#26 Darren Murphy – Push Industries. Performance over everything

If you’ve ever found yourself deep in the weeds of suspension kinematics or obsessing over damping curves, you’re in good company. In the high-tech sanctuary of Push Industries in Colorado, founder and CEO Darren Murphy has spent two decades following his very own revolution in mountain bike suspension. This isn't just about making better parts; it's a technical philosophy—and perhaps a bit of stubbornness—required to build a manufacturing powerhouse that prioritizes elite performance above all else.

This episode sheds light on the history of the company and later takes a deep dive in how Push suspension works. It explains a lot about how suspension works and you will learn a lot directly from the mind behind the product. 

SUPPORT THIS CONTENT

Link to accompanied article.

Review of the Nine.One fork.

Read more suspension nerd articles.

www.TESTPILOT.bike

-------

Testpilot.bike – Your magazine for deep insights on product, bike culture and the two wheel industry.

4zig

Transcript

Jens – Testpilot.bike (00:29.883)
Darren Murphy, founder and CEO from Push Industries. He will explain how you will enter a slippery slope when you start to get into the weeds of suspension tech, making and providing improvements on what currently is on the market and ending up having a machine park of how many CNC machines Darren?

Darren (00:30.018)
Nice.

Darren (00:54.71)
I don't like to discuss that, we have a very sizable factory now. I will say that.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:01.553)
Yeah, so maybe you sparked a lot of interest in the mountain bike community now even more because yeah, you showed a front suspension, but maybe not all of the people out there know where you're actually coming from because you never thought that you would actually make such things. You started in... Yeah.

Darren (01:23.788)
No, I-

Yeah, for me, I have a passion for motorsports. I have a passion for bicycles. I've always loved racing motorcycles and cars and bicycles and et cetera. And I grew up in the era.

of the early days of mountain bike suspension and I was fascinated by it. know, for me, it was just one of those things that when I saw the very first, actually when I was riding mountain bikes, I had a Bontrager switchblade fork, right? I was always fascinated with mountain bike tech and I was always very mechanical.

And when mountain bike suspension, you know, it was that first RockShox RS1 and then the MAG-20 one, and then you had Marzocchi and Manitou and everybody kind of joining in. So I was fortunate to grow up in that era of that very early suspension development for mountain bikes. Found it fascinating. long story short, I was working in motorsports and

motorsports suspension and had an opportunity to get a new bike and the fork was way too soft and I was trying to figure out how to, you know, tune it, how to change it and quickly realized that there just wasn't a lot of tools available. There wasn't really any suspension tuning companies. There wasn't any like performance parts which were so readily available in motorsports. So if you had a motorcycle or a car, you know, there was just so many options for aftermarket suspension.

Darren (03:00.344)
or suspension hop-up parts. And so I just looked at it as an opportunity to kind of combine my passion for suspension and for mountain bikes and thought, hey, I'm gonna start a company that offers performance parts and performance tuning and just being a resource for mountain bikers. So push.

Originally, the vision of Push was, you come to me with what your needs are and I'd have all of these tuning options for you and can tune your Fox suspension. I started with Fox because in my opinion, in my opinion at the time, they were the leader in mountain bike suspension. so in 2000, 2003, yeah. So 2003, I started with just tuning Fox rear shocks. I don't think...

Jens – Testpilot.bike (03:39.387)
Which year we're talking? 2000? 2000.

Darren (03:49.89)
They didn't have their fork yet.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (03:50.233)
vanilla R decade

Darren (03:53.942)
Yep. Yep. Yeah. So it was the vanilla, vanilla R and they had the vanilla RC, the piggyback shock. And so I was offering tuning services for customers. So if you had a trail bike or a downhill bike, et cetera. And so I started offering high performance piston kits and tuning services, spring rate changes, or just basic service even. And so yeah, that's how I started. thought that

That was going to be my future. I was going to be a suspension tuner for the mountain bike space. Little did I know at the time how rapidly that was going to grow and how big of an opportunity that was going to be, for sure.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (04:40.209)
So you ended up not only providing the kits because you had these RCT3 kits for Rockshox forks as well. And so you at some point became actually a manufacturer.

Darren (04:57.878)
Yeah, and even so when I first started the company, I was working with local machine shops. So we were we me. So I was designing.

different machine parts, seal housings and pistons and valves and all kinds of different parts. And I was using local machine shops and I'd worked in manufacturing environments for a number of years. So I was very familiar with manufacturing. I was fortunate to get to design components for companies where they had production on site. So I learned a lot about design for manufacturing, et cetera. So when I started Push, we were using local machine shops to make parts. So we've been making parts ever since kind of day one.

but yeah you're right it came a point where it was 2008

when we kind of had the financial crisis here in the United States and a lot of our vendors for manufactured parts were slowing down or we had quality problems, etc. So the economy was really affecting our vendors, not so much us as a company. And that's when I started looking at, know, hey, maybe we bring some of the manufacturing in-house. And at that point, again, we're still just a tuning company, but we were also supplying tuning kits to other partners. So we had

TF tuned in the UK for example who was a partner of ours so they were buying all of our tuning kits and doing installations and we're starting to look at growing that business

Darren (06:25.43)
So we brought in our first CNC machine in 2009. And that was another big shift for the company, because now it's like, wow, we've got different capabilities now. And that machine led to a second machine, which led to a third machine pretty quickly. And so by 2011, we were making quite a few, we were making a lot of parts, which...

you look at the business differently when you have those capabilities. So that really ratcheted up what we could do for products. And so then we started looking at making products that we could sell. So products that not only could be installed by tuning centers, but could be installed by end users, such as our ACS3 coil conversion kit. So we made a...

a coil conversion kit for forks and so being able to make those types of products was pretty exciting.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (07:27.491)
So when we're like a Eureka moment, like this is now the next step should be we make our own shock.

Darren (07:38.574)
So if I recall correctly that would have been 2013. So the tuning business had grown.

to be quite large. we were out of our facility here in Colorado, we were were averaging eight to 10,000 Fox Forks and Shocks a year. And then globally, our partners were doing I don't know how many maybe another six to 8000 installations of our of our components. So globally, we created this massive kind of service and tuning program. And it got to a point where customers were asking like, hey, can can I just

buy a Fox shock or a Fox fork that already has the tuning. don't want the downtime. I don't want to send my stuff to you.

