MTB Forks

This website will give you a short overview about the different types of MTB Forks. You will also learn which is the right one for you and your bike. As forks are very cheap it is a good way to upgrade your bike. Here you will learn the things you should know to find the best MTB fork for you instead of something expensive stuff you don’t really need.

Decide what type your MTB Fork has to be

First of all you have to know what you want to do with your bike. You only want to ride it on streets? Then you don’t need any special fork. No special suspension. Just a cheap fork. You can go for a Freeride Light Suspension Mountain Bike Fork. These MTB forks have a low travel because they only absorb the small road holes. The light suspension mountain bike forks are much heavier than the other MTB forks you will see later on. Or you can go for a rigid fork that has no suspension. Street bikes use these forks. All the bikes used in the ‘Tour de France’ have these rigid forks. They are nearly the lightest forks but you will feel every hole on the road.

You want to ride offroad with your new suspension fork?

So we can start. What type of riding do you prefer? Downhill (DH) ?? Cross Country (XC) ??

Let’s start with Downhill (DH). As the name clearly says you will ride down the hill. You will need a very long travel (up to 300mm) and a very good MTB fork because the fork will be under stress all the time. It is common that these suspension forks will have a double crown. This will give the fork more stability and even more weight. However weight is not a big problem here.

A MTB Cross Country (XC) is an off road competition where the participants have to ride through the same circuit multiple times. These MTB forks are one of the most expensive ones. They have to be very very low in weight. The travel can be around 40mm to 100mm. The XC suspension forks utilize air springs and air pressure rather than the more common coil system.

These are the most common riding styles. As mentioned above you should know what you want to do with your bike. It is important to try out several MTB forks, suspension forks and even rigid forks. It doesn’t really matter what type of riding you prefer, you should always be comfortable with your bike in the end.

Some words you have to know when you are talking about suspension MTB forks:

Travel: This is the amount of movement in a suspension fork. It’s how far the fork can be depressed when pressure is put on it. Today nearly every suspension fork can be adjusted externally.

Rebound: It is the rate at which the fork will bounce back after it has been depressed.

Lockout: This is a new feature some MTB forks have. It will disable the suspension and will turn your suspension fork into a rigid fork. This is for people who sometimes ride off the road and sometimes on normal roads. This feature is normally not very often in use and some critics see lockout as useless but it depends on your riding style. If you switch the type of riding you can profit of it. If not, just spend the money somewhere else.

BOB: One of the disadvantages of full suspension bikes is that you can loose a little bit of power on each pedal stroke with the energy being absorbed into the rear shock (this is commonly known as BOB). BOB is nearly no problem for MTB forks but it’s good to know it.

Sag: This is one of the things people don’t know how to adjust. It is the amount a fork or shock will be depressed when you sit on the bike. This is important for air shocks. Sag will be different on every bike. Even if u change your fork or rear shock Sag will change. You have to know the manufacturer’s recommendations and put more air into the fork (shock) or release the air out of your suspension fork (rear shock).

Here is a special offer video just for you. Watch it to avoid the same mistakes:

Here are some special MTB Forks:

First of all you can see an example of an MTB fork above. There is the “Preload Adjuster knob” to adjust the travel of the fork. Also the “Rebound Adjuster” to adjust the rebound can be found. This MTB fork, as well as all the other MTB forks you can see above, are known as RightSideUp forks. In other words it says that the upper tube of the fork, this is the thinner one, is above the lower tube, this is the thicker one.

There are other MTB forks known as UpSideDown (USD). Here are the thicker tubes above the thinner. This will give you more stability and sensibility. But you need another nave of wheel to fix this and it will be quite expensive. The USD forks will be used for Downhill because only here you can feel a difference. Cross Country forks are optimized for a low weight and short travel so there won’t be a huge difference.

Last but not least there is a very strange type of MTB forks. It is know as Lefty-Fork made by Canondale. There is only one tube instead of two. It looks very instable but tests showed that the lefty fork is one of the stablest MTB forks because there is no upper tube that goes into a lower tube. Lefty forks use needle bearings instead of bushings. This will make them lighter and super-strong.