My 160mm Pikes are great but with the slack head angle on my bike I can't help think that being able to drop the travel to 130mm would be very handy on steep ups.
However, is it a costly exercise and would I just be better to sell my Solo Airs and get some second hand Dual Position Airs?
Thanks for info guys.
Not worth it you need to change the csu and internals, so sell current fork and buy a DP one.
Performance wise the Dual position is not as good either.
Lots of offers on the Dual Position forks as they're not as popular - probably because, as LoCo says, the performance is not equivalent to the Solo Air.
Is the head angle slack because you're running a longer-than-intended fork? I'd sooner drop down to a 150mm or even 140mm Solo Air if appropriate for the bike, rather than mess around with Dual Position.
It won't be the slack head angle making climbing difficult, it'll be the seat angle not being steep enough. However, although dropping the front by 30mm will help with that, it'll also lower your BB which can be annoying when pedalling up techy stuff.
Is your saddle slid all the way forwards? If not, that's the easiest fix!
Cheers guys.
A lot of variables to go into but yeah, the bike is naturally slack (66 deg) but seat angle is pretty step, 73.4. It's a Marin Attack Tail, 2010.
Going to mess around with stem/ stack/ seat and bars I think then go from there.
She behaves well with weight forward, just my nads don't like being impaled on the front of the seat.Lol
It may ride better in 150mm travel setting as the longer fork will have raised the bb a touch which seems quite high as standard at the same time as slackening the head angle.
As with any adjustment there will be multiple differences in how it affects the bike.
The climbing on a bike of that type on really steep section you may need to have your chest 'on the stem' to keep the front wheel down, so try aa few different techniques/distributions of weight.
Isn't that one of the problems with popular, modern geometry bikes that the chainstays are too short for the slack front end when climbing (and steepening the seat angle is a way they've tried to compensate for this when longer chainstays as well would help centre the rider better)
I know that when I added offset bushings and a -1 degree headset to my Alpine (now 64* head angle and a very low BB) stopped the front end from wandering and lifting on even the steepest climbs.
Tom KP