Can I just buy a set of suspension that already has it built in? And so we started talking to Fox about that a little bit, we talked to RockShox about it a little bit, we talked to a number of people and we were trying to sort out like how can we buy suspension from the factory? And they weren't super interested in that and I understand why now, know, it's taking their product and modifying it and the warranty concerns, et cetera. So, you know, it's...

that's kind of starting the conversation internally. We kind of joked about making forks and shocks, but at that time we didn't have, I always say we weren't a manufacturer. We made parts, so we had some CNC machines and we made parts, but we definitely weren't a manufacturer. So we were talking about, or we kind of joked about it, and then one day,

Darren (09:21.186)
we were starting to have some supply problems. So when our tuning business had grown so much that we were relying on the manufacturers for spare parts, just, know, dials and caps and upper assembly, just replacement parts, know, wear items. And we couldn't get those items at the rate that we needed. And so that was causing some problems with customers because, hey, where's my stuff? Where's my stuff? And that was...

kind of 2013 is when we really started to feel that squeeze where our customers were not as happy with us any longer because we couldn't turn around their stuff quick enough and it didn't have anything to do with us, it had to do with the supply from the manufacturers. And so that's when I decided, I'm like, you know what? We've been joking about making a shock, let's make a shock. And I didn't know what that meant at the time, but I was...

I was passionate about it and I thought we could do it. And we had, at the time we had this idea because the Santa Cruz Nomad had come onto the scene and a lot of us here at Push were riding those. And so here in Colorado, you know, we had a Nomad as our regular trail bike. That was a big shift too, right? The Nomad represented like the mix of trail and downhill bike.

And so that bike was so capable, we thought it would be so cool to have a shock where you could optimize it for climbing, optimize it for descending, and not just like a lockout mechanism. And so I had the idea for the dual valve system, and we kind of had this supply problem. And so, hey, let's make a shock and incorporate this dual valve system. so 2013, we started taking a look at it and...

how to make it different. what were we going, we didn't have the budget to be able to compete with the big suspension manufacturers. So what are we gonna do that's different? And I said, you know, we're gonna do it in push style, which is let's shoot for the moon. Let's create the most radical.

Darren (11:30.38)
product we can and then we'll figure out what it's going to cost. Let's performance, performance, our company is performance, performance, performance. Always performance first.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (11:42.001)
Yeah, that's actually where the name comes from,

Darren (11:44.43)
Yep. Yeah, push. And so, yeah, so 2013 we set off to build the world's most high performance coil shock, which at that time, you know, coil shocks were not very popular downhill bikes only. But on trail bikes, coil shocks weren't a thing. And we introduced it in May of 2015, I believe. May of 2015 is when we launched the 11.6, which changed our company forever.

in a good way.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (12:16.155)
What's interesting about Push is that you shouldn't sell yourself short on it. You provided suspension tuning to World Cup guys. So what Push actually offers, and it's not just a product, you get a really close relationship to actually all the way up to you. So if a consumer has a problem,

it could be that you answered that question.

Darren (12:48.214)
Yeah, 100%. We are obsessed with performance and we're obsessed with customers, right? The customer experience. And that started from day one, mainly because I didn't have any money. Again, I started Push Myself and it was just me. I was a one-man show and I didn't have the money so I knew I had to provide.

a super high-end customer experience. And that's traveled all the way through to today. So yeah, customer experience, and that lends itself to even our partners, right? It's not just push as a company. Obviously, in Germany, we were partnered with MRC in Germany, and they also just, they're aligned with us in regards to that customer experience. So customer experience is a really big one.

Yes, we did early on. You're right, we did.

We started off with the Turner Honda racing team way back in the day. So Sven Martin, who has become kind of a household name in photography for the mountain bike and photography and media. Anyone in mountain bike racing knows who Sven is, but got connected with Sven very early with the Turner Honda team. That led to a relationship with Eric Carter. I worked with Eric Carter for two seasons, worked with Brian Lopes, got the phone call and boy, what was it?

2005 from Rob Roskop. So the first time I met Rob Roskop was in 2005 when the Syndicate program was starting and they were looking for suspension help and so that was back in the day of Steve Peat, Nathan Renny, was John Kirkcaldy maybe? I can't remember everybody but yeah so we did we built special shock absorbers for the Syndicate program in 2005.

Darren (14:41.944)
Boy, on and on. I've worked with many of the professional racers over the years. And racing changed, as everybody knows. Racing has changed so much. And the teams and the sponsorship. Even to this day, we have professional racers that test our product, ride our product. But at the end of the day, we're a smaller company. we just don't have the...

the sponsorship means to make those deals happen, unfortunately.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (15:14.085)
I mean, it's interesting because there are many off the shelf products from competitors offering a great value. They offer a great performance. But there's maybe in the mountain bike world, people, even the average Joe Blow, they're looking for the performance. They really want to get in like the last little bit. And when you're buying a product, you may not always get that. And when we had a suspension field test,

Darren (15:21.902)
Yeah.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (15:43.769)
last year and we had the the 9-1 in it as well. And there's a lot of discussion because if you compare just looking at numbers alone, weight, price, etc. it's sometimes hard to justify. But maybe a lot of people not taking into consideration what all went into that pricing decision because you sometimes get way more. If you just order a regular big player brand fork

you're getting it to you get a box shipped. Now when you order a fork from you guys you're also getting a fork but you're already getting a fork tuned to your needs because there is way more conversation up front.

Darren (16:29.43)
Yeah, that's, our products are very expensive. Part of that is the technology that's packed into them, the manufacturer, the manufacturing. We manufacture and assemble the forks here in our facility in Colorado. So we have different manufacturing costs, different technology costs.

But a big part of it, the person who's coming to push is really the customer. There's so much technology when it comes to suspension. It's so difficult to keep up with all of the changes, all of the new technology. It can become overwhelming. And a lot of times, you have customers that are looking for a certain performance, but it's very hard to achieve it.

with a production fork because there's just so many settings. It's where do you start, where do you go? And again, part of that customer obsession from our perspective, when you come to Push, you're basically looking for, you're paying for an expert, right? So we publish our phone number, our email, we have online chat available. When you buy a suspension product from us, we wanna know.

who you are, where you ride, how much do you weigh, what bike are you on, what are you looking for? And so we help cater the suspension to what you're actually looking for. So we always say, you know, with push, it's the easiest way to upgrade your suspension without having to know anything about suspension. And that's who we are. So if you're looking for a performance gain,

and you don't have the time or the interest or you don't know where to get started, like how to do that, that's what we provide. So you get a suspension product from us in the box as a setup card that shows here's where all of your settings were set from the technician. So you always have that baseline, those baseline settings.

Darren (18:30.828)
And then we make ourselves available so that if you have tuning questions, if you're looking to get a certain level of performance or you're riding on a certain level of terrain and are just trying to experiment, instead of doing it on your own, you have this whole support network. And that's not just us. That's globally through all of our service centers and our partners, they all have those same resources. And so that is the big difference. So you do pay a premium.

