Barcia trolling us about his forks: Air or Spring

chasetwo79 wrote:

I swapped out my internals in my 16 FC450 but have left the AER in my 20 and tbh I’ve not had any issues with them...

I swapped out my internals in my 16 FC450 but have left the AER in my 20 and tbh I’ve not had any issues with them in 25 hours on the bike. I told myself that I was going to ride them for a bit before making a plan on what direction to go and now I’m pretty sure I am going to stay AER and change some valving for the mid stroke and that’s it.

I’m a 6 foot, 215 pound, 37 year old Vet A rider who rides just MX and for me anytime I buy a bike I have to swap out both front and back springs and such. With the AERs I can simply swap the rear shock spring and then work with the air pressure on the forks. I’ve done nothing to the forks other than add air and mess with clickers and it works pretty well. Much better than I thought it would.

Air forks are the future and one of the main reasons that the Austrian bikes are so light.

Jeff_Brines wrote:

You have one part right, which is where the oil resides. However, the overall function of oil height in most mx forks is very similar to...

You have one part right, which is where the oil resides. However, the overall function of oil height in most mx forks is very similar to volume spacers (for mountain bikers).

Without getting into the weeds too much on volume differential between mtb and mx and seal differential (both play big factors here) oil height has a massive impact on spring rate later in the travel. How much of an impact depends on the fork model.

I'll hunt around for a forces curve with oil height as a variable.

MDana87 wrote:

That would be cool to see. I haven't spent time playing with oil height on the AER, but sounds like I should experiment. Any idea if...

That would be cool to see. I haven't spent time playing with oil height on the AER, but sounds like I should experiment. Any idea if these are long & thin enough to suck oil out of the external chamber while on the bike & in the clamps?