RSR Bikeworks, Data Acquisition day/review

With a looming trip to Morzine me and a mate were at FoD last weekend and chatting with Rich Simpson who owns/runs RSR Bikeworks. We’ve known rich for a few years now and had the boys bikes done once upon a time and really gelled with him and his setups.
Anyway i was chatting and saying “i wouldn’t mind getting my Status 160 done” where [smention u=609]Weeksy08[/smention] laughed and sniggered. But Rich thought at any level a decently setup bike is better

So we booked it in and had it tweaked.

IMG_20240801_120927 by Steve Weeks[/url], on Flickr

IMG_20240801_120918 by Steve Weeks[/url], on Flickr

IMG_20240801_120923 by Steve Weeks[/url], on Flickr

It starts with attaching some electrical gubbins to the bike that does the measuring, that’s all directed into a phone app which is configured with various parameters to get your setup.
Consistency is key for the setup so we used the same trail for every run. It’s a trail we locally know as “sharkfin” from one of the features. But it’s fast, flowy, jumpy, rooty, pretty much everything we wanted in a trail and a trail i know well. It’s not as techy/gnar as some i may ride, but it’s closer to what i ride most than they are.

First was setting the sag and we were slightly thrown by the shaft on the Fox Float X which is a 60mm stroke.. When we looked at the data for the sag it was showing a lot more than it looked. It turned out that the shaft is a 60-65mm shaft and the stroke is adjusted internally, so when it was at a sag of say 45% it looked a lot different. I was running 215psi in the back and 80psi in the Fox 36 on the front and i’ve always really liked it.

Rich noticed that 210 was as i say above nearly 45% sag and we started upping the rear pressure to get to a sensible figure, in the end we settled at 260psi… year really, that much of a difference. I thought it’d feel horrid on the trail and i was pleasantly surprised. A couple of runs and we changed a click here and there, then removed a volume spacer from the forks, then changed the pressure down in the forks to 77 and added a volume spacer, then back out, then some more air here and there…

In the end we reached the point where it was too much and i was feeling the back end chattering on the root section, which really pleased me that i noticed as i don’t see ‘feel’ as being my strong point. We then dialled the rebound back slightly and the final run was honestly the best run i’d had on the trail in hundreds of runs. I guess it helped that Rich is also a National level DH racer and ex-GB Champion in BMX, so with him and the boy chasing me (or getting bored) i had to bring my A game.
But the back of the bike felt SO much more planted and stable in the corners with the higher pressures and the root section i was going through like it didn’t exist now.
We were working on a particular right hander which i’d been struggling on all day and braking too hard into it, nearly stalling and holding them up, on the last run i let myself go in a fraction slower and carried more corner speed through it, popping me out WAY nicer.

I wasn’t clearing the final gap/table/jump, but i never have and i wasn’t doing badly on it actually lol.

A big chunk of the process wasn’t just the bike, but as much about picking his brain and learning a bit for weeksy08 in terms of when he comes in with “oh the bike feels a little XYZ” then i can arguably have a little more knowledge about what we may think about adding/losing a click of here or there and why

All in all i felt it was time and money really well spent, not only because i have a bike that feels awesome now and i like even more than i did befoe i started, but because i’ve learned a fair bit about the process and suspension in the process. I’ve also learned that despite me thinking i have no feel of what a bike is doing, i may actually have some.

This is something I’ve toyed with the idea of doing, not because I’m a racer or fast rider but very much like you because I would like to know whether I’m in the ballpark normally. Also like you I’ve never felt I can feel the changes objectively, I always worry that I’m not consistent enough to benefit fully.

That was another interesting part of the ride/day that the data doesn’t lie. It was saying how my body position/balance front/rear was pretty consistent when i ride and i was massively surprised i could ‘feel’ some of the things we changed. Admittedly there were a couple of times when we changed something and i came in with “feels exactly the same”…. It wasn’t and the data showed a difference in the balance/travel/whatever but to me it felt identical. However at times i came down and thought “nooo i don’t like that at all”.

But the good thing is that you don’t always need to feel the difference, the data at times will tell you if you’re going the right way.

It was little things like hitting a particular set of 3 corners which is left/right/left in quick sequence, the fast kids it’s a schralp type thing each way, i always felt in there i was all over the place and now i know it’s because the back end was squating on each chance of direction and not giving me any support to push through the corners, this made me sit back on the bike and again forced my body out of position each time and unsettled me.

It’s only going through this process that i’ve actually thought about what was happening. I thought it was all down to me being crap in these corners, but it seems my crappness was only part of it and the setup was playing a factor too.

Don’t get me wrong here, i’m not saying this has turned me into a riding god… Not for a single second. But i do feel it’s given me something i wasn’t getting previously and as well as that a bit of knowledge as to why.

Of course, we could have found all of this with bracketing, testing etc… but i honestly thought i had the bike dialled well… It seems my well and the datas version of well, differ quite a lot.

I believe you have used Shockwiz a lot too and reading the above makes me wonder how much value you’d put on Shockwiz in the future?  Blown out of the water or still a useful if less comprehensive tool?

Ime a shockWiz gives you a great base and go from there

I believe you have used Shockwiz a lot too and reading the above makes me wonder how much value you’d put on Shockwiz in the future? Blown out of the water or still a useful if less comprehensive tool?

I’m going to reserve judgement on that question for now as I think I’ve been guilty of underselling the Shockwiz when using it in terms of settings and confirmation bias.

Reason, I always set it up using soft//poppy and like everything, it’s only as good as the data you give it.

I’m thinking that soft and poppy may well give a nice armchair feel to it, but also not necessarily be the best for riding and support. So potentially setting the Shockwiz to firm or even neutral may be very very different.

As I say, we did my mates bike last weekend and his rear is same as mine as it’s the same bike and his pressure is 80+ lower than mine, but the weight difference in riders would put that realistically closer to 30, so we’re curious to see how he feels on mine and how I feel on his.

I’ll never say a bad word about Shockwiz but I’m curious to see how the settings compare.

I’ll never say a bad word about Shockwiz but I’m curious to see how the settings compare.

Me too.  The problem for Shockwiz is it has to make recomendations without knowing what you are riding, it has no idea whether you are testing it on a set of berms, a line of jumps or just rolled over a log.  I’m just interested that you have made so many changes to what I assume was a Shockwiz set up

We’ve been having some Shockwiz issue, so mine hasn’t been done (I think)

This was a brand new Shockwiz from warranty test was fresh out of the box.

Another minor downside with them, they’re at times a bit flakey.

I’ve found the shockwiz about as reliable as the weather forecast .

I had the bike out on Sat and I was curious as to how it’d ride on less tech terrain. The trails were generic Berkshire XC stuff with some slightly more interesting trails thrown in.

But the potential harshness I expected didn’t arrive, it just rode really nicely and with less sag and more pressure helped in terms of pedal strikes, I didn’t actually have any at all

So really ?

Is soft and poppy shockwhizz terminology, soft and poppy seem to counter each other in my mind?

Yes it’s in the menu. Maybe that’s why it was so far out as the options were counter intuitive? Not sure in truth.

https://www.feeltheberm.com/blog/new-custom-tune-mode-for-shockwiz