Suspension tuning guides

[tim-4par]

Hello! Just bought my SV in March. New to the whole bike riding thing. Found out about this website from a guy at the top of Palomar! Kudos to him!:) Got a technical question for someone who knows. How do I measure sag on my front forks? I weigh 195 lbs. and I find that my forks are too soft even when the preload is fully adjusted. I'm not loaded so I'm going to go the poor man route and change my fork oil to 20W and adjust my spacer, but I don't know how much. Any help out there? Thanks.

[linp]

Welcome!
Stinky did the Racetech springs and 20Wt fork oil mod and really likes it. I think he weighs about the same as you. He did a write up of it a few posts down.

Here's something on suspension setting:
http://www.racebikesite.com/motorcycle-modifications.htm

[Stinky]

Originally posted by tim-4par
I'm not loaded so I'm going to go the poor man route and change my fork oil to 20W and adjust my spacer, but I don't know how much. Any help out there? Thanks.

I did the same thing and added 20W to get rid of the brake dive. I tried to add some PVC for more spacer but failed and got lazy and never tried to replace the stock spacers.
You won't realize how bad it is even with the 20W until you get new springs.

[CPM F4]

Haven't had a chance to go through all of the articles but this looks like a good resource for those looking to learn about and tune their bike's suspension. Articles are from Sport Rider magazine.

Suspension tuning guide (http://www.sportrider.com/tech/146_0006_susp/)

Suspension setups (http://www.sportrider.com/bikes/146_susp_settings/) used by Sport Rider for their tests of different bikes.

[cracked lid]

This is great. I've been looking for something this thorough.

[Kurt'sSV]

There's no SV for the suspension setups used by Sport Rider, so that won't help most of us here. Thanks for trying, though. :D