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Adjusting the suspension
Suspension and damping of
Scorpion /fx /fs 20 /fs 26 /fs 26 Enduro
/fs 26 S-Pedelec /plus 20 /plus 26
Rear suspension and full suspension tricycles
allow compensation of bumps and roughness
of the track for advanced comfort and reduce
forces on the tricycle.
A well-adjusted suspension improves the trac-
tion of your tricycle on uneven roads. Espe-
cially when riding in a bend this allows a
higher speed and also improves safety.
In order to achieve maximum riding comfort,
the suspension settings have to match your
weight as well as the road condition.
The goals of the adjustment are:
•
maximum use of the available suspension
travel without the suspension frequently
bottoming out
•
quick reaction of the suspension without
obvious oscillation after having passed a
bump
•
avoiding self-enforcing oscillations, that
means increasing oscillations of the suspen-
sion system due to pedalling influence,
rhythmic body movements or permanent
wavy underground
The improvement of road holding the suspen-
sion gives you a plus of safety.
The suspension system of the rear swingarm
consists of a spring and a damper.
Often, the terms suspension and damping are
used inaccurate in everyday language.
The spring is the elastic element that com-
presses and expands due to the load changes,
which e.g. occur on bumpy roads. While ex-
panding, the spring releases the same energy it
took to compress it.
The rear swingarm is suspended with a steel
coil spring in the standard version. The op-
tional rear shock R
OCK
S
HOX
Monarch uses air
as spring medium.
The damper slows down the process of com-
pression and expansion. That means the tricy-
cle does not immediately "spring" back to the
initial position or even further than that after
having passed a bump. The damper converts
spring energy into friction and finally into heat,
and thus takes away energy from the suspen-
sion system. The damper prevents the spring
from swinging uncontrolled after an initial
stimulation. In addition, the damper helps to
avoid self-enforcing oscillations of the suspen-
sion caused by recurrent stimulation like ped-
alling forces within a crank revolution or the
rhythmic up and down movement of the legs.
In case you have mounted the optional sus-
pension element R
OCK
S
HOX
Monarch, the hy-
draulic damping of the rear suspension is
adjustable. The more you increase the re-
bound setting, the slower the system comes
back to the normal position after a compres-
sion.
Adjusting the suspension
You should always set the damping as low as
possible to give the tricycle the possibility to
quickly react even to several bumps in a row.
You can ride a recumbent tricycle with a con-
siderably lower damping rate than for exam-
ple a MTB: due to the relaxed and steady
position of the body the recumbent does not
experience extreme variations in the load as it
is known from dancing on the pedals while
riding uphill on a mountain bike.
In addition to this, varying pedalling forces
have very little influence on the suspension of
the tricycle due to the No Squat design of the
suspension system of the tricycle. So when
you adjust the damping, always start with a
low damping rate.
It is necessary to choose the correct spring
stiffness to have a well operating suspension
