Played with forks and shock today

i found a 41mm showa non adj on ebay a few months ago to go with the new lh leg i had. i had the cartridges redone by Krooztune, a local company in melbourne and got them back together and fitted today. the issue with these forks as std is that they have a lot of high speed compression damping, so they're nervous on rough surfaces. i remember our demos from years ago being like that. for springs i used some originals from these forks (i had a spare pair) which i cut down from 19 odd coils to 14.5 odd coils. the spring rate, as measued by Krooztune, was 0.70 std and 0.86 for my cut down ones. used 5 weight oil in them with 100mm air gap.

previously i had fitted 0.80 springs to the original 40mm Marzocchi forks - the original Marzocchi springs are 'progressive' that's more like two different springs in reality. you need a heap of preload to get the sag right, which just compresses and binds (which therefore negates) the soft section of the spring totally. this helped a little, but the issue that still annoyed me was the fact the Marzocchi don't have any compression damping until about 2/3 travel - none at all. they don't have removeable cartridges either, so you can't revalve them. so if you hit the brakes hard at low speed the front would drop so much that it almost caught me out a few times when working my way thru traffic - the only riding i do now. plus i gave them too much preload by mistake - they had 30mm preload which gave 21mm sag with my 95 kg on it (i'm tubbing up).

with 12mm preload on the new springs i have 35mm sag with me on it. i ended up machining some plastic tube (the old 40mm Marzocchi preload spacers) to extend the showa "steel with plastic end insert" preload tubes - worked well. now there's much less drop if you hit the brakes. plus it seems to ride quite nicely, so i was happy with that.

i got a std rear spring rate checked too - it starts out at 8.6 and finishes at 12 according to Krooztune. i'm not sure how far compressed that is tho. mine originally had 20mm of preload on it - free length is 185mm, it was fitted at 165mm. sag was 47mm. i added 5mm of preload which reduce the sag to 40mm. should have gone another 3 or so mm. i'm amazed there's that much preload on it personally, but there you go. i have an 888 showa rear shock i might fit - it's kind of for the 851 that hasn't been ridden for 3 years. the body is a touch smaller than the sachs, so i think the remote preload adjuster i have from a showa bmw shock will fit it nicely. the original spring rate on it calculates at 11, which i thought was a bit hard, but now i'm not so sure i do have an ohlins 10.5 at work i could use that plus another that might be a white power at around 10.5.

it needs some rear shock help - it wallows quite badly on an off camber, stepped freeway on ramp i hit every commute. it's quite a good little test section for a shock i guess. options are to respring and revalve the std one, we did one for a customer recently who weighed the same as me that got an 8 rate spring - not sure how much preload it had, must have been a lot. the sag when fitted was fine on it. he was happy with the result anyway. and realistically the 888 shock will need a reco and revalve - it's amazing how much difference a good revalve can make on its own.