Hi all, I have a question on rear suspension for the gurus: Is there some combination of sag and volume tokens which can make a longer travel bike behave and feel like a shorter travel bike? (In terms of pedalling and suspension feel – ignoring the different feel of the geo)

Thanks

Try more tokens, but it still won’t feel the same.

I assume you are unhappy with the way your bike pedals?

Hmm, they all pedal differently independently of travel to a degree. What are you hoping to achieve? and what do you have on the shock to play with? Does putting it in climb or equivalent make it better? What about adding rebound control if it feels wallowly.

It depends on their leverage curves – but if you get the same spring rate at the wheel then they’ll feel the same until one runs out of travel. In reality that’s nigh-on impossible to achieve but to get close to it you’ll need to run a smaller percentage of sag on the longer travel bike, so if their leverage curves are the same and shocks are the same (bar stroke) then you’ll need to run the same pressure.

Maybe instead of thinking in terms of pedaling like a short travel bike (which you will never achieve), think in terms of making it pedal as well as it can. Obvious things to do are to bump up the pressure in the shock and increase the rebound damping until it doesn’t wallow over fast undulations, then bump up the compression damping so that it pedals well when seated. You won’t be using anything like full travel on XC or road courses, so not sure that adding tokens will really help much.

If it’s possible to reduce fork travel and drop the front end, that will help a lot on climbs.

I fitted a shorter shock to my Patriot because I had one and I could due to the moveable mount. Geometry was fine, but it was definitely nowhere near as good. Felt weird with a long fork and short shock and I really missed the bottomless feel of the longer shock. Didn’t seem to improve the climbing as generally when climbing I stayed seated to steamroller the bike up techie stuff, and it was worse at that.