Overview
Motorcycle manufacturers have to produce a motorcycle at an affordable price for the "average" rider, to achieve this each component must be produced to a strict budget. The fine tolerances required by hydraulic components such as suspension units do not lend themselves to cheap mass production.
We have yet to meet the mystical "average" rider that all bikes are set up for, every rider has different requirements from their suspension. We often see when we are working with race teams that two riders can ride identical bikes with their own preferred suspension settings around a racetrack at lap record pace within a hundredth of a second. If the riders then swap bikes neither can understand how the other gets round the track so fast with those settings. There is no magical setting that suits all riders.
Improving the suspension allows you to brake later, carry more corner speed and accelerate earlier, so reaching your top speed quicker.
Springs
The springs support you and the motorcycle. Without the correct spring rate for your weight the suspension will not perform to it's full potential. If necessary we change the springs to suit your individual requirements.
Damping
Well-damped suspension has a balanced relationship between low-speed and high-speed damping on both the compression and rebound strokes. Low and high-speed damping refers to shaft velocity, or how fast your wheels are moving up and down. It is imperative that the relationship between low and high speed is set up correctly internally, this is rarely the case with production bikes.
Fork Pistons and Valving
Cartridge forks
Some manufacturers control the damping of the forks using pistons with very small orifices and others use large orifices.
Small orifices work fine at low velocities but when you hit a sharp bump this causes the forks to compress at high velocity, the rise in damping force is very severe as the orifices cannot displace enough fluid, this results in a harsh fork action and chatter.
Large orifices work fine at high velocities but the orifices displace too much fluid at low velocities, this gives a lack of feedback and a mushy feeling from the forks.
Our solution is to replace poorly designed pistons or re-valve the stock items to more accurately meter the fluid flowing through them.
Damper Rod Forks
Some bikes mostly those built prior to the mid nineties and some current models with cheaper basic forks are fitted with Damper Rod Forks. These use a rod with two sets of orifices to control damping, the bottom set of orifices control the compression damping, and the top set of orifices control the rebound damping.
The biggest problem with these forks is that they generate a progressive damping curve, the orifices are either going to be too large to provide adequate low-speed damping, or not large enough to eliminate hydraulic lock, neither of which is desirable.
To overcome the inherent design faults of these forks we install Race Tech Emulators that change damper rod forks to operate like well-tuned cartridge forks.
Shock Absorbers
Manufacturers invest very little in the design and quality of the shocks. Although standard shocks have external adjustment capabilities, these adjusters have their limits and typically affect only a small portion of the entire damping range, they will not compensate for the large tolerances required for mass production or poor internal valving design. The majority of standard shocks have a whole catalogue of faults, only some of which are correctable. The cost to achieve this would be close enough to the cost of a precision aftermarket shock to make replacement the only sensible option.
Custom engineered suspension allows the full potential of bike and rider to be achieved.
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