so a few weeks ago under the advisement of local suspension afficionado luca marinelli i modded the spv damper of my '05 nixon super plus spv evole mega turbo edition. ][.
the mod consisted of removing on of the two shims at the top of the damper, with the understanding that it would liven up the rebound and reduce the spv-ness of the damper.
what i was really looking for was a fork that felt more like my fox, although the nixon is a 145 and the fox is a 100.
i had felt, before the mod, that the fork was out of wack, it rebounded really slowly but also had a lot of stiction. the mod definitely made the rebound quicker, and also made the fork sound different, the hissing/scratching noise of high pressure squirting became a lot louder.
but the stiction was still there, so today i rebuilt the fork. i dumped all the old lubricant and set everything back to factory (lubricant wise, the damper is still modded.) i used motorex 5 weight in the damper as called for, and 50 weight engine oil on top of the air piston, and that's within spec.
but i didn't have any 5-40 semi bath oil for the lowers, so i used 50 weight there too.
my questions are these:
- does anyone have any experience tuning spv dampers and have any pointers to offer?
-is using 50 weight instead of 5-40 semi bath a really bad thing for the lowers?
-why are there sometimes two numbers in oil specs?
-i also used park grease on the top cap threads instead of prep-m, how bad is that? and why?
-how exactly does semi bath lube work? what does it lube?
after finishing the rebuild i'm pretty happy with the fork (relative to it's old self, i'm still ordering a fox for the bike
) redoing the lubes definitely removed the heinous stiction from before. the rebound adjust still seems to have shockingly little effect on the performance of the fork though.
the mod consisted of removing on of the two shims at the top of the damper, with the understanding that it would liven up the rebound and reduce the spv-ness of the damper.
what i was really looking for was a fork that felt more like my fox, although the nixon is a 145 and the fox is a 100.
i had felt, before the mod, that the fork was out of wack, it rebounded really slowly but also had a lot of stiction. the mod definitely made the rebound quicker, and also made the fork sound different, the hissing/scratching noise of high pressure squirting became a lot louder.
but the stiction was still there, so today i rebuilt the fork. i dumped all the old lubricant and set everything back to factory (lubricant wise, the damper is still modded.) i used motorex 5 weight in the damper as called for, and 50 weight engine oil on top of the air piston, and that's within spec.
but i didn't have any 5-40 semi bath oil for the lowers, so i used 50 weight there too.
my questions are these:
- does anyone have any experience tuning spv dampers and have any pointers to offer?
-is using 50 weight instead of 5-40 semi bath a really bad thing for the lowers?
-why are there sometimes two numbers in oil specs?
-i also used park grease on the top cap threads instead of prep-m, how bad is that? and why?
-how exactly does semi bath lube work? what does it lube?
after finishing the rebuild i'm pretty happy with the fork (relative to it's old self, i'm still ordering a fox for the bike
) redoing the lubes definitely removed the heinous stiction from before. the rebound adjust still seems to have shockingly little effect on the performance of the fork though.