Time for some more preaching. Coil is better. Always has been. Always will be. Yes, some gravity racers prefer air. Are you a racer? I’m not.
- Price: £849.00
- From: silverfish.co.uk
Air may have more feedback at 40mph down Champery. Air may have more ‘pop’ on jumps. Both are largely irrelevant to normal mountain bikers. What’s more important in terms of suspension for normal mountain bikers? Traction. Consistency. Comfort. Cost. Living with the sodding things.
Air forks have got a whole load better at doing the pitter-patter, off-the-top sort of sag-point suppleness. But when it comes to midstroke, coil rules the roost. Coil has that supple yet supportive thing going for it. When you go back to an air fork after riding a coil fork it almost feels like something is missing.
The air fork does sat down sag point stuff kinda OK, and does the not-bottoming-out-harshly thing, but that’s about it. When it comes to the main meat of riding around out-of-the-saddle actually-doing-stuff there’s nothing that feels like the er, feel of coil. Incredibly supple, unparalleled levels of traction everywhere, loads of support under braking and cornering.
It’s the increased level of support when riding front-heavy that’s really great when riding big terrain, often without any clue as to what’s about to happen up ahead. This is especially true if you factor in the compression damping adjustment. On air forks, introducing any amount of compression damping really seems to rob the fork of any suppleness. With the Marzocchi Bomber Z1 Coil you need fear not the compression dial. On super-steep, slo-mo trails you can dial in half a turn of the compression lever and the fork doesn’t get all jerky or weird, it just holds you up more with hardly any detectable loss in traction.
Oh, and the increased time between recommended service intervals is a Real World nice aspect too.
Any niggles? The Marzocchi Bomber Z1 Coil fork is about a pound heavier than its air equivalent (a pound that is entirely worth spending in my opinion) and there are only four spring weights, which in theory could mean that some riders may not quite be able to get the perfect spring weight (though I’d still argue that a slightly imperfect theoretical spring rate will perform better than a ‘perfect’ air spring rate).
This product features in our Daytrippin’ Kit Essentials buyer’s guide
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Review Info
| Brand: | Marzocchi |
| Product: | Bomber Z1 Coil Fork |
| From: | Silverfish |
| Price: | £849.00 |
| Tested: | by Benji for Singletrack World Magazine Issue 149 |
