This has peaked my interest basically the guy claims we have been using the wrong tech for years.

http://www.pinkbike.com/news/brew-nitro-shox-eurobike-2015.html

First thing I thought of when I saw the title was ‘bet milyard is involved somewhere’ his lad used to race what to many would be the perfect dh bike (industrial looking, single swing arm, fully Enclosed gearbox/drivetrain (may even have been shaft driven?)) he was getting half decent results on it, anyway some journos had a dabble with it and said that while the nitro (think it was hydrogen charged then though) shock obviously worked incredibly well, it made the bike feel like it had a flat rear tire. Not sure why they stopped racing though, guess the lad got bored or had other things to think about, as we all did at that age.

Now, back to milyard and those naughty V12 (yeah, V12) motorbikes he builds…

Is this the same Millyard shock that’s evolved?

It was pretty much universally praised by everyone who ride it.

Hunter went on to say that back-to-back timed runs comparing the Nitro Shox with an unnamed production shock showed that their test rider was consistently ten percent faster with the BREW damper on his bike

10%?? from a shock? er, Bullocks!

Is this the same Millyard shock that’s evolved?
It was pretty much universally praised by everyone who ride it.

Yeah that one. I *think* it was dirt who played with it (may have been MBUK, was reading both at the time.) and mention the odd feel compared to traditional shocks. They did praise it’s function though

Maxtorque, I can well believe 10%.

Stephen Millyard has been racing again recently on an updated version of the bike, he’s no slouch (podiumed in BDS’s).

I think Jones rode one for Dirt & praised it years ago, considering it only had 150mm travel as well.

Bernard Kerr rode one for a few years a while ago too.

Ah I’m talking about 7/8 years ago, a quick scout round Google indicates there’s been a bit of dev since then

I would imagine that one of the reasons it hasn’t had an easy route to market is that the spring is pressurised nitrogen instead of air.

tomhoward

Maxtorque, I can well believe 10%

Let take typical 3.5 minute DH run. That’s 210 sec, so 10% is 21 seconds.

If you can improve a run by 21 sec by just changing your shock, you could rock up at the Last DH world Cup in Val di Sole, and you’d be able to move from 70th place to 1st place in the race. That’s how big a 10% margin is. Lets face it, There are world cup racers who have had crashes, completely come off their bike and still not lost 10%!

That’s why it’s bullocks, and shows the people “claiming” these numbers are idiots……..

I’m a real cynic when it comes to these lone experts/geniuses screaming “LEFT” when an entire industry of thousands of people are saying “right”. I (probably unfairly) tar Chris Porter with the same brush.

10% improvement though… That’s a hell of a claim.

Like I say, I’m talking 7/8 years ago when there were bigger gaps between riders on the results sheet and rear shock were much less tuneable/ advanced. So the difference may not be as big now, but I’d still expect it to be a significant improvement, knowing what a talented man Allen Millyard is.

Also, 10% faster could mean through a speed trap. 33 mph plays 30…

Very interesting. Let’s hope it gets to market so we can all try it out.

Imagine if you teamed one up with a pair of carbon wheels – 20% faster for no effort!

The industry has stopped screaming left and right over the last few years. Now they just scream CHINESE FIRE DRILL!

I don’t believe the stuff about % faster but I had a look at the dirt video and it does look like the rear tracks well on a rough track.

Thank **** this is back. Been waiting a long time.

iirc it was incredible over really rough terrain.
However.You can’t pump the bike.You can’t pre load it to jump.It pedals like riding through treacle.

Forgive me if I missed it (I’m hungover and just woken up) but if it uses nitrogen as the spring,can the user set their own sag? What if said rider wants to adjust the sag for different tracks? It’ll probably be fine for pro pit crews, but is it practical for your average punter?

I like the idea, nitrogen reacts to heat far better than air, top race teams have been filling tyres with nitrogen for ages to negate changes in pressure when things heat up, can’t see why it wouldn’t work for shocks.

