Modern Buddy

I couldn't understand why my back hurt so much after riding. The adjustment on the rear shock has a F and S with arrows. I assumed that it meant Firm or Soft. In reality turning it towards F softens and vice versa.

lotusmark wrote:I couldn't understand why my back hurt so much after riding. The adjustment on the rear shock has a F and S with arrows. I assumed that it meant Firm or Soft. In reality turning it towards F softens and vice versa.

I asked about adjusting it here:

viewtopic.php?t=11764

and hairball was spot-on with how to figure out where in the spectrum you are.

this is what I've since come to understand.

that dial is the dampener, and adjusts how fast and slow the shock goes up and down.

On soft, you sit on the scoot and depress quickly but is slower to come up. This is good for heavy loads and 2 ups. The shock depresses and when you hit a bump, it absorbs it without a hurky-jerky retraction.

On Firm the shock depress slow but returns faster. so for light loads, single riders, on the firmer side is a less up and down hurky jerky.

What you can't tell without doing what Hairball suggests is know if you're in the middle or all the way around once and almost there again. So it's just good to reset to 20 clicks and tweak a little from there.

lotusmark wrote:I couldn't understand why my back hurt so much after riding. The adjustment on the rear shock has a F and S with arrows. I assumed that it meant Firm or Soft. In reality turning it towards F softens and vice versa.

i've found the dampening knob useless. i ended up adjusting the spring itself. mine was set all the way out, so the shock was bottoming out i believe, and i was feeling every freaking bump on the highway. i adjusted the top screw thing of the spring down, so it doesn't have some much travel, and it has made my ride so much more tolerable and smoother.

here's what i adjusted below. i just screwed it down a little towards the bottom of the shock (but not to the bottom of the threads), so it wasn't at the very top of the threads.

I just found this and hope it works. I have almost an inch of threads at the top and I feel like I'm bottoming out everywhere.

Adjust the spring preload FIRST. Then any damping adjustments; as the damping will change with spring pre load.