Part of it is the quality of the product, the manufacturing, the technology, et cetera. But a big part of that is the customer experience and having a team of people that are going to help you get the most out of your suspension. And that's what makes us unique is, yeah, and it doesn't matter. Messaging online, email, phone, et cetera. We make ourselves available to get you the best setup. Because we're not satisfied until you're satisfied.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (19:27.092)
A very interesting point is if you're at rider weights. I'm pushing 230 pounds. I'm 6'3", so I'm not a tiny person. But there are also tiny persons out there and they may be just 150. In a stock suspension it only can cover so much in a bandwidth of adjustability.

Darren (19:39.245)
Yeah.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (19:56.241)
For instance, the rebound is sometimes a really hard thing to actually get dialed in because it's bound to your spring rate. And the spring rate I need to run on an air fork, mostly or it can easily over overwhelm the rebound circuit while a lighter rider can not get the rebound fast enough because it's over damped for them and under damped for me.

Darren (20:23.726)
Yep, yeah. Yeah, that's super common, you know, with our, and that's why when we first started building the 11.6, that was the whole point of that platform. So the 11.6 is one where if you have a Santa Cruz Nomad and you're 230 pounds and you have a friend who also has a Santa Cruz Nomad who's 165 pounds,

you get different damper specs. so it's not just that, you know, we build like with the 11.6, the shocks are built specific to the specific to the application. So the shock that we build for a Nomad would be different than the shock that we would build for a bullet, for example. And, but it's not only the different platforms inside the platform, we build different configurations. So, and sometimes that means

actually different mechanical parts. They're physically not the same product, even though it's on the same bike, because the needs of a 230 pound rider or the valving range or the bump stop, know, all of these things varies based on rider weight in the bike that it's going on. So yeah, for us, and then we just have so many tools in our toolbox.

It's combining, again, it's combining the custom tuning aspect and a production fork and shock. And that's really, you know.

A lot of riders who are listening to this are familiar with, you you get a production fork and then you ride it for a little bit and you're looking for more performance and so you send it to a tuning shop or you get aftermarket performance parts installed and there's an additional cost that's associated with that, time and cost. And so with our products, it's all wrapped up in one. So you're getting that customization and that tuning kind of component in a production fork from day one.

Darren (22:13.59)
And another thing I'll add too is we're really focused on service and durability. Our products are not disposable. We were just having this conversation yesterday. It's remarkable, even in our service department here in Colorado.

you know, we still get shocks in that are 10, 12 years old, which is awesome. People still riding some of those older bikes, is pretty cool. But that's the other thing too, is we really focus on building very durable products, long lasting, you know.

So part of the expense is it's an investment in a product that you can keep for years. You can take our products from one bike to another bike. That's very important to us as well is that you can have a great setup and you don't have to buy it again when you get a new bike. You can have it transferred to the new bike, which is really, important for us because we're really focused on durability and sustainability.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (23:12.379)
So you also can transplant the shock to a new bike and can change some stuff on this architecture that's already there and adapt it.

Darren (23:22.05)
Yep. Yep. Yeah. And that's a, that's a big thing for us because it's very common. You know, it's, super common where a new bike comes out and people are excited about it. And, and, so we all, we all love new stuff, new shiny objects. Yeah. So that's.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (23:38.319)
Yeah. But maybe there are a couple of parts out there, like maybe the Chris King hub and you want to transplant that wheel set over to the next one. And then there's like a new hub standard and you're really annoyed.

Darren (23:52.908)
Yeah, yeah, and with us, just adapt to those. And along with that is we have our warranty reset program. Not to put my salesman hat on here, but another big aspect is every time you have your suspension serviced, the warranty gets reset. And so if you have one of our forks or shocks and you send it in,

Jens – Testpilot.bike (24:03.567)
Hahaha.

Darren (24:13.454)
and have it serviced, your warranty gets renewed. If you buy our product used, so if you buy it off of a website or from your friend or whatever and send it in and have it serviced, you get a fresh warranty. And so we really stand behind the products. That's, again, that's another part of the cost is that you're making an investment in a product that is really designed to last.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (24:37.513)
So talking about the 9.1, which was maybe a bigger milestone in your company history. So you had all these tuning sets available for the given brands out there and the given products. And then you made the switch. And I remember a fun story you told me about the crown and you hired the industrial designer to really make it look nice. I mean, the whole 9.1

Darren (24:40.685)
Yeah.

Darren (24:45.889)
yeah.

Darren (24:53.155)
Yep.

Darren (25:04.364)
Mm-hmm.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (25:07.215)
stands out look-wise in the portfolio of everything out there, of all the offerings.

Darren (25:13.388)
Yeah. Yeah. The nine one is, it's been a special project, you know, even with the 11 six, when we first introduced the 11 six, it was quite radical at the time, you know, in, in its aesthetic, but all the, the aesthetic was really driven by performance. Same thing with the nine one. So, you know, shortly after building the 11 six, obviously people started saying, when's the fork, when's the fork.

We didn't know what the fork was going to look like, but much like the rear shock, we wanted to take some time to just really try to figure out how we could move the performance benchmark.

by a lot, which is what we set out to achieve with 11.6. So 11.6 we set out to really make a big leap in performance and we felt that we got that. And so when it came to the front fork, well, how are we going to do that? Because the front forks, production forks are really nice. The manufacturers do a great job. So nothing to take away from the Fox and RockShox and Olens of the world. They make really good products.

But we were looking at how do we go to the next step. Because of my background in motorcycles, every performance motorcycle in the world uses an inverted fork. So obviously, I've been working on inverted forks my whole career for 30 years and knew a lot about inverted forks. Really wanted to dive into why mountain bikes weren't using inverted forks.

The challenge for us is when we first started developing, or first started really looking into what the fork would look like, there wasn't really a lot of, you could test all kinds of conventional forks, right? There's all kinds of conventional forks, different dampers, different spring systems, bushing systems, et cetera. But when it came to inverted forks, there really wasn't much out there.

Darren (27:13.13)
outside of intend, it's like who was really doing an inverted fork and that wasn't really the market that we were looking at. So we were looking at a different market than where that fork was positioned at the time. So we didn't really have much to go off of. So we just had to...

dive in and start experimenting. And so we literally spent two years experimenting with all kinds of different things, different crowns, different axle lugs, different tubes, different bushings. Yeah, we literally spent two years just exploring like what, how things worked. And yeah, to your point, we had built something that...

worked really well, but wasn't very pretty. so because of the uniqueness of the, we're a bunch of engineer geeks. So talk about a nerd podcast, like I'm the biggest, I appreciate that you said I'm the top five nerd out there. So I love nerding out on technology and.

