ShockWiz Helps Anyone Understand Suspension
After 8 months of waiting, I finally received my new mountain bike last week! The Intense Sniper T Pro is a modern Cross-Country bike with All-Mountain Geometry. The Front and Rear suspension are Fox components, and the first thing I did was place a ShockWiz unit on the front fork and rear shock.
The ShockWiz is a component that measures air pressure in pneumatic suspension systems. Using a cell-phone app, the ShockWiz looks at compression, rebound, and travel to make post-ride recommendations in the following areas.
- Base air pressure
- Spring Rate
- Compression
- Rebound
Suspension Tuning is Usually a Guessing Game
ShockWiz removes a lot of the work required to properly dial in a bike’s suspension. Over the course of a ride, the app will provide a “Confidence” Percentile, followed by a “Tuning Score”. Recommendations about what to ride next are also displayed. I’m fortunate to have a perfect, traditional Cross Country Trial course up on the mountain behind my house. Using this course, and starting from the first hour of ownership, I’m blogging the changes that I’m making to the suspension, based on ShockWiz recommendations.
So far, I’ve had about Six rides on the Sniper T. I must say; after riding a 10-year old bike with “Old School” Geometry, having a modern bike that fits me properly, and has modern suspension, is a game-changer. Suspension requires about 20 to 50 hours of time to properly break in the seals, but the ShockWiz has already provided some fascinating information. This is helping me improve more quickly and setsuspension settings with more confidence.
Ride 3 ShockWiz Review and Changes
My goal with this series is to produce multiple short videos reviewing the data from the ShockWiz app after each ride. I was unable to adequately collect data from rides 1 and 2, but here is Ride 3’s review.
Going forward, after each ride, I will write up a quick review, make a short video, and then make changes for the next ride. I’ll also be using the same trail repeatedly, along with downhill segments to properly assess speed, comfort and control. Let’s see what the system says, how the changes are made, and whether this improves performance or not.
Thanks for watching, and ENJOY THE RIDE!
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How much does adjusting tire pressures change the readings that Shockwiz gives you on the suspension setup? Going the other way, can Shockwiz (perhaps working with Tirewiz) help figure out optimum tire pressures?
I absolutely believe that tire pressure is the first component of suspension, be it mountain, road, gravel, whatever. Farrrrrr too many times, I’ve seen dealerships sell cyclists Gatorskinz or Armadillos or worse, inflate them to MAX PRESSURE, and then tell the client that they’ll never flat again.
Yeah…. probably because they’ll never RIDE again, thanks to the discomfort and poor control from this crap.
Tire pressure for the Shockwiz DEFINITELY makes a difference, especially because of the volume in mountain bike tires. David Nayer of Nimble Wheels (RIP thanks to the factory fire; he lived, but the line never recovered), talked decades ago about how tire pressure needed to be as low as safely feasible, and the four mantras of modern tires and pressure were: Control, Comfort, Acceleration and Braking. Substitute Control for Cornering if you wish.
I absolutely believe in the TyreWiz, and someday (which is not a day of the week, much less this week), I’ll own a pair or two and I’ll use them regularly. 1 psi on a mountain bike can be the difference between grip and slip. It can also be the difference between roll and flat.