Touring on suspension forks...?

EnglishChris

hi...

I suspect this may draw some strong conflicting advice but I've been mulling this over and can't quite decide so thought I'd throw it out there...

I'm planning a one-two month tour from London down to the east of Switzerland (mostly on roads), then through Switzerland on the Panorama mountain bike route... and then...well, I'm unsure.. possibly on down through the Alps to Nice. If I'm really quick then maybe I'd head along the Med and nip down to Barcelona but that depends on lots of things, work included. I've not toured before and will be using an On-One Inbred. I'm using this rather than a road bike because my preference in future is for relatively rugged touring - so this is kind of an 'easy' test to see if I even really like decent length tours, but somewhere safe, developed and easy to get from if I hate it!

I'll be camping, and riding solo so the intention is to take front and rear panniers to spread the load a little. I'm looking at buying racks at the moment - I'm prepared to spend good money on something of quality that will last and be very reliable.

The fork on my Inbred is currently a RockShox Reba Race with disc brakes (Juicy 3s). (the parts are from my hardtail MTB which is slowly being used to build a commuter / tourer out of the Inbred. I'm undecided whether to just go with this fork and get a rack that would fit (e.g. an Old Man Mountain), or to swap it out for a steel fork and get 'normal' front rack. I know that a large proportion of tourers don't use suspension forks, because of reliability, weight etc but I've also read articles from some that do.

The negative about just going with the Reba is that I fork (ha!) out for a front rack that would then be no use if I decided in future that touring with a suspension fork wasn't the best. The positives are that it involves less faffing with the bike now, and that I have a suspension fork for the rougher parts of my trip, and t hat I'm not left with a set of Rebas that i only bought a few years ago (though I guess I could sell them).

So, I thought I'd open it to the house... Does anyone have experience of touring using suspension forks, especially with front racks? How did you find it? Worth it? Unnecessary? Pain in the ar*e?

Cheers

andymiller

I tour on a bike with suspension forks, but mainly so I can camp and do off-road day rides. I'm not convinced forks are much help for off-road touring - ie riding on dirts roads and tracks. They take some of the pain out of inadvertently riding into a pothole but they don't reduce vibration and small bumps (or at least so far as I can tell) big tyres are best for that.

The problem with modern airforks like your Rockshox is that they work with air and a very little oil which means that if the seals should fail then you are stuffed. Also the official service intervals are very short. One option you might want to consider is refurbishing an old set of Marzocchi Bombers - these work with oil and springs rather than air and so are going to require less maintenance and less prone to catastrophic failure. (This is what I've done and it wasn't that hard).

As far as front panniers are concerned, my advice would be to do without - rear panniers and a drybag give you plenty of storage capacity and believe me it's bad enough having to haul a bike and two panniers up a steep unrideable slope - four would be a nightmare. If you decide you need them you can get carriers that work with suspension forks - as well as OMM there's Tubus and a make that Chain Reaction sell - Axis I think. So far as I know there's no rack that will work with both.

cycladelic

My old mountain bike had front sus forks and they are okay for touring, but I wonder how much energy gets wasted with them going up and down all day. I went to Vietnam with them - they weren't required.

l now have steel forks and often take front paniers.

You can look at the Carradice rack/pannier combo called Limpet or this Lowrider one...

http://www.carradice.co.uk/index.php?pa ... duct_id=77

I had Limpets, but found removing the bags a bit of a hassle - you may just want to remove the contents and leave the panniers on their loop/frame.

andymiller

cycladelic wrote:

My old mountain bike had front sus forks and they are okay for touring, but I wonder how much energy gets wasted with them going up and down all day.

Modern MTB forks have the option of a lockout device. In any case your forks must have been set really soft if they were going up and down all day - at least if you were riding on surfaced and unsurfaced roads.

cycladelic

Hi, Andy

They were Rockshoxs - a bit old - and didn't have a locking mechanism. It wasn't like they were bouncing, but any small amount of give will detract from the energy put into propelling a bike.

About 20 years ago, I splashed out on a high-end Moulton and that seemed to go up and down when giving it some riding up a climb.

I just don't feel sus' forks are required, unless you're riding on washboard tracks in South America for weeks on end.

andymiller

I'm not saying suspension forks are required either - I suspect most riders can get by perfectly well without them at least for touring. However, I am deeply sceptical about the energy loss argument: the typical suspension fork that a tourer might use would have 100mm of travel of that riding on unsurfaced roads I'd estimate that on most days riding on surfaced/unsurfaced roads you'd maybe use 25mm of travel (50mm-75mm on a rough downhill descent and very rarely the full100mm). In any event, I suspect that in the absence of suspension, that energy would go into bouncing the front wheel off the ground.

EnglishChris

Thanks for the views guys. I don't think I'd bother buying another set of forks for touring with, just wondering if I can get away with using them for long enough to make it worthwhile buying a set of racks for them.

Its pretty accepted in mountain biking that the suspension, even in the front fork, does suck power away from you on climbs in particular. Less so with the fork than rear suspension, but even so. My Rebas do have a lockout but if I think this is going to be a set up as a fulltime touring/commuting bike maybe its worth getting a set of steel forks if I can find the right size.

Maybe thats an excuse to buy another Inbred frame and use the forks to start to build up an off road hardtail... ;-)

mz__jo

I used a Fireeye Stoker fork on my MTB as a tourer (and as an mtb) and for load carrying it was great, super rigid (much too rigid as a mountain bike) and 100% reliable. There are a enough holes to work out how to fix luggage but you have to drill a hole on the crown and the 700grams that you save over a sus fork won't make a lightweight out of your MTB.
I have now been convinced by the club's trail riders to fit a sus fork but I have built a real road tourer to compensate. I have doubts about the wisdom of loading the lowers of a sus fork, they don't strike me as very strong for load carrying and I doubt a OMM rack would fit over the fork-ends on my (cheap) sus fork.

weeve

just building 2 bikes right this minute...or should be but too lazy and watching TV ...Thorn Ripio frame for me and inbred frame for the Mrs. Doing similar road/mountain track trips and not getting front panniers...just a decent bar bag (ortlieb) and rear rack and panniers (thorn expedition rack/ortlieb panniers)...thats 47 litres of space. Add whatever you want to the top of the rack (tent/mat) and thats about as much I ever have on alpine climbing expeditions ...so defo not taking more on the bike...if I ever need to Id just buy an extrawheel (google it if not sure what it is)

Im using regular fox fork for trips i want to dump the stuff and go mountain biking ..and a Pro carbon fork for times for rough trails and road combined.