As others said though, the practicalities are probably the barrier, air shocks for all their compromises are a doddle to set up with a shock pump….and I think a certain section of our MTB community love to tinker, buying a ‘fit and forget’ nitrogen shock would be anathema to some people’s expectations of how suspension should work.

You only have to look at how people lap up the RS tokens nonsense to see what I mean….to me that indicates a half finished product, one that needs development before coming to market….but people love the fact they can take the fork apart, shove some plastic in the air can and change the feel….maybe it makes them feel like an engineer or a suspension guru?!….personally if it comes working well straight out of the box and has as few adjustment dials as possible then that indicates to me that it’s probably a better product and probably had more R&D for a wider range of rider weights that a product put out for 60kg flyweights and some naff tokens in the box so you can finish the job the suspension company should’ve done in the first place!

Rant over, if it came to market at less than £1000 and had service centres that could take care of the nitrogen element I’d buy one, for me MTBing is about riding not tinkering and fixing stuff, I want my bikes to work with as little hassle as possible and as close to zero maintenance as I can get away with.

Good luck to Hunter, Millyard or whoever is developing it at the moment, no doubt there will be resistance from the established players but if they can get them built and sell direct over the internet I don’t see why it couldn’t take off, get a few decent privateers in DH on this shock too, bloody some noses and they’ll be laughing.

What on Earth are you talking about Deviant??

The reason you can “fiddle” with the air shocks on your bike is that the riders weight is such a high proportion of the total mass!!

On your car, which weighs 1.5 tonnes, even a real fatty getting into it isn’t going to make that much difference. But for a bike, the ratio between sprung and unsprung weight changes massively depending on rider weight! I’m 68kg, my mate who happens to have a practically the same bike as me is 105kg. Do you think that that bike should leave the factory with a setup that can’t be changed and suits neither of us??

Next time you go out on your bike, strap a 25kg bag of sand to your back and see how you get on with you std setup………….

Deviant, if you carry on like this you’re going to take Hora’s crown for ill-considered rants which totally miss the point!

Don’t think so, I read the article as suggesting nitrogen charged shocks offer better damping than their air equivalents and that because of this better performance less adjustment is needed to get them working as they should.

The article also addressed the rider weight issue in saying that shocks would leave the factory already tuned for the purchasers weight….it also said there is more margin for error with nitrogen anyway so setup becomes less critical.

What’s not to like?…. Sounds great to me and seems far better thought out than the route most manufacturers go down where the fork you buy is very much ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’ until you either pay to have it custom tuned by Loco, TF etc….or start buggering around with tokens/spacers yourself.

Add in how air damped suspension changes in performance based on how hot the shock/fork gets whereas nitrogen doesn’t to the same extent and it seems superior all round.

For once this seems like a genuine step forward instead of different sized wheels or plus sized tyres.

All of the air shocks I’ve ever owned have come with 80% nitrogen fitted as standard. Would increasing that to 100% really make that much difference?

Most suspension systems are damped by oil passing over shims or through orifices, not air (the chamber behind the IFP just helps allow for oil displacement).
They use air as the spring medium.The loss in performance as they get hotter is caused by the oil becoming less viscous,not expansion of the air for the spring.There is nothing stopping you using pressurized nitrogen in the air can of your fox/rock shox shock.
You seem a little confused.

^^^^ This. In fact, it’s the water content that is the issue! “dry” air is fine and changes it’s density pretty much the same as Nitrogen, as you might expect!

Is 100% tinned nitrogen not ‘drier’ than the atmospheric 80% stuff? I’m sure that’s where the advantage is, rather than the nitrogen itself. There’s no moisture in there to condense/expand over a wide range of temperatures.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=why+tyres+nitrogen&oq=why+tyres+nitrogen&aqs=chrome..69i57.7985j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8

It could be complete snake oil 650B bunkum though.

