Cascade, what do you consider the ideal progression for a coil shock application? For an air shock application?
Or is this all just up to personal preference, the specific application and terrain? If so, please elaborate.
From what I've seen all the Cascade links do sort of the same thing, up progression. Am I wrong, or is your position that more progression = more better in all scenarios?
Thanks.
Sent from my KYOCERA-E6920 using Tapatalk
I would say there isn't a one size fits all progression amount. It depends on how hard you are riding the bike. The ideal amount of progression would be the amount that lets you have a reasonable amount of sag while only bottoming on the largest features you hit. If you take it to the extreme of WC racing, a lot of riders are on links that put the progression well above what's already considered pretty progressive. Generally speaking there aren't many non-DH frames out there that are at the ideal amount of progression for aggressive riders, hence the existence of things like volume spacers and progressive springs.
Slight tangent about those... the reason they are not identical to a different linkage is because they only affect end of stroke ramp. You can get identical bottom out resistance with them, but small bump and mid-stroke will be lacking in comparison. You also get a much larger variation in rebound speed between top and bottom of travel. This is especially the case with the Megneg. It sucks you in to having rebound being too slow at top of travel or too fast at bottom of travel because of the very large pressure differential. How rebound affects ride quality is something that should maybe receive more attention than it does. If rebound is too slow the bike won't track well, but if it's too fast it'll feel unsettled. Having equal rebound speeds at top and bottom of travel would be the perfect scenario, but obviously that isn't easily attainable.
Back to progressive links, for those that are trying to balance things with volume spacers, over-springing, or excessive damping, our position is that a progressive link is better in all scenarios. Pedaling is largely unaffected. If you actually get into it on paper it's better for horst link bikes, but in practice that isn't noticeable at all. If you are running ~30% sag, have no volume spacers installed, your damping is in a reasonable range, and you aren't having issues with riding deeper in the travel than ideal or bottoming out then I'd say a progressive link would be less of a benefit. It wouldn't really do harm, but a certain level of aggression is needed to get the most out of them.