Here at Push, we were fortunate that design, engineering, manufacturing, prototyping is all in-house. So all the people who are involved in this process are in the same building. so, yeah, so we developed this thing that worked pretty well. was heavy, it wasn't pretty, but it worked pretty well. And so we knew...

to make it marketable, we're gonna have to bring some professionals in. So yeah, we hired a firm out of Denver, Colorado to take this thing and say, can you make it look, can you make it look how it performs? Because yeah, the Crown, know, the, the, one of the most unique features is the Crown design, right? So the Crown is, the Crown design is something that hasn't really been seen in mountain bike and.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (28:52.696)
Hahaha

Darren (29:08.296)
And so how do you take this huge chunk of metal and make it look like it's not 20 pounds in weight?

Jens – Testpilot.bike (29:19.545)
You also make a lot of decisions in regards of performance and you are not a guy up for compromises. So you went with coil. The thing is, again, if you're just speaking numbers, it's more on the what you consider heavy side, even though it might not feel as heavy on the trail. But there are there is a boatload of engineering parts and marvelous ideas within the fork.

Darren (29:28.128)
No. Yeah.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (29:49.829)
which are very different to what is available in the market. mean, talking about the sub chamber, every fork has it, but you can actually turn it on and off. like, okay, you make it more progressive, but then you still have a hydraulic bottom out and you can also influence that one. So what seems like a functionality from different parts within the fork doing the same thing, it's actually not the same thing.

Darren (30:00.664)
Yep.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (30:20.421)
because now you can really dial in your fork.

Darren (30:24.95)
Yeah, and most of that comes from our DNA as a company. We love riding mountain bikes. We love pushing the technology and performance envelopes. Fortunately for us, our main business is aftermarket, not OEM. And so being an aftermarket focused company allows us to look at the cost of products differently. It's the last thing we look at, to be honest. When we're developing products here at Push, there's never a conversation about

price point. You know, it's always let's just build, let's build it and then we'll see what it costs. So yeah, we do have a lot of flexibility in regards to that. And so a lot of the things that we do when you look at how, you know, our upper structure, we're the only company that doesn't

press fit it so the upper structure is not press fit, it's bonded together. The way our bushing system works is completely different. We looked at, we're obviously a coil sprung company, So coil springs are our game, we're not really interested in the air.

air spring systems because again from a true performance like removing the friction of air systems and putting a coil system in there having lots of spring rates so on rear shocks 25 pounds per inch increments on front forks 5 pound per inch increments

but looking at, you know, a coil spring needs, in a fork, it needs some progressive assistance, so having, using the air volume that's trapped inside the upper structure, making it adjustable, having the hydraulic bottom out, these are all features where we're looking at from a customer perspective and saying, how can we provide an unrestricted performance gain to all riders? So if you're 110 pounds or 250 pounds,

Darren (32:17.634)
you know, we want to have unrestricted tuning options so that someone who is on the high end of the spectrum in weight is just as excited as the person who weighs just over 100 pounds. And then the people who are the average rider weights also. So everyone is getting the same performance benefits. And I think that's a big part of it, you know, is even with production forks and shocks, even when you have them tuned,

their chassis lend themselves to, you have a limited range to work inside of. with our products, when we set out to design them, it's like, no, we want every single rider, no matter what their riding style is, no matter what their ability, no matter what they weigh, to have the same transformative experience. We want everybody to go, this is the best suspension I've ever ridden. And in order to do that,

Yeah, we have to pack a lot of different tuning features in there, a lot of different technologies, a lot of different options. And at the end of the day, listen, we want to ride the best stuff, which means that we want all those things.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (33:30.353)
So maybe you can put in your words why you actually made the decision to have that hydraulic bit adjustable hydraulic bottom out system as well as the sub chamber because you could also argue, okay, let's skip one of them, put a rubber bumper in there and then you're good to go and save maybe 80 grams. I don't know.

Darren (33:53.358)
Yeah. Yeah. The hydraulic bottom out, you we've used that technology in our rear shocks for years. We didn't incorporate it into the first 911. The first 911 forks, the V1 version of it had a very linear spring characteristic. So we had the coil spring and then we had our air bump stop, which is a air chamber, a sealed air chamber that we had in the bottom of the fork. And from

For trail riding, was awesome. Having that linear spring characteristic with a nice cushion at the end was quite good. When we started getting the forks out to people who were riding them at the bike parks more regularly, and then some of the pro athletes, Sean Neer is a test rider for us. He's former Yeti Enduro racer, still was involved with Yeti. Amazing rider.

So he, along with some other kind of pro riders were pushing the forks to a whole different level. And so we kind of realized, wow, okay, we'd spent so much time developing the ultimate trail fork that we didn't realize how many people were no longer riding downhill bikes, right? Like they had a trail bike that they would take and do lift access.

So that caused us to take a look at it say, well, we need more bottoming resistance. And for the guys who were riding at the bike parks, not only did they want more bottoming resistance, but they wanted the fork to ride higher in the travel. And so that's when we looked at it said, well, those are two different things. Because if we optimize bottoming performance, like putting an independent hydraulic bottom out system will...

we'll solve that, you know, like that's a great solution for bottoming, but that doesn't make the fork ride any higher in its travel. And so then we started looking at, okay, well, let's use the trapped air or the ambient air that's in the structure itself as a little spring boost. so we built, so we sealed off a chamber inside the fork, which we called the third spring. And...

Darren (36:02.708)
I was riding one of the prototypes and I felt on our local trails there was a couple of trails where I really liked the increased ride height, but there was other trails where I thought it took away from the performance. So I was like, man, I came back and talked to our engineers and said, my challenge would be, the hydraulic bottom out is amazing, but this third spring, which has now become sub chamber,

is something where sometimes I like it, but other times I don't. And so is there any way we could make it where you could turn it on and off? And I think that's the key. Any writer who's ridden a fork where you've added tokens to change, you know, we've always been restricted with air systems where if you make it more progressive, then it takes away from some of the sensitivity and vice versa. And so I tasked our engineering department to say, hey, is there any way? And at the time when I was asking this, I thought it was impossible.

because I knew how the system was built and I looked at it and said, there's just no way. And Matt White, our engineering director, came up with this clever solution, which was also backwards compatible, because that's a big part of Push as well, is when we introduce technologies, making it available to customers who have the earlier versions. And we started doing that with our rear shocks. And so with the front fork, was part of it, was, this sub chamber is great and the hydraulic bottom out's great.

but how do we make it so that previous customers can also have it? And again, that's where that cost comes from, right? It's like it's an investment in a product that you can take forward.

