Shock revalve

 In june my shock made a loud bang and started spraying fluid out of the adjusters. Damper shaft had just snapped, apparently a common issue with these things. Not covered by warranty as that is only a year apparently.

While it was being repaired at fox I thought I'd try some different valving. The stock tune from kona is a linear curve, which means that as shaft velocity increases, so does damping force. I've felt like this was part of my issue with the bike as it felt very squishy under pedaling forces, which is low speed shaft movement. A digressive valve means there is much more low speed force and then it levels off in the higher speed range.

Every fox shock and fork has a 4 digit code on it somewhere and you can look it up on the fox website to find out the details of your suspension. Mine spits out the following:

2020, FLOAT DPS, P-S, A, 3pos, Evol LV, Kona, Hei Hei CR, 190, 45, 0.8 Spacer, LCF, LRM, CMF, TC-6265/PMS-447-C Logo

The year, model, bike it comes on, length, stroke, air volume spacer size

LCF stands for Linear Compression Firm
LRM stands for Linear Rebound Medium
CMF stands for Closed Mode Firm

So now instead of linear I have digressive valving, firm, on both rebound and compression sides. I also previously swapped the 0.8 in^2 volume spacer for a smaller 0.4 which allowed me to increase air pressure to make the shock firmer while still using most of the travel. I have been at about 215psi.

The revalve resulted in a pretty big difference. At the same shock pressure it feels like the suspension barely moves when I stand up and pedal hard, yet if anything is more comfortable over bumps and rocks and roots while descending. It also uses less travel because of the extra low speed support, which keeps it from compressing as far and blowing through travel when loading the bike or pedaling hard or even landing on jumps.

I've actually been dropping the air pressure a touch, as previously I was only sitting at about 18-19% sag which is on the low side and then still not ever using full travel. Down at 200-205 I still get a good balanced feel and pedaling support but below that it starts to feel a little too squishy again. I had my rebound pretty well figured out before but now am at about the same spot with a different curve so probably need a little further adjustment there.

In conclusion it feels really good though. I'm not really sure why it wasn't this way out of the box, but I suppose they were going for a more supple feel and progressive curve where I'm looking for more of an XC race bike pedaling feel. But on the other hand it's still pretty smooth and rides nice so yeah, seems way better. Now that this bike is lighter and pedals well I'm starting to question my new bike order. But I think a hardtail will still  be nice to have, and then I can do things like keep more aggressive tires on the hei hei and put on a dropper that goes down farther and works in the middle spots.