Mountain Bike Suspension
Mountain bike suspension is an innovation that provides a cushioned ride by suspending the rider and bicycle, insulating them from the road terrain. It is usually split into two conversations, front suspension and rear suspension.
- Front Suspension: when talking about the front suspension, it’s usually referencing the front fork. Suspension forks utilize an internal spring and damper to suspend the rider and bike. Suspension forks are highly sophisticated pieces of equipment and earn their high costs. The better ones are adjustable. They are designed for a specific riding style, such as Downhill, Enduro, Fatbike, Freebike, and XC. What makes one better suited for a specific riding style are:
- Amount of Travel
- Weight
- Durability
- Strength
- Handling Characteristics
- Rear Suspension: a shock absorber is built into a frame design, where the rear triangle supporting the rear wheel is allowed to articulate. There are alot of variations on spring placement, which makes for cool and interesting bike frame designs. There are alot of different designs for a rear suspension, with too many to list here, but in general they can be placed into two primary types:
- Single Pivot: this design uses a single point to pivot the rear of the bicycle. Typically the pivot point is where the rear triangle framing attaches to the bottom bracket.
- Split Pivot: this design uses two or more pivot points.
- Rear Suspension Shock: all rear suspensions use a shock. Just because a builder designed a frame design to use a specific rear shock, doesn’t mean you’re dedicated to using only that shock. In fact, there are a lot of aftermarket shocks you can use to upgrade your ride and change some of the riding characteristics of your rear suspension.
We’ve gathered some of our favorite fork and frame builders below, with many of them American made.

2014 Cane Creek DBinline Air Shock Made In The USA
Cane Creek has debuted their latest air shock offering. The new 2014 Cane Creek DBinline air shock is designed for ...
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5 Things You Need To Know: 2015 FOX Racing MTB Forks
FOX Racing Shox has released a bunch of info on their 2015 model lineup. They have updated quite a few ...
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Best 2014 29er Mountain Bike Fork Guide – FOX Racing Shox
Each year suspension designers try to come up with new designs and suspension improvements for mountain bike forks. It is ...
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Cane Creek C Quent Shock and Tuning App
Cane Creek has released a couple of new goodies lately. They've released a new air shock called the C-Quent and ...
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Cane Creek DBAir CS Climb Switch
Most riders already know that the North Carolina made Cane Creek Double Barrel shock is one, if not the best, ...
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Cane Creek DBAir XV Shock Gets Progressive
Cane Creek has now introduced their DBAir XV, an extra volume air can built specifically to compliment bikes with progressive ...
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![Cane Creek DBcoil [IL] shock](https://cdn.oldglorymtb.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2017-cane-creek-dbcoil-il-shock-review-520x245.jpg)
Cane Creek DBcoil IL Shock Review
North Carolina based Cane Creek has been well known for making one of, if not, the best coil shocks on ...
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Cane Creek Malcom Monday: Tuning Field Guide
Cane Creek has a weekly show on their site called Malcolm Monday where they talk with suspension guru Malcolm Hadley ...
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Cielo By Chris King Rigid Steel Mountain Bike Fork
Cielo by Chris King has published some new images of their complete 29" mountain bike. The news here is that ...
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Shockspital Bluto Cold Weather Kit
Shockspital has their Bluto low-temp air spring kits now in stock. Extends the cold weather performance of your Bluto fork ...
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Waltworks Rigid QR15 Fork
Walt has a new article on his Waltworks blog about his latest rigid QR15 fork offering. His fork uses Paragon's ...
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[How To] Set Mountain Bike Fork Sag
Getting your suspension dialed is one of the most important technical things to know how to do on a mountain ...
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[Review] Cane Creek DBAir CS Climb Switch Shock
The announcement of the Cane Creek DBAir CS Climb Switch shock just came out near the beginning of the month ...
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[Review] Cane Creek DBAir Shock
Cane Creek has been well known for their headsets and Double Barrel coil shock. Awhile back they debuted an equally ...
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[Review] Cane Creek Double Barrel Air Shock
Pink Bike has published a thorough review of Cane Creek's Double Barrel Air shock. They do a good job of ...
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[Review] FOX Float Fork and Float Shock
MBA has published a review of FOX 2013 32 Float fork and Float Shock. They discuss the performance of both ...
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