July 27, 2021

Stiffening up the front end (so to speak..)

Stiffening up the front end (so to speak..)

The forks on the recently acquired PC800 are too soft. My 80kg alone uses up about 1/3 of the free travel – and if you hit a speed bump at anything other than a crawl it bottoms out. If you miss spotting a pothole and hit the thing at speed – well that’s pretty brutal altogether.



A quick google confirms that they came out of the factory like that. It’s never going to be a taut handling thing, but I’d like to do something to stop the thing taking such a bang every time it bottoms out.



Rather than go chasing stiffer springs and playing with the fork oil, I was looking for an easier fix – and one with a certain amount of adjustability, so I can play about with the preload to a degree.



One option seems to be to track down and fit (or make up) a set of air-fork caps like this:





https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/402370097…4AAOSwiEFfPwCP





Or another – see if I can chase down something more modern in the from of a preload adjuster like this (if I could find one that fits the internal threads on the original forks):



https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/202292746…Cclp%3A2563228



Worth pursuing one or other of the above d’ye think – or should I just bite the bullet and try to track down some stiffer fork springs ?


Source: Stiffening up the front end (so to speak..)