Key Components
Chainstays
Perhaps the most striking and technologically unique feature of the SilkTi is
the flat chainstay. This structure is able to provide significant vertical move-
ment and lower levels of stress than round stays. Since our flat stay is only
.25” tall, for a given amount of travel the plate has one third the bending
stress of a .75” round tube. The result is our stay can provide nearly double the
travel seen on other softtails with far less stress. As with any spring—and our
chainstay is essentially a leaf spring—low stress means long life.
The chainstays are designed as a planar truss to increase lateral stiffness. In
fact, the SilkTi chainstays are 50% stiffer side-to-side than the round
chainstays used on other softtails.
The CDE Shock
Due to the SilkTi’s significantly increased suspension travel, we needed to
design a shock absorber appropriate to the application. As a result, the SilkTi
uses our Critically Damped Elastomer shock, a simple engineering marvel with
few moving parts. It is reliable, lightweight, user-friendly, and provides
excellent travel with minimal maintenance.
In the first part of its travel, the CDE shock is supple and undamped, which
allows it to be very active on small amplitude/high frequency bumps (small
bumps). On higher amplitude/low frequency bumps (the big hits) the shock
becomes progressively stiffer and the damping kicks in. The purpose of the
damper is to absorb bump energy to keep you on the bike and the tire on the
ground. Most short travel softtails leave out the damper. But a good damper is
critical to performance particularly as travel increases.
Das Boot
Because we like to build bikes that last a long time and require minimal
maintenance, we’ve built the SilkTi shock as a sealed system. Since there is a
large change in air volume inside the shock when the shock goes through its
range of motion, we needed to design a shock boot that absorbs all the excess
air without ballooning and trying to suck nasty stuff into its nicely sealed inner
environment. Using a bunch of fancy math that most of us forget after our last
calculus final, we’ve designed a custom boot that accomplishes this goal.
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