So anyway, yeah, so he, Matt came up with this really clever solution and now at the top of the left fork leg is this little switch. And so if you want the fork to ride higher in its travel, you can turn it on. And if you want it to be more linear and take up all that trail chatter, you can shut it off just by a flip of a switch. It's really clever and yeah, it's a great, it's a great solution, great solution.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (38:01.425)
During our testing, I named it my muddy button because like when it's super slippery slop and you just open it up and you can have like, or be deeper in the travel and have them for more pressure on the handlebars and more front grip. It's yeah, it provides more grip. And then the moment that trail gets faster again and you're hitting stuff harder and you need that like staying higher in the travel riding style.

Darren (38:07.063)
Okay.

Darren (38:22.37)
Yep.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (38:30.907)
You just flip the lever. There's no need for tools, no air pressure adjustments, no nothing. It's just like done.

Darren (38:37.722)
Yeah. Yeah. And the cool thing is that the hydraulic bottom out stays the same in either mode. So it's like, again, from a solution perspective, it's yeah, I, I'm a big fan. I'm biased, but I'm a big fan.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (38:53.457)
So we talked a lot about adjusting the spring curve and having that bottom out resistance and reaching the end softly. But how about your damping? We touched a little bit on it saying, okay, you do custom adjustments by rider weight and rider style. So what makes push damping technology different?

Darren (39:04.811)
Yeah.

Darren (39:22.65)
You know fundamentally we have kind of the core, so on our compression side of the damping, our external adjustments on all of our forks and shocks are kind of controlled by this valve technology called the shimless valve system and we use it across all of our products. It's very unique. It's a way of providing compression damping that's, because again when we look at mountain bikes, the ideal

damping characteristic is one that provides enough

firmness to give you control. We use the term quiet suspension and so here at Push, our goal is to make quiet suspension. You don't really ever have a sense of it moving. know there's a lot of times when you're riding a bike and you really feel, you can feel the suspension moving a lot and whether that's under braking or when you're in tight switchbacks you feel the bike porpoising etc. So for us we always want quiet suspension which means how can we increase the damping levels to control all the

movement but at the same time be plush and so our shimless valve technology is kind of the foundation for for that architecture which is you know I would say that push damping is controlled and very compliant a lot of that comes from our spring systems again by committing to coil it really makes you look at damping different

And so for us, our damping characteristics are radically different than what's available on the market, simply because it's optimized around a coil spring. With the fork, the damping architecture is very radical. In fact, I think that probably our competitors who get our fork and put it on a dyno probably think there's something wrong with it initially.

Darren (41:19.03)
So if you were to look at the damping curve from our fork damper compared to other dampers on the market, it's probably the most radical difference of all the products that we make. And it's just because the inverted fork, we've optimized the design to reduce friction. So the constant lubrication of the seals and the bushings and the coatings that we use, there's so little friction in the fork itself that you have to increase the damping levels just because of that.

But I think the main thing, not to go too tech nerdy on the damping stuff, because I could talk about that for days. we have, you know, it's a major priority for us. for us, the big thing is,

Jens – Testpilot.bike (41:55.066)
for it.

Darren (42:03.912)
is quiet suspension. When you ride push suspension we don't want you to really have a sense of the wheels, how much the wheels are moving. You know when you get on the brakes you don't want the fork to dive when you're, especially when you're going through switchbacks you know you don't want to have that porpoisey feel that you get a lot especially on e-bikes. You know with the e-bikes with the extra mass like a lot of times you're flipping through switchbacks there's just a lot of movement and a lot of excessive wheel movement. So to summarize our damping it's really about

control while also being very plush. And that's a very fine line to walk. We build a lot of external adjustability, and here's another thing I'll say. With production suspension, 80 % of the damping can be controlled externally and 20 % is preset at the factory. We're the opposite.

So with push suspension, 80 % of the damping is preset and 20 % is external. We do that on purpose. so while we have all this external adjustment, it's really about giving the user a usable range. And if you talk to riders who ride a rear shock specifically, it's like, you you can do large swings in adjustment and not really get

not really have a bad feeling, you know. So the stuff is tuned and set up so with our forks and with our shocks, they're tuned and set up in a way that if it's been built for you, the external adjustments become this usable fine tuning. And so I think that's a real big difference is while many products have a very broad range, I think most riders have experienced if you go.

you know several clicks in either direction it makes it almost unrideable and one of things that you'll experience with with push is you can make large swings in the clickers and it still rides it still rides good it's one of those things where it's like it's it's not unrideable and it's more fine tuning control

Jens – Testpilot.bike (44:18.109)
For the 9.1 what really stood out for us was the way the rebound works. I mean you have just this one adjuster but still the better amount of traction and ground control you get you would think that you can't get an active fork out of it. So for instance if there's like a tiny section and you want to pop over it and if you have a slower rebound to have the most grip for instance.

Darren (44:42.691)
Mm-hmm.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (44:47.729)
Then you might have to work extra hard to get the bike off the ground. And here you were just giving this tiny input and whoop, you still got like the agility out of it. So it was there and this is a fine line that's hard to hit to achieve that.

Darren (45:07.52)
Yeah, and that comes from two things. One, our rebound systems are very different. If you were to lay out our rebound shaft compared to a regular fork. So with rebound, the low speed, with both compression and rebound.

Low-speed damping is controlled by a hole. So we have a hole and we're opening and closing the hole. So when you're turning your external low-speed adjuster on compression or your low-speed adjuster on rebound, you're basically moving a needle that's opening and closing a hole. And so it's very basic. Well, if you look at our rebound, what we call the bleed hole, so our low-speed bleed hole on both compression and rebound is half the size of what you would normally see in mountain bike suspension. And we do that because we want to cut off the low-speed

control at a very specific velocity and so we have the most high-tech test equipment in the marketplace. So what we do is we make our low-speed bleeds actually choke off at a very early point in the suspension velocity.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (46:10.373)
and you're forcing the whole fluids into a different port.

Darren (46:14.208)
Right, so by choking it off, so the low speed port is just a hole and then...

the mid and high speed damping is controlled by the pistons and valves which have really large ports that have either shim systems or valve plates. They have different things to be able to control them. And so by choking off the low speed bleed ports very early, it forces the oil into the pistons and valves earlier and that's where you get that sensation. And so what you're experiencing, what you just described is basically because

That's being done because the low speed is being closed off so early in the suspension's velocity that the oil is then being moved from a very restrictive port to a very high flow port. And so you get the initial control from that restrictive port. That's where you're getting that traction. It's not allowing the suspension to vibrate or bounce, but then it transitions into the pistons and valves quite quickly. And that is something that you'll see. Like I said, if you laid out

all of the different rebound rods or rebound shafts of all the different brands, you'd look at ours and say, wow, that thing has a very small bleed port. And that's kind of one of our tuning methodologies, methods, tuning methods. The difficulty with that is it requires, that, but that.

the reason we can do that, so the question is, well, why don't all the other manufacturers do that? And it's because at the end of the day, they don't know what rider weight is going to be using the product, how much air pressure, tokens, what the spring rate is going to be, et cetera. Because we know what the rider weight is going to be, we know what the spring rate is going to be, or the range, we at least know a...

