006_007 said:
Tweaking the linkage meaning grinding it a bit to fit a schraeder valve of an alternate same sized shock, sure, that is still plain jane. Using rockers designed for a different frame - frankenturner. Pushing the shock, nah, thats plain.
And hey, if you want to to change your brand of rubbers from your first time, do whatever it takes to spice up your night life.......
OK, so here's my semi-serious response to the question being begged by your initial post. You asked "how many?." Equally important questions are "why?" and "why on Turners?"
Having posed the questions, I'll take a shot. The "why" is pretty straightforward. Bicycling is a gear sport, and we are guys (for the most part). In general, guys like to tweak things, and gear sports offer lots of opportunity to satisfy our urge for tweaking. By the nature of the equipment, mountain bikers are afforded more opportunities to tweak their gear than road bikers, but it's really all the same thing. It starts with messing with the air pressure and compression damping by twisting that little dial on the fork or the shock. Then maybe you decide to try different spring weights on a coil fork, or different oil weights and volume, or maybe even revamp the internals entirely (PUSH upgrade). Tires, saddles, seatpost quick releases or quick adjusters, etc....you are basically just tweaking your ride because...well heck, you are a guy and it's what you like to do.
The other important question is "why Turners and not some of the other brands?" To this I would respond with a couple of related points. First, Turner's designs are derivative from his previous successful designs and share common design principles, and in many cases common parts. This interchangeability has afforded the Homer Nation the opportunity to try combinations that DT might not have considered, or didn't think made sense for volume production, but might meet an individual's requirements perfectly. Or not...maybe it sucks, but if the guy who put it together likes it who are we to judge? Compare Turner's entire line of bikes to the Specialized FSR bikes over the last few years. Specialized always needs to come out with something new and improved, to obsolete last year's model and stimulate new sales. This can not do anything good for design stability and parts interchangeability.
The other aspect of Turners that allows the tweaking to work is that there is enough "headroom" in the designs to allow it. If the bikes were built to pare every last conceivable ounce, you might have a bike that works for its intended application but would have a higher incidence of failure when you exceeded those design parameters. Not intending to bash He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named here, but we'll use one of his designs as an example. Some older Truth frames were susceptible to failure at the seat tube, near the linkage pivot. If you had tried to increase the travel on that frame with a different set of rockers or something similar, I suspect that you would have been looking at a much higher failure rate simply because there was very little headroom in the bike as originally designed and built (even though it was a great ride within it's inteded performance envelope).
So that's the long way of explaining it....the short version would be "because we like to" and "because we can."
