The suspension on your dirt bike is an adventurous multitasker. It strengthens good wheel friction, smooths out your ride, and reacts in a minute to all the enthusiasm a racetrack or a trail can toss at it. Learn how to adjust dirt bike suspension to your weight.
Start with the fundamentals to keep your suspension working well: test your rider slackness, then fixed sag. Once those are ready, you can modify contraction and rebound between drives to contest several terrains. Next, fix your fork suspension to shift how your front wheel handles and your shock to influence the rear. This helpful chart clarifies dirt bike suspension adjustments from a nonprofessional viewpoint. And as you’re about to see, there’s much to earn from a bit of work.
Why Should You Modify Your Bike’s Suspension?
Although manufacturers have their bikes’ default locations, it doesn’t always sponsor every rider. So it is okay if you modify it. An excellent suspension adjustment will lessen the irritation you sense whenever your bike smashes a lump.
Modifying the bike, size, and strength is also essential as it assists with handling and suits your riding style better. Possibly your motorcycle is a used one; the old holder might have tweaked the bike, so it is okay if you modify it back to your chosen setting.
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Tools for Rear Shock Adjustment
You don’t certainly need some unique equipment to make this adjustment. But it is okay if you have tools like box wrenches, sockets, shock wrenches, crescent wrenches, and screwdrivers. Also, a good penetrant like the WD-40 will come in helpful to get persistent portions swapping.
Remove The Air Valve Caps And Set o-rings. To modify the shock air, you must eliminate the defensive valve caps. Just thread them off and spot them somewhere stable. Most tools and shocks have a rubber O-ring on the trunk to demonstrate travel force this to the seal. If your fork or shock doesn’t have an o-ring, put on a zip tie, but thread it back so it can be effortlessly eliminated.
1. Sit on Bike
Pull whether you do the front or rear suspension first. You should only modify one end at a time. It would help if you sat on your bike to reduce the suspension underneath your weight. If you ride with one, you need to wear your regular riding kit plus your bag. It’s best to lean against a wall or get a friend to help fix the bike. If you’re doing the rear suspension, modify the seat to your normal riding height and sit gently down. If you are doing the fork, get into the standing up posture you would use when going downhill. Kick out the suspension once and permit it to cease.
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2. Measure Sag
Shift the o-ring on the shock or fork down until it reaches the stamps. Getting a friend to do this might be more accessible so you don’t confuse your position. It would help if you now got off the bike gently so that you don’t compress the suspension anymore. Use the tape measure or leader and calculate the expanse between the o-ring and the seals. Remark on this.
3. Add Or Remove Air
You are now required to compute the excellent sag for a susceptible fork. Just time the sag proportion by the overall travel, giving you what the sag should be. For instance, a fork with 160mm of travel that you want 20% sag with would be 160 times 0.2, which equals 32 mm of sag.
A shock is a little bit more confusing as you need to understand the stroke length of the shock. It’s often composed on the shock or given with a code that can be looked up on the manufacturer’s website. Still, if you don’t know it or can’t find it, you’ll have to entirely reduce the shock, compress it to bottom it out, magnify it, and calculate the distance from the seal to the o-ring.
It’s worth citing that the shock’s stroke isn’t always the same as the exposed shaft length, so double review exactness is required here, even if it takes a bit extended. Now you expect to reiterate the estimation as with the fork. For example, a shock with a 65mm stroke running 30 % sag would be 65 times 0.3, giving 19.5mm of sag.
Correlate this mark figure to the sagging figure you calculated before. If it’s larger, you need to eliminate air, and if lower, expand it. Do this using the shock pump, but ensure that the valve and pump are neat and free from the gravel, as it’ll disarray things if you get dirt inside your shocks. Add or eliminate air in percentage to how far out your gauged figure is from your target, but be conscious that 5-10psi will make quite a significant distinction.
4. Measure Again, Repeat Until Ready!
You need to eliminate the shock pump and repeat the sag assessment step. Taking the pump off is crucial, as even the reasonably small air volume inside it will throw out your measurement. Some pumps have a particular valve so you can vacate the pump connected but separated from the air chamber.
Keep rehearsing steps 2-5 until you get the sag figures to rectify. Then, to
do the other end of the bike. Just repeat this method.
5. Replace Valve Caps and Ride!
This one is simple: pop the valve caps, wrap them back on, and get out there. Then, when you have the format right, remark the pressure you’ve put in both fork and shock so you can get set up earlier next time if you have to reduce them for any reason.
Final Words
Modifying your bike’s suspension is a satisfactory, straightforward method, but it can slightly confuse new riders. Many people believe it implicates a lot of guesswork, but the fact is that there’s a clear way to do it and an improper way to do it.
Take clues from this article’s dirt bike suspension tuning directions to ensure you do it correctly.