Darren (48:06.666)
the range of spring rates that that person would use. So therefore we can valve the pistons and valves in the damper to accommodate that small bleed hole. And so that's why we're able to do it.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (48:19.227)
How were you able to collect all that kind of data? Because even when we go out for testing and you have maybe a same height rider, maybe 40, 20 pounds less, and he has a different sensation on the bike. And while we can talk a lot about our impressions on the bike and how it feels, you can never experience it firsthand. So you are also not a tiny dude. So...

Darren (48:43.491)
Yeah.

Darren (48:47.394)
Yeah.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (48:48.145)
It's hard to understand. So how do you actually know all of this and how you collect that information and that data?

Darren (48:55.916)
Yeah, I mean we have some of the most advanced onboard data logging systems, computer systems for monitoring how the bikes are working. We have...

a number of dinos, have electromagnetic dinos, we were able to ride trails on our test equipment like we can recreate. I'm sure a lot of people out there have seen the videos of forks and shocks being slammed on dinos just as they are on the trail. We have those capabilities. But at the end of the day, we ride a lot of bikes. And fortunately here, we...

We hear ride bikes and then part of our test process is we give suspension forks and shocks to a lot of local riders too. We just have a lot of, we just gather a lot of feedback from different rider types. And one of the things that I've also instilled in everybody that works here from day one is.

No ego. We don't have an ego policy. There's no ego allowed at Push, right? Because we understand to make the best products, to be able to squeak the maximum performance out of things, we have to listen to what rider feedback is and really accept it. Not just listen and say, okay, thanks for the feedback, but to actually take that feedback and understand. And so over the years even, we've changed.

our damping characteristics, we've changed our approach to spring systems. Again, going from the V1 to the V2-914, adding that hydraulic bottom out and adding that sub-chamber was something that's just based off of the marketplace. Again, being a smaller company, we can react quicker too. So when we get the feedback from customers, don't take feedback and I guess we don't take it lightly. We really accept it and try to understand where they're coming from because we feel like it makes better.

Darren (50:42.902)
products. so, yeah, so for us it's just about we have a certain idea of what we're looking for performance and we have a number of different sized test riders here at Push. We rely on our local community but at the end of the day we just have a lot of customer feedback that we use when we're developing the products and yeah even when it's bad we want to hear it.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (51:12.433)
So I don't know if you can actually give that information away, but if you assemble a fork and you know, okay, this is the rider weight, this is the riding style, what are you pulling from? Is there some kind of a model kit and you have 20 versions of the rebound?

Darren (51:30.614)
Yeah, so for us, so for the forks, it's a little bit different. So with rear shocks.

Yeah, we have a massive database on rear shocks. Rear shocks are different because the damping range, when you look at the damping range of rear shocks, it's all over the place because of the different leverage rates. And when you look at the spring rate range, so rear shocks, you know, from 300 pounds up to 700 pounds of spring rate in 25 pound per inch increments. And so the spring load is quite large. So the range of spring rates, the range of leverages,

combined with all the different rider weights makes for a huge recipe book. So that's what we have. So when we build rear shocks, our team has an online database that we reference. And so our engineering team builds these reference databases. sometimes over the years, those even get adjusted. So anyway, so for the rear shocks, it's quite vast.

And so yes, if you come to us, say, hey, I'm this rider weight, this is my riding style and ability, this is where I ride, this is what I'm looking for out of my suspension, we'll cross reference this database and then build a custom tuned shock for you. That being said, forks and shocks all come with a 60 day performance guarantee. And so within 60 days of riding our products, spring raids, tuning, like all that is complimentary.

With the front forks, it's a little bit different. So with front forks, there is no leverage. It's just a one to one ratio. And so when you look at how much, well, to give you an idea, well, let's pick a bike. I said Nomad earlier, let's go with the Nomad. So Santa Cruz Nomad. On the rear shock on a Santa Cruz Nomad, it will, the rear, if you have a 200 pound rider,

Darren (53:27.342)
it's probably gonna be running right around like a 475 to 500 pound per inch spring. the damp, so with 65 millimeters of stroke, the thing's gonna be generating about 1500 pounds of spring load.

which means that we've got to be creating over a thousand pounds of rebound damping, right? So to control 15, when that spring compresses and creates 1500 pounds of load, we have to have over a thousand pounds of rebound damping to keep that thing from just snapping back. So on the rear shock, you might be producing say 250 to 300 pounds of compression damping and over a thousand pounds of rebound damping.

So now let's go to the front fork. So on the front fork that...

Jens – Testpilot.bike (54:13.745)
Shall we just make a little explanation of the forces? Because I really like that and maybe not everybody gets it. Because if you now imagine your rear shock and you have the spring fully compressed and depending on the spring rate you run you always have a fixed force. So you always will know the amount of force you maximum get

Darren (54:21.677)
Yeah.

Darren (54:37.838)
Correct.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (54:43.235)
on the rebound side. And you said you need to adjust the rebound force accordingly to that spring rate. Now think of all the off the shelf bikes. Like there is no custom, this is from an OE side, the brands buy boxes of shocks. They put on the small size frame, the same shock as on the extra large. Now imagine the different weight

Darren (55:10.424)
Correct.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (55:12.379)
There might be a chubby, I don't know, five foot person as well, but you get the idea. Like there is different forces and the rebound in these shocks, in this standard OE shocks is always the same. So this is...

Darren (55:18.06)
Yeah. Yeah.

Darren (55:27.598)
Yeah, and it has to be at the high end because they have to compensate for people running the stiffest springs or the most air pressure. And so people who running less air pressure or a lower spring have a compromised rebound circuit. Yeah.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (55:41.573)
Yeah, and sometimes the heavy dudes, as I mentioned earlier, I'm 230, I have to run the... if there's just one adjuster, sometimes I have to have it fully closed at the pressure I run to have it slow enough. And while the lighter rider has to have it fully open. So it's always a compromise.

Darren (56:01.378)
Yeah, it is compromised for sure. And especially with rear suspension because the range again is so broad. And when I'm using the, and when I say, you a thousand pounds of rebound damping and 250 pounds of compression damping, that's measured at certain velocities. So when we talk about damping, it's all damping is speed sensitive.