[Quote]I like the idea, nitrogen reacts to heat far better than air, top race teams have been filling tyres with nitrogen for ages to negate changes in pressure when things heat up, can’t see why it wouldn’t work for shocks.[/quote]

Nitrogen is used because it is convenient, you could use dry air but that’s not quite so easy to get a hold of whereas bottleddry nitrogen you could pick up from a welding shop.

Don’t think so, I read the article as suggesting nitrogen charged shocks offer better damping than their air equivalents and that because of this better performance less adjustment is needed to get them working as they should.

Nitrogen damping and nitrogen sprung are different things. Cane Creek used to do an air damped shock, but that’s still a completely different thing again, this one still does the damping with oil.

When the DHX was first released there was talk of adjusting the damping by adjusting the air pressure behind the IFP which should have the same effect.

Boost valve on fox shocks is basically using the IFP to ramp up the damping through the stroke i.e position sensitive vs speed sensitive (shims).On most shocks it is factory set .On dhx air/coil it was user adjustable for pressure and volume.

One thing is for sure, it’s going to feel different. It may be faster or it may be slower. Most likely it will be like everything else, it will have some advantages for certain applications and disadvantages for others.

The important thing is that it’s different and therefore a game changer, a quantum leap forward. Manufacturers will soon be coming out with ‘Oleo Optimised’ frames. Within a year coil and air shocks will be consigned to the great clearance bin along with 26″ rims, 9mm quick release, 135mm hubs, non-dropping posts, etc.

Choices like these are far too important to leave to the consumer.

I’m holding out for a carbon torsion beam sprung magnetorheological damped shock to be released.I’ve calculated it will be 11.678% fasterer.

You seem a little confused.

Perhaps and perhaps not, a similar shock appeared in the Millyard DH bike and was universally praised despite having less travel than conventional DH bikes, it was noted for its simplicity too which for me can only be a good thing.

Maybe people like paying over the odds for average kit?…maybe that feeling of being an amateur engineer armed with your shock pump and twiddling dials is worth more to people than kit that works better?….with the Ohlins DH shock on the Demo also praised for its ease of setup and lack of adjustability I’m excited that things could be moving to a point where your shock arrives in a box and actually just works straight away, no faffing around, no tokens, no posting to Loco/TF etc….sounds bloody great to me.

It is probably better for people who don’t understand what they are doing….not to be able to do anything to things 😉

moving to a point where your shock arrives in a box and actually just works straight away, no faffing around, no tokens, no posting to Loco/TF etc….

thats pretty much what that achieves though, mine came back with about 4 clicks of rebound ranging from a bit slow to a bit fast, I’d agree more adjustment isnt always better, but shocks like the CCDB were as good as they are in part due to a huge range of adjustment allowing anyone at any weight/bike/track to get the optimum put of it.

I like not having to bugger about with forks/shocks too much. I like my CTD stuff though.

The “feels like a flat tyre” thing reminds me of my herb- it had a pretty complicated linkage path, linear and soft as pudding for the first couple of inches then increasingly progressive. Tracked beautifully, soaked up rattly bumps, tons of grip. But felt completely weird because of all of that, and yep, first run of every single ride I thought it had a flat.

Always interesting to see new cool things but I suppose the danger with a radically different shock is that all the bikes are designed for shocks that work “normally”.

deviant – Member

You only have to look at how people lap up the RS tokens nonsense to see what I mean….to me that indicates a half finished product, one that needs development before coming to market….

Or, different people are different weights, and even 2 people of the same weight might want their suspension to operate differently. There’s no one perfect suspension setup.

If you’ve got a suspension company making you your own personal shocks (and adjusting them if you get fat) then what you say makes sense, otherwise adjustability > lack of adjustability, unless you’re either lucky enough to like the suspension exactly how it came out of the box, and be the right weight, or, you’re not competent to set it up so would prefer a “not too bad” setting out of the box to having the possibility of making it brilliant.

(and I say that from experience, I put an ohlins shock in the motorbike and instantly drowned in the settings, for the first few rides it worked less well than the rubbish cheap kyb that came in it as standard.)