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Bicycle Retailer Article about Answer

Tame Ape

BUY HOPE!!!!!!!
Mar 4, 2003
2,284
1
NYC
stiksandstones said:
This just in from a washed up has been....

Palmer did ride a boxxer. McAndrews demanded he be on one in 1996 and had the parts shipped out to europe for Tim Flooks to build him one.
He also rode it to a silver medal at the worlds in Cairns, .15 behind Nico.

Did I drop enough names?

Has been-over and out.

Stik-
Do you have any pics from those earlier days of DH/MTX stuff? I always love that shizz and seeing the contrast to the current stuff. Or is the photography a current thing?
TA
 

wizardB

Chimp
Mar 17, 2005
27
0
Slag fox rather than Manitou,L own three Fox Forks an F100RLT ,Talas RLC and a FloatTriad all three are at fox for the second time this year the F100 with less than 100KM on it.On the other hand my Minute and Flick just keep on bouncing the minute has over 2000km with one servicing and the flick has 2 full seasons on the shore with no problems.
PS the Talas has been at Fox for over 6 weeks now
 

thaflyinfatman

Turbo Monkey
Jul 20, 2002
1,577
0
Victoria
Jm_ said:
They used HSCV damping, which is essentially "shims". Hey, guess what the boxxer FINALLY uses?

The boxxer was mainstream at the time, and it existed due to production and marketing.

Other than that, the only real "technology" it brought was the one-peice cast lowers.

This is my semi-annual boxxer-bash, but apart from that, I don't think the boxxer had a big impact on the products that were developed after it. RS rode the "boxxer craze" as long as they could without changing the internals, and we've already heard enough from the riders how much "better" the new boxxer is. Welcome to shim-stack performance, but only 9 years after other companies were using it.
hahaha, here we go again for about the thousandth time. I think you place WAY too much emphasis on the arbitrary use of shims, rather than worrying about aperture size variation, oil flow rates, consistency etc. The reason shims are a good system is because you can have a central port for LSC (which is easy to adjust with a needle), and have a slightly preloaded, variable-aperture, high-cross-sectional-area group of secondary ports for the HSC. In other words, when the oil pressure builds sufficiently, the shims bend back off the ports they cover and allow oil to flow through (which is why you can revalve the damper by changing the shims, since it basically just alters how much oil pressure you need to bend the shims a given amount). The old Boxxer damper had an equivalent setup with the sprung high speed valve which you adjusted the preload on, and the LSC port. If you just pulled that part out of the compression cartridge and whacked a shim stack/LSC port/needle valve setup in there, you'd find that it was no better. The reason for this I believe is simply oil displacement (and the fact that it's not positive displacement as such either, due to the crappy plastic compression rings circlipped into the stanchions that allow oil through) ratios and thus oil speed. Manitou used to advertise that their oil flow speed was half that of the shaft speed (or was it one third... I forget). I did some displacement calcs for the Boxxer damper, and the oil speed through the centre of the compression rod is actually 2.5 TIMES the shaft speed - so at least 5x faster than the Manitou equivalent (that'd be for TPC/TPC+ btw). Notably the new Boxxers slow the oil down HEAPS (about 1:4 iirc, haven't got the calcs with me) by displacing much much less oil and using much smaller apertures. However, they still don't use a shim stack as such to allow compression blow-off from high to low speed. The Motion Control (MC) damper tube (the plastic thing with all the slotted holes in the side of it) actually compresses slightly and thus moves some otherwise covered ports back away from the metal LSC-adjusting plate at the bottom of the assembly, which opens up more ports to prevent spiking. Whilst this isn't a shim stack as such, it does a very similar thing (in a less tunable manner). The shim stack in the Team/WC models is actually a second damper IN SERIES (conventional LSC/HSC circuits are parallel) which the flow is directed through to give more/tunable HSC damping, whereas the Race model might theoretically display a tendency to blow through travel at high shaft speeds. However, the Race model exhibits all the smoothness (actually, arguably moreso) of the WC/Team models, so obviously it's not simply due to the shim stack that the forks have better damping/smoothness. This leads me to believe that cavitation/flow separation caused by low pressure/high velocity dampers such as the old Boxxers is the main reason the dampers don't feel anywhere near as nice - not whether the things are shimmed or not.
 

thaflyinfatman

Turbo Monkey
Jul 20, 2002
1,577
0
Victoria
That's not analysis... that's just a very basic explanation of how the dampers work. You could go on about it for years, literally, and the guys that make this stuff obviously do. If you wanted to really thoroughly analyse the dampers currently on the market I reckon you'd be looking at literally 500 hours per damper just doing measurements/calculations and CFD simulations.