Three new Fox GRIP dampers and a 32SC fork

Are we allowed to point out the not quite Kashima gold mismatch going on?  Fair play to Fox for clashing with thier own colour….

I think kashima is basically an anodising process so the final colour is dependent on a ton of factors- the exact composition of the aluminium underneath, getting the chemical processes exactly the same, and also the time each bit is in it. Maybe also a pretreatment too. So it’s not too surprising that different parts come out different. But it’s pretty funny when you see a 40 with different coloured legs…

I’m guessing these are going to be at lesat somewhat backwards compatible like the earlier grips were? It seems to be a damper change in the same chassis so that ought to be rollbackable to some degree, though maybe not as far as my ancient 36s… It all sounds like good stuff, especially getting less crosstalk between circuits is basically how you make a fork easy to tune and comprehensible, it’s something that frinstance the old mission control damper was fantastic at but a lot of newer stuff hasn’t been so good.

Oh yeah, I really like the presenter and presentation, he’s got that “showing the firstborn to your parents” thing going on but also a nice amount of total nerdiness about it. Good stuff

Jordi? Properly loves what he does. Not a presenter. Rides a RocketMAX.

It’s called power clashing, and they do it because they can.

So, the earth shattering advancement in suspension technology is a more free flowing piston with a higher number of shims controlling fluid flow.

I’ve never ridden a Grip2 damper, but people often seem to be running them all the way open (on compression at least).

Jordi says in the video they want to “tell a better story through the damping”, but it’s unclear whether they’ve shifted the useable range?

Innovation and investment in R&D slowed over Covid which is precisely why this is the first update for 4 years.

It is more of running change despite the gold lowers (which seem to be a launch limited edition).

The good news is that we do seem be reaching a plateau in mountain bike development. Geometry, frames, forks and groupsets are just about as good as it is possible to get and the rate of advances is slowing. Today’s bikes don’t look or perform massively better than those of 5 years ago, but massively different to 10 years ago.

In previous years it was worth investing in new tech to advance things, but as the happy owner of a few sets of Fox forks, I don’t feel compelled. They already work well, and with decent maintenance will stay that way for a while.

This kind of release is ironically good for the consumer but not so good for the industry. As the pace of change slows, the industry resizes and prices continue to increase, there isn’t enough advantage to swapping parts to warrant the prices.

This sounds like a complaint but actually it is the opposite. I am sure if I was in the market for a new fork I would benefit from the new dampers but in a blindfold test there simply isn’t enough newness here to warrant the significant price tag. In short, thanks Fox for proving how good your ‘old’ 2023 forks are!

I’m on a grip 2 damper. The compression has been fully open since I got it

Wow, the prices…….

Does that mean more marketing words or making the damping actually work?

Well I just picked it out as amusing marketing bollocks.

What don’t you like about Fox damping?

chakaping
Free Member

What don’t you like about Fox damping?

The range of actual useful adjustment in the current crop is really pretty poor ime. Like, if any number of people are running an adjuster fully open (as I am and as the internet suggests many other people are) then that’s a sign that you’ve fundamentally ****ed it. Does anyone in the world run the high speed compression over half?

And the grip damper’s obviously a compromise due to having less adjustment, but I’m too light for it, there was no good setting in the damper for me. And I’m not alone.

It amazes me that anyone using a long travel fork uses no compression damping, I find my 38 is awful without it but I’ve always like compression damping over volume reduction.
At 73kg got 1 reducer, 113psi(on my pump) hsc 1 from closed lsc 10 from closed. Are we slowly heading back to the early 2010s ctd era where your fork was either at no travel or full travel with these

The range of actual useful adjustment in the current crop is really pretty poor

That’s what I suspected (and had mentioned myself), but I thought the comment I was responding too was just unhelpfully negative.

Chakaping… the range of adjustment on the basic (and ace) Grip probably pairs better with your coil than with our air sprung forks. Most people end up with leaving them fully open on air forks. I’ve got one of those Marz coil kits to go in a Fox36 rhythm… so I’ll see for myself soon enough.

I’ve got about quarter of the compression on, but think I need more to stop it diving on steep sections. I am at the top end of the weight for the medium spring.

I’d been wanting to try one of these for ages now, and it’s even better than I’d hoped. Much more of the coil feel that I was after than my coil Helm.

I assume the new dampers are backwards compatible, as I think they showed pricing for them?

Personally I quite like the simplicity of just having LSC and rebound knobs, like on my Select+ Pike.

That’s the exact problem though, “high speed adjuster rolled all the way off” is not “no HSC damping”, in these forks it’s “still really quite a lot of HSC damping, too much for a lot of people”. It’s minimum, it’s not off.

It’s not quite this simple, but, basically they created a really excellent damper- or in fact dampers, it’s the same of the Grip, Grip2 and even my ancient Fit4 at least- but then put the adjustment range in the wrong place and gimped it.

(the reason it’s not quite that simple is that the damping range isn’t necessarily a fully independent thing, so it’s possible that the damping range is a bit dictated by other parts of the fork design, or there can be strong overlaps between circuits that basically mean you can’t create specific effects without crosstalk or other drawbacks. Which isn’t an excuse, it’s just a description of a damper design with issues. In other cases, like those old Fit4s I mentioned, it was literally just a design failure, Andreani made a replacement piston that fixed their mistake without other drawbacks. But by and large, the cleverer the fork, the harder it is to change one thing without unintended consequences)

It’s actually pretty common, this sort of thing, to be fair to Fox. Probably every manufacturer has had forks that has either not powerful enough adjustment, or the range in the wrong place, or where there’s a single adjuster the curves don’t match up well at different spring rates so the compromises are all bad.

Bottom line is, selling a £1000+ fork or designing an OE part that won’t work correctly for a whole lot of users without spending money on it is a bit shit, no matter how excellent it is for other people. Especially when you don’t advertise it

GripX is also used in a new Marz 38 stanchioned fork, with the simpler damper working with a wider travel range than when used in Fox forks. Interesting. No coil option, but sounds like a more conventional air spring than the Fox38 that could lend itself to a coil version in future…

🤞🏼