to my dissertation. Only I pitched shock position against wheel displacement. That told you if or how much a design ramped up at the end of the stroke. It also showed that some designs got softer, the nearer it got to bottoming out.

I like all this stuff, but I'm a bit of a geek. You do have to be careful to read between the lines when reading that Trek bumpf though. VPP is easy in the first part of travel as it sits just after that area once sagged. And the DW design sounds like fun – pumpy, firm but capable of taking the big hits.

Either way you can't beat a test ride.

Why not ask Alan from Chumba? Or are you trying to dig him out of the huge hole he dug himself over on mtbr.com?
A lot of people don't care about that stuff in the graph. Alan does, even though he hasn't got a clue what he's talking about.

I think that graphs are used by many more than just Alan at Chumba in fact that particular graph is from trek. Also I have seen loads of stuff from all manufactures. Fwiw i have never bothered with the technical drawing stuff, but sometimes it can help explain stuff.

When I was designing my carbon suspension bike I looked into all this. I even paid out money on some software Linkage to check out my designs. I also looked a a load of reviews and tried to match the reviewers comments with different types of suspension. I came to the conclusion that it was all boll**ks.
The only thing that matters is the it gets stiffer (ooh!)towards the end of travel, but that's just common sense.
So I think it's just marketing stuff.

The only thing that matters is the it gets stiffer (ooh!)towards the end of travel, but that's just common sense.
So I think it's just marketing stuff.

so unlike the dw-link mojo then?

I don't really care about this stuff. Were I skilled enough it would possibly matter. As things stand I'm too busy fighting for survival to worry about the particulars of suspension design process.

Some things matter more than other things, and sometimes the "things" that matter only actually matter on certain types of bikes with certain amounts of travel. There's so many variables that slapping lines on a graph becomes more or less meaningless.

I've seen German mag reviews where they attached any number of measuring devices to bikes, and print list of numbers, and angles and so on, Germans still ride shite Full sussers though, and walk down the rocky bits…