As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.
When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.
Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.
Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.
Thanks for your patience and support!
I am basing my estimates on what is currently on the bike, or what appears to be currently on the bike. The rear spring has a sticker with 6.4 on it. Some threads on some other sites have stated that these bikes had 6.4's on them stock. This seemed pretty stiff to me too. But when I attempt to set my race sag I have the rear spring cranked down to the point of impending coil binding and I still can only manage about 5.5 inches of race sag, and then I have no static sag. So, needless to say I am a bit confused.
Racetech has a pretty decent spring calculation chart, but they have no listing for an '08 TE610. The closest bike they have is an '10 TE630, which it appears is pretty close in weight and suspension components/geometry. Their site estimates I need a .52 front and a 6.1 rear. But there is where I get confused again as I am being told (and the sticker says) it already has a 6.4 on the rear.
Maybe the sticker is just some sort of routing/inventory sticker and has nothing to do with spring rate? People are just confusing it to mean 6.4? It certainly has me confused.
Can anyone here definitively state what the stock spring rates are on these bikes?
How much preload do you have on the spring?Stock springs for the 08 are 0.50 and 6.4. The number on the spring indicates # kg/mm so your spring is stock.
When I set up my TE630 ( I weigh 180lb) the race sag numbers indicated the rear spring was much too stiff. I went from the stock 6.4 to 5.4 kg/mm and the sag numbers were much better.
I am also at a loss as why your sag numbers are so high!
1.5" from spring to shock collar.How much preload do you have on the spring?
You should put the bike up on a stand. Back off the collar until the spring is free. Bring collar down until it touches the spring put a paint mark on the threads above the collar. Now add 10 to 15mm of preload to the spring. If you can not get sag numbers correct between the 10 to 15mm a new spring is needed. This seems like the part of setting sag everyone forgets.1.5" from spring to shock collar.
This is exactly the procedure I follow and race sag wasn't even close. So I took it down to just before the point of coil bind and still don't have the correct sag numbers. I'm just trying to figure out as close as possible what spring rate I need to get the sag numbers close.You should put the bike up on a stand. Back off the collar until the spring is free. Bring collar down until it touches the spring put a paint mark on the threads above the collar. Now add 10 to 15mm of preload to the spring. If you can not get sag numbers correct between the 10 to 15mm a new spring is needed. This seems like the part of setting sag everyone forgets.
I used a little different procedure:You should put the bike up on a stand. Back off the collar until the spring is free. Bring collar down until it touches the spring put a paint mark on the threads above the collar. Now add 10 to 15mm of preload to the spring. If you can not get sag numbers correct between the 10 to 15mm a new spring is needed. This seems like the part of setting sag everyone forgets.
You can take note of settings either by mark or measurement and crank more preload on to compensate for the extra weight. I don't usually touch mine. I find that I ride a lot less agressively when carrying extra weight so bottoming is about the same.For those of you that do some adventure type riding how do you decide the compromise between loaded and unloaded weight when setting up your suspension?
Majority of my bike use and most critical use of suspension is unloaded weight. But when I'm packed for a trip and have 70-90 lbs on the back I don't want to be bottoming the suspension on every pot hole and speed bump.
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