We're stoked to announce that we'll be supporting and working closely with Josh this season. Josh only took to mountain biking at aged 14 and at age 16 found himself the overall winner of both the regional Gravity Events series and the Pearce Cycles series. After a disappointing start to the season Josh switched to the Saracen and turned it around to finish 5th overall Nationally - this boy is quick!!
What's more Josh is eager (perhaps too much so) to experiment. So having Josh on board, as well as Becci Skelton and Anna Craig, is going to give us even more insight to the Saracen Myst. This is perfect because we want to use our ambassadors to gain insights that help us to get the best out of our customers bikes. Josh challenges every decision and every tweak and that's great. Today we got started!
No one wants to give too much away about how to set their bike is set up, but we can give some generic tips based on our findings up to now:
Working with the 2021 Fox 40's compared to previous connotations show that you will generally need less volume spacers. Josh is running 2 less by comparison to his previous 2019 forks. Air pressure is about 15% above body weight. The fork tune gave plenty of rebound speed so we were able to adjust both faster and slower to find that sweet spot. Again, on older forks I often find that the HSR needs to be pretty much open but not so much on these newer forks.
In terms of spring rate/air pressure, we worked in typical values for the fork. This is a tricky stage without data because I am yet to find a reliable method of relating static sag to dynamic sag. Let's say about 20% though. On the rear of this bike we have looked at the leverage curve and axle path to decide what might be optimal sag. We want the sag to be in the region of the axle path that gives us the best motion. Between 30 and 80mm the Myst has pretty much direct up and down movement so we've set the sag in between so that the wheel is moving easily over the 'chatter'.
The leverage curve of the Myst is quite and odd one. Is is very progressive at first. That means that the rear can feel very soft when you sit on it. It does ramp up quite quickly though. Later in the stroke it becomes linear and then digressive. This means that if you underspring the Myst it will tend to blow through that last bit of travel and bottom out frequently. On the other hand if you overspring it it won't give you ideal sag. For Josh we got just this; 400lb was blowing through and 450lb was only giving us 15% Ssag. The 425lb was perfect. The Bottom out resistance of the Fox DHX2 seems to be enough to cancel out that digressive end stroke in any case. Axle positions histograms for the Myst overlay each other beautifully on the myst, It's a very nicely balanced bike when set up and there is no wonder the bike has proven itself with some many race results over the years.
The Myst is relatively linear bike so we've gone for quite a bit of LSC damping and softer air to give it a more linear fork feel. The data shows this as an excellent balance to the rear.
Essentially this graph shows a position change at the axle on the x-axis and compression velocity on the y-axis. Technically acceleration is a force, but velocity is the closest we can get to that. So, in simple terms this graph shows the relationship between the force through the axle and the amount of suspension travel used. There is always some degree of scatter because more force is required for a position change deep into the travel compared to at the start of the stroke. The orange point show the rear and blue the fork. What this demonstrates is that the front and rear follow the same trend in terms of the relationship between force and distance travelled. You may notice that the fork travels less. We get some spare travel on the fork so the max travel on the day was 90%. We kept this for hits bigger than what were on the track we used for testing.
To achieve the compression speed balance we used settings that I frequently come across but are not really ideal or what you might expect. On the rear we had to add a lot of HSC damping and very little LSC damping. On the fork we are doing the converse, a lot of LSC damping and minimal HSC damping. If you have a stock Myst this is worth trying as it's not unusual.
So, in summary. Spring rate is critical on the rear. Try running lots of HSC and not so much LSC on the rear. Do the opposite with your fork. If you've mover from older Fox forks to new, you'll probably need less volume spacers than you are accustomed to.
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