Afternoon, still shock week in the Weeksy household. I’m happy with the RP23 i’ve got in the G-160 now but we’ve now moved onto my lads shock.

As you may recall he has a Specialized Sworks 2015. This came with an Ohlins STX22 which has now been binned due to catastrophic failure.

Due to Specialized using a funny ended shock we’ve ended up with a BikeYoke 2.1 installed which allows us to run a 210*55 shock in there.

So we’ve bought a Rockshox Debonair Deluxe in a 210*55.

First question may or may not be completely daft… but i’ve had to fit it inverted due to clearances.

[url=https://flic.kr/p/2kFcb1M]2021-02-26_05-37-53[/url] by Steve Weeks, on Flickr

If i flip it i can’t quite get it in as the frame contacts with the housing at the top end, so we flipped it and it fits fine. Firstly, is the any reason i can’t run it this way round ?

Now when we do shocks usually it’s 1psi – 1lb weight. So him being a small lad, usually 100psi does us nicely, this method has worked well as a baseline for shocks for years for me. However at 100psi he’s getting 40% sag. So we’ve upped it closer to 120psi to get 30% sag which i can live with, but he’s saying that’s really hard. He may just need to get used to that though.

The problem is, even doing small jumps off kerbs he’s bottoming it out at 120psi.

Is this shock compatible with bands/spacers or do we just have what we have and that’s it ? Any thoughts on bottoming it out ? Would increasing rebound help us there as it will then rebound earlier in the travel ? He has always liked his shocks fairly soft and quite slow on the rebound/pressures, but that’s because we use a Shockwiz and dial it for ‘soft/poppy’

We’ve got the Shockwiz on there now, but we’re not out testing until tomorrow. But thought i’d get some ideas from anyone here first.

Yes you can put plastic tokens in the shock to build bottom out ramp

Ok, I’ve seen them on YouTube, different system than I’m used to seeing,but essentially look simple enough. No idea how many I have in there as it arrived.

Thanks for the sanity check though

Spacers sound like the win – I had similar problems on an RP23.

The particular pressure for a given sag point will vary with the leverage the frame provides.

https://www.sramconnect.com/globalassets/document-hierarchy/service-manuals/rockshox/bottomless-tokens-english.pdf

We’ll find out then 🙂

I had the genius idea of getting up at 5am this morning as this was all playing on my mind and swapping my RP23 to his bike for the day.

1 hour later I’d fitted my shock to his after spending the time removing both, removing spacers, etc then went to fit his shock into my bike for the day and it doesn’t fit due to the Whyte Yoke fitting issues, weirdly the RP23 falls in beautifully but his RSDeluxe simple doesn’t fit unless i go nuts with a file again, which i didn’t feel the love for doing.

So he’s got the Deluxe today for better or worse LOL. Spacers are ordered and we’ll get them setup 🙂

Well that was a crazy interesting morning.

After I removed the shockwiz, removed the shock pressure obviously and the reinflated as I put back in his bike, it felt better. But I never mentioned it to him.

When out I asked him how it felt.
“Maybe 1-2 clicks of tortoise needed, but great”
So if checked shockwiz and it showed

1st goring by Steve Weeks – Flickr2BBcode LITE

So we gave it 2 tortoise but then also moved to the jump area with decent sized 10′ gaps and 15′ tables etc and got

2nd goring by Steve Weeks – Flickr2BBcode LITE

So we’re not far off. Obviously every setting is compromised for one or another style of riding, the xc based ride over is very different to jump area, but not bad. Best of all, no complaints from the lad.