So when you see these marketing terms of speed sensitivity, well, all damping is speed sensitive. That's how we measure it. So dyno's measure damping as at this speed, when I move the shock absorber or the fork at this velocity or this speed, how much resistance is it generating? And so on that Santa Cruz Nomad with that 200 pound rider, when I say it's over a thousand pounds of load, well, that's hitting something at a pretty good clip. Because when you're just riding down the trail and you're going through a G-

the suspension is moving quite as much slower. So the shock is compressing and rebounding slower, which means that it might only be generating 250 or 300 pounds. same thing on compression. So when you go through a G-out, it may only produce 80 pounds of compression damping and 300 pounds of rebound damping. When you're hitting a big square bump at speed,

All of sudden there's a big input into the suspension and so you might have to have 250 pounds of compression damping being generated to absorb the impact and because it's gone deep in the stroke you now have over a thousand pounds of rebound damping controlling that spring from just snapping back. And so on that example, over a thousand pounds of rebound and say 250 to 300 pounds of compression damping, those are peak. Those are like peak damping or peak velocities.

So then, so we kind of talk about the rear shock. So with the rear shock, we've got all these variables. And so there's a lot of changes that happen from a tuning perspective. So it's not just external adjustments, it's internal adjustments. When we go to the front fork, there is no leverage. It's just one to one ratio. So that same rider who had to run a 500 pound shock spring only has to run a 50 pound per inch fork spring. So...

Jens – Testpilot.bike (58:13.883)
tensed.

Darren (58:14.87)
huge difference in the spring load. So when you look at the spring load in the front fork, it's just a couple hundred or a few hundred pounds versus over a thousand pounds of rear shock load. So the range of rebound damping that we need. So when you look at fork springs,

So in the rear shock springs from 300 to 700, in a fork spring it's 30 to 60. So the range of the spring rates is much smaller in the front fork, which means that we don't have to do a lot of valving changes. So because the spring rate range is so small in the front fork, we're able to get...

almost all of the rider weights controlled by just the external adjuster. So we kind of have a preset rebound stack and with the external tuning on both compression and rebound in a front fork, we can build enough range into the compression damper and enough range into the rebound damping in a front fork to cover all the rider weight ranges. Now with that being said, you know,

probably five to eight percent rider of the riders fall outside of that. We were talking about Sean Neer earlier, right? Like a pro rider at that level. He's looking for a different, you know, not their stock nine one settings, you know? So for someone like that, we do have tuning options. And so our fork dampers are completely tunable, just like the rear shocks. But you'll find that nine out of 10 riders or more can use the external adjustment window.

So with front forks, it's really about, when you're, when we're looking at the front fork, it's, the most important thing is,

Darren (59:54.508)
The spring rates, so when we're looking at rider weight, riding style, and the bike that it's going on, excuse me, it's really about getting that initial spring rate set correctly, getting them the recommendations on sub chamber, setting the hydraulic bottom out pressure correctly, because the hydraulic bottom out is also adjustable. So again, delivering the 911 fork to a customer, like the spring rate, sub chamber use, and that hydraulic bottom out. And all the damper settings are set for that, what we feel is your window to start with.

Yeah, so it's different. So from forks to shocks, it is different because of the different needs of the systems.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:00:32.379)
What is your take on...

position, how you say, position sensitive damping, not speed sensitive damping.

Darren (01:00:43.19)
Yeah, we kind of have that, right? That's the unique thing about the 9.1. We have it in the rear shock, so our hydraulic bottom out is interesting because it's both position and speed, right? So with the rear shocks, we have hydraulic bottom out, which comes in at a certain position but then turns into a speed sensitive system. The fork is unique because it's

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:00:58.033)
Position sensitive.

Darren (01:01:12.062)
it's decoupled or the two systems are independent from each other. So in rear shocks, the hydraulic bottom out is in the same cylinder. It's part of the overall damping system. With our front fork, what makes it unique is the damper is in one leg and the hydraulic bottom out is in a different leg. And so the hydraulic bottom out in the 9-1 is a mini shock absorber that we built into the other leg. So that gives us both position and speed sensitivity.

because it's independent from the main damper, it comes in for the last 75 millimeters of stroke. And because it's an independent unit, that technically would be position sensitive. But when you engage it, it's the speed sensitivity that determines how much force it's, yeah, how much you're getting.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:01:58.628)
to get.

Darren (01:02:04.982)
So we kind of, we have a mix of both. So I think that, you know, position sensitivity, speed, well, all dampers are speed sensitive, like I said earlier, position sensitivity is something that can also be really valuable with mountain bike suspension. I just think that, yeah, I mean, shoot, going way back, back in the early days of DH, Norba, DH racing.

I mean, Fox used to make some really interesting position sensitive, some of their old vanilla RC shocks, the race shocks and stuff had twin tube position sensitivity, like their off-road trucks, which was pretty cool stuff that they used to do back in the day. But yeah, I I think that there's a place for position sensitivity in mountain bike suspension. Again, we're using it and it just allows you to create a whole different damping characteristic.

Like the way we're using it obviously in the 9-1 is we want to create high high levels of damping at the end of the stroke to cushion bottoming but we don't want that to interfere with the top and the middle part of the stroke where you want the fork to be plush.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:03:18.927)
I mean, the main challenge is maybe that you have so many variables and everything influences each other.

Darren (01:03:27.18)
Yeah. Yeah, that's that is the challenge. and that you know, that's a great point that we should touch on, which is the best and the best suspension setup in the world is still a compromise. I think it's unrealistic for riders to chase perfection. There is it's not realistic to have something that's the plushest thing and the most controlled. The

best at bottoming and not harsh, et cetera. So I think that's something in the mountain bike world that's kind of unrealistic is people, a lot of riders are told that you can have the plushest ride with the most control, with the best bottoming, that does not exist. So as good as we are at custom tuning with this vast.

of a database as we have on rider feedback, all of that stuff. We always use this kind of sliding scale. Suspension's a sliding scale, right? You have comfort versus control. And as you slide that scale back and forth, if you want more control, you will give up some comfort. If you want more comfort, you're gonna give up some control. It doesn't matter what brand, who the tuner is, there is no, there is no like ideal. And I think that's something that

Isn't spoken about enough in mountain bike suspension now. We have the most advanced technologies the most advanced test equipment blah blah blah It's still a compromise. What do you what is your preference? Do you prefer to have more control more comfort? and Yeah, that's an important important note to the listeners out there is if you feel like you're Have exhausted trying to chase like perfection your

I'll tell you right now, you're never going to get it. You're always going to have some sort of compromise.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:05:26.769)
And if you maybe take the time to a session on one track for a full day and really really dial in your suspension, you are dialed in on that particular track. And if you just go on the next track, you're like, this is so weird right now, but it just works perfectly on this one section or one trail.

