Found a good point with my shock with it at 20-25% sag (not too soft or firm) on my stumpy but bottoming out harshly on rough terrain. The problem is I can't add volume spacers to it due to propriety specialised stuff so can I just add some fork oil instead?
Oil does work, same as a volume reducer but just guess the quantity
What’s “harsh terrain”? Is it more than you might expect an XC bike to handle? How much of the work are you leaving to the suspension?
Yes, I did with my old dux air
Just added more float fluid
Yes and no, if it gets through the transfer port to the negative spring it could mess it up.
What shock is it? Have you taken the air can off to see if another brands spacers will fit?
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Thick grease works better, big blob at top of piston away from the pos / neg transfer port (I used red rubber grease which is thick and won't damage seals etc as designed for braking systems)
Tried float fluid but as above... Made my shock pretty noisy and found after a while it lost small bump compliance (assuming from oil migration to neg chamber through transfer port)
Was a Spesh shock on my camber.
I have a fox float ctd
"harsh terrain" is DH tracks. It handles all mountain stuff really well but will still comfortably bottom out, just want a bit more progression for rough DH sections. Played around with the rebound only found that speeding it up lost a bit of chassis stability and didn't fix my issue.
Why can’t you add generic spacers? Any softish closed cell foam or rubber will do. Grease or oil could block the transfer port or end up in the negative chamber, doing the opposite of what you want.
harsh terrain” is DH tracks
And you don’t think you might be asking for too much from what’s basically an XC set-up? A shock/bike that’s comfortable on the big hits of DH is going to feel cumbersome on lighter/technical trails, and the opposite is also true.
Unfortunatly the float ctd was a terrible terrible shock to start with. Had mine push tuned which turned it from almost unusable to something that kind of worked. As I said, thick grease at the top of the piston does work.... I was able to run lower pressure without the shock bottoming out. You could also cut some foam (like a long swimming pool float) or some thick rubber matt (round disk with a hole in split)
Best think you can do though is bin the ctd... But that does not help much 🙂