It’s like anything on MTBs, at the top end of the market it’s a numbers and letters games, how much travel, how fat the stanchions can get, how low the weight figure is and how many made up acronyms can the marketing Dept’ splash all over the spec sheet…
Mid price point and down it’s just “trickle down” Look further down the ranges and you’ll see the forks of yesteryear with the odd change to spec’s and name but effectively the same chassis with similar internals, how far honestly is the current “Tora” from the “Psylo” you could buy 6 years ago? The “dart” is more or less an old “Judy” sure they’ve had to re-tool the crown and lowers thus subtly changing the look of the forks and fiddle about a tad with travel but they aren’t a million miles apart from the forks you would have thrown hundreds of pounds at less than a decade ago…
There haven’t been that many leaps forward in fork Technology, over the last 20 years merely scaling up of the chassis to accommodate more travel and extreme use in the field…
Maybe more reliable air springs in the last 5 or so years, possibly manufacturers have a better idea of what the damping is actually doing…
At the end of the day they are basically still just some type of spring, a bit of oil, a pumping rod and some form of valve in a tube (x 2)…
As for the idea that they don’t last, well that’s just cobblers, they may get sold on, a few may get snapped but the vast majority will be floating about in the classifieds/eBay for some time to come and those of us that bother to service forks ourselves can get most things to keep running for years, for those over burdened with money there’s the shiny new version of any given fork, not significantly different from the previous revision, but the man in the shop; he said it’s Waaaay better…
Fox 36's seem a bargain in comparison.
