Fork fettling question

Ferrals

I'm happy with how my fork is performing 95% of the time, but yesterday I was finding that when travelling at speed through the chattery stuff (in particular sidewinder and dead sheep gully on penhydd in afan) all the vibrations seemed to be transmitted to my hands, to the extent I was slowing down to regain control. I normally run the compression damping 2 clicks in so fully opened that to see if it made a difference but it didn't seem to do much. The forks are rs sektors with 1compression and 1 rebound knob. Is there anything I can do to reduce the vibration in terms or rebound? It seems right all the rest of the time so don't want to mess around with it unless it will clearly improve things.
As this is the first bike I've had with modern suspension forks,and as I didn't ride much for a long time on my old elastomer sprung bike I've no idea if the vibration is just par for the course or not? I guess some of it will be coming through the frame from the rear wheel (hardtail).

BloggingFit

You could try slowing the rebound a little to see if it helps without compromising the set up for the rest of your riding.

Otherwise you may just be at limit of the fork for that particular part of the trail.

Ferrals

Cheers I'll give that a crack

Herdwick

BloggingFit wrote:

You could try slowing the rebound a little

I'd say quicken it up, slowing the rebound will cause the fork to pack up ie won't extend fast enough to suck up the next hit so will stiffen more.

BloggingFit

Herdwick wrote:

BloggingFit wrote:

You could try slowing the rebound a little

I'd say quicken it up, slowing the rebound will cause the fork to pack up ie won't extend fast enough to suck up the next hit so will stiffen more.

The advice is based upon assuming rebound is already too quick for the high speed chatter on the trail so making it quicker still will only amplify the problem. If rebound is within a normal range then yes, slowing may cause packing down but as there has been no mention of the forks dropping down and packing through the trail we can assume that it's more likely a faster rebound issue.

Equally it could be neither and just the limitation of the fork.

The Rookie

How much sag are you running? A Friend at work dropped his from 25 to 30% and said he found it much better over longer chattery sections.

Ferrals

Cheers, I'm running 30% sag already if I remember correctly. Kev from Lodge cycles helped me set up the forks when he serviced them and after that they felt 100% better than how I'd had them before so I'm sure they are practically spot on (the issue I felt over the weekend was the first time i felt they could be improved). It may well be the limits of the forks and I can live with it if that's the case, but I'll try slowing the rebound a touch and see if it makes things better as I don't notice any packing down at the moment.

When I next get them serviced in a month or so I'm going to try spacing the travel down from 130mm to 120mm which if I've understood correctly will actually mean that 10mm becomes negative travel and so may improve the chatteryness as it will fill in the holes a touch more.

The Rookie

No, reducing travel doesn't work like that, it moves the rebound stop so it can't rebound as far is all.