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Fox Testing New Electronic Lockout?

2K views 13 replies 11 participants last post by  Cyclingdirt 
#1 ·

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#7 ·
I was thinking about this the other day, actually...

I'm training to be a systems engineer. Luckily I seem to be better at that than racing mountain bikes, because I'm going to be pretty slow this summer. Damn grad school!

Anyway, one way to think about a suspension fork for someone who cares about pedaling well is that it's a selective filter, something that removes a periodic force with the frequency of a person pedaling while allowing low and high frequences (sag and trail chatter) to pass. A problem is that I think a lot of slightly larger obstacles aren't allowed to cause the fork to deform by such a setup, which is where the reputation of a lot of XC forks as being a bit harsh comes from.

It's easy to incorporate stuff into an electronic feedback system that would take a ton of damping circuits and maybe additional masses and valving to achieve with a fluid system. Initial setup, if done well, could even be easier. I think it would help for the system to know how fast the bike was going and maybe also whether or not the rider was pedaling, but I can imagine it using only feedback from the fork itself, if it was made to be smart enough. Pretty cool.
 
#8 · (Edited)
It's easy to incorporate stuff into an electronic feedback system that would take a ton of damping circuits and maybe additional masses and valving to achieve with a fluid system. Initial setup, if done well, could even be easier. I think it would help for the system to know how fast the bike was going and maybe also whether or not the rider was pedaling, but I can imagine it using only feedback from the fork itself, if it was made to be smart enough. Pretty cool.
That makes a lot of sense. I'm sure you could retune it for different course profiles and maybe enable you to collect ride / bump data....it's been tried though a few times though, hasn't it? A friend had a Proflex / K2 bike years ago with this gizmo attached but it seems like none of the major players were interested in adopting it. In some ways I'm surprised electronically controlled suspension isn't widespread already...



 
#9 ·
I know Cannondale was trying it.

It's going to need to be a lot better than suspension systems without it, I think. Or, Fox and other companies will need to be willing to take a really long time to recoup development costs, and offer forks with the electronic gizmo for only a little more than forks without them. The controllers would be pretty cheap, once they got going, especially if they shipped in near-stock cases and took off-the-shelf batteries and used off-the-shelf actuators. They might even permit removing some of the expensive innards from a fork. But development of something like this is always pretty expensive.
 
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