The following will be controversial. Mrblaine said it was hokey. I am proud of myself for figuring this out.
Reclaiming Unused Shock Travel
I had begun thinking my way a little further through shock lengths and coil lengths and realized that my front Old Man Emu N66 shocks have a compressed length of 13.2" while with my bump stop extension stopping my tires from scraping the fenders, I had 15" of available compressed shock length. That means that my shocks could be compressed an additional 1.8" before bottoming out. That unused shock uptravel can be moved into droop by decreasing the shock mount locations. I was pleased that Unlimited04 had come to the same conclusion years earlier, so i went ahead with mine.
Here we are at full bump and the shock's bar pin raised up on a pair of 1" steel stand off tubes.
To avoid having the stand offs too tall, I assembled a stack of cup washers and fender washers to push the upper mount down.
The final result is that I went from ~7.625" of travel to ~8.875" of travel. I left about 3/8" of compression to make sure I don't blow up my shocks.
Also because I had them, I threw in the 10mm (~3/8") spacers that Old Man Emu sells. The concern with coil spacers is coil bind. However, ftgiles posted this a while ago:
Reclaiming Unused Shock Travel
I had begun thinking my way a little further through shock lengths and coil lengths and realized that my front Old Man Emu N66 shocks have a compressed length of 13.2" while with my bump stop extension stopping my tires from scraping the fenders, I had 15" of available compressed shock length. That means that my shocks could be compressed an additional 1.8" before bottoming out. That unused shock uptravel can be moved into droop by decreasing the shock mount locations. I was pleased that Unlimited04 had come to the same conclusion years earlier, so i went ahead with mine.
Here we are at full bump and the shock's bar pin raised up on a pair of 1" steel stand off tubes.
To avoid having the stand offs too tall, I assembled a stack of cup washers and fender washers to push the upper mount down.
The final result is that I went from ~7.625" of travel to ~8.875" of travel. I left about 3/8" of compression to make sure I don't blow up my shocks.
Also because I had them, I threw in the 10mm (~3/8") spacers that Old Man Emu sells. The concern with coil spacers is coil bind. However, ftgiles posted this a while ago:
ftgiles;27847489 said:There's a little more to it than is often discussed.
Doing the math, I am several inches away from coil bind, so I see no harm in adding a small spacer for a little more lift.ftgiles;27847489 said:If you have the same length spring and increase the spring rate from 140 to 160 you will be reducing down travel .68" and increasing uptravel .68". If you increased the spring length by .68" you would get the same ride height increase and have the same down travel and increase your uptravel .68".
A .68" spring spacer will give you the same ride height increase and keep the same downtravel and also has the potential to also increase your up travel as long as the bump stop is set for other reasons than coil bind. If the bump stop is set for something other than coil bind that means you have unused spring up travel with your current spring that can be utilized by using a spring spacer.
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