Darren (01:05:38.104)
Correct. Right.

Yeah, Absolutely, yep, agree with that 100%. That is another thing that people get sucked into, right, is they do test sessions on a certain trail and get it as good as it can be, and then they go ride a different trail and all of a sudden it's like, wait, those same settings, yeah, not as ideal.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:06:04.369)
We experienced it even during our testing that some bikes from a particular area works best in the testing area. And if you take them to a different like riding style Lomi and this bike is developed somewhere where it's super chunky, it's just not a match. And then at the moment you have the opportunity to ride the bike in a similar situation. Suddenly it really makes sense and really works because it's tuned because they test it.

the most on that area. And we talked really a lot about suspension now and still there is the contact patch and now Schwalbe did the new update on their radial tires and they changed the game again. So you have to change your suspension settings now because actually damping or somewhat of a suspension happens in the tire as well.

Darren (01:06:34.017)
Yep. Yep.

Darren (01:06:47.374)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Darren (01:06:59.5)
Yeah, it's always been that way. The tire has always been the first kind of point of suspension. I talk about that all the time because I agree with you, the radial tires are making a big impact. The last couple weeks I've been riding a couple of bikes with radial tires for the first time and pretty impressive. Yeah, definitely pretty impressed with how that tire technology works. But even prior to radial, I mean,

the difference that a couple PSI can make in a tire, modern mountain bike tires with the volumes and stuff that we're riding. so that is, that's an area where we always tell riders to start, right? Before you start making a lot of suspension adjustments, what about tire pressure? Because the difference between 25 PSI and 29 PSI in a front tire is massive as far as the initial kind of compliance and traction and.

the front end feel, you know, what's going into the suspension. So the first point of contact with suspension, 100 % is tire. Tires and wheels have an influence on suspension feel. So stiffness in wheels, stiffness in tires, different treads, casings, all that stuff has a big impact on suspension and will change your settings. So yes, I could agree with you that if you have an ideal setup and then you switch to a radial tire, your...

pressures are probably gonna change dramatically because of that radial tire and just the makeup of the tire is going to change the way your suspension behaves. And the good news is it's generally in a positive direction, right? The radial tire provides better traction, better compliancy, better comfort without really giving up on the control side. So yeah.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:08:44.331)
Would you say in a perfect world like one manufacturer would have an engineering team of developing the tires, developing the rims, the spokes, the hubs, the whole system all the way up to the handlebar?

Darren (01:08:55.926)
you

Yeah, that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna make our own tires and wheels and headsets and stems. Yeah, I mean, and that's, know, again, from the world that I came from, when you look at motorcycle development, you know, they do have that advantage, right? So when you look at like a Honda dirt bike, you know, Honda is working with Showa on the suspension forks and they're developing the chassis and the handlebars and the flex and all the different characteristics. And so there's a huge advantage to doing that.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:09:00.598)
Hahaha

Darren (01:09:27.98)
We don't have that obviously in the bicycle world, but yeah, there's a huge advantage if you could work with all the OEMs at the level that like a Honda works with their partners.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:09:38.833)
So maybe as a closing we should maybe recommend to all people out there because we don't have that yet what the motorcycle world has. Try different things. Try playing with your suspension. Try playing all the way to the tire pressure, tire casings maybe, handlebars, grips. There's a lot of improvement available.

Darren (01:10:03.362)
Yep, and I'll give another quick tip for listeners out there that I always tend to tell people, which is nine out of 10 times if you feel like your suspension is harsh, it's because it's too soft. So people tend to feel harshness in their handlebars or harshness at their feet, that chatter or that kind of spiky feeling in your suspension.

A lot of people go the wrong direction. They tend to soften it up because, it feels harsh, so I need to make it softer. And generally harshness comes from riding too deep in the travel. Forks are progressive, shocks are progressive with the linkages and the shocks themselves. So when you ride at the top of the stroke, that's where the, that's the softest or most comfortable portion of your suspension stroke. And so a lot of times...

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:10:51.569)
And the physics behind it, the physics behind it is super interesting because the amount of force for the first inch is way less than for the third inch.

Darren (01:10:59.619)
Yep.

Darren (01:11:05.742)
Yep, yeah and it's a simple thing that riders can do. Go up to your bike and hold the front brake and just push into the first inch of travel and feel how easy it is to move the first inch and then lean into your bike. So compress it one inch and then try to compress it into the second inch and you'll feel how much harder it is. And so yeah, one tip I'll throw out there that I always try to push out to mountain bike riders is if you feel like it's too harsh, you should try.

stiffening you should try increasing your spring rate increasing your compression make it stiffer and a lot of times that will solve that harshness and make the bumps feel just more rounded

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:11:46.737)
Also stiffer and maybe faster. Don't make it to a pogo stick and all the way fast So you'll die and don't have any control anymore but if your fork recovers faster you are way up in that fluffy part of the suspension and then it's also again easier and I really like the fact that if you're riding higher up in the travel you also Remain your geometry. We have bikes with

Darren (01:11:54.766)
you

Darren (01:12:04.162)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:12:16.561)
pretty slack head angles and you can ride really steep stuff comfortably. And having a fork that stays higher in travel provides a lot of safety.

Darren (01:12:31.182)
I agree with that 100%. Less chassis movement. The other thing too I'll add is a bad habit in the mountain bike world with suspension is people gauge their suspension performance by how much travel they're using. So I'm gonna recommend that everybody out there stop doing that. Take your travel indicator O-ring and cut it off because mountain bikers have become a group of people that

If you're using full travel, then your suspension is working well. And I'm gonna say that if you're using full travel, your suspension isn't working well. Ideally at the end of a ride, you shouldn't have what we call hard bottoming events. You shouldn't be that deep in the stroke. So if you're gauging how well your suspension is working by how much travel you're using, then your setup is probably compromised. So don't look at how much travel you're using, go off of.

ride feel and performance, like how is it working? And don't try to overthink it. When you make changes, is it better, worse, or the same? Don't try to figure out if it's diving, if it's this. Make a change. Was it better, worse, or the same? That's all you need to do.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:13:46.257)
Perfect, thank you so much. It was great nerding out on how you approach your goal into the elusive perfect suspension. But it's good to have you out there and going the extra mile and providing something that is maybe different to what you can buy off the shelf.

Darren (01:13:47.438)
Got it.

Darren (01:13:59.309)
Yeah.

Darren (01:14:08.226)
Yeah, yeah, thanks for having me. Super appreciate it. Awesome.

Jens – Testpilot.bike (01:14:11.163)
Thank you.