Supermoto rebound settings

[Niall-griffiths]

At the moment my 2002 sm250 is very soft on the suspention it tilts right down when I sit on it and the forks are also very soft. Today I set the rebound to the hardest settings on both and it feels much stiffer ... However I'm not a pro rider and I use the bike for road use at weekends I'm after some advice on if having the suspention set as stiff as possible could be a bad thingZ? I can get the bike low enough to scrape the pegs when they where soft so I do manage to get reasonably low.

[Jakobi]

Put your clickers back in the middle of the range and measure your sag figures. Sounds as if the bike is under sprung for you.

Did you close the rebound or open it?

[motopsycho87]

How much do you weigh? It's easy to change the springs, and generally a lot better to go a weight heavier than "recommended" (this was told to me by Dr Shox) and use less preload.

Use the racetech calculator to find what you need. With my bike it got it bang on, rear race sag is 35 static, 105 race.

You can do your springs yourself, but the valving I'd advise taking to a pro (Shox works though GH Motorcycles in Colchester, it cost me about ?230 to get front an rear done WITHOUT SPRINGS).

Faulkner springs are good for the rear (get them direct or from demon tweaks).

[WAZ]

If your bike is fitted with WP43s, you'll struggle to find springs for it due to the small diameter, I ended up having a set custom made to my spec by 'Springcoil' in Sheffield (http://www.springcoil.co.uk), for my 01 EC300 supermoto. I had them made 50mm shorter than standard and fitted nylon spacers under the damper rod to 'take up the slack', and uprated from 0.38 to 0.44kg/mm. Although they are 50mm shorter, the ride height is only 28mm lower due to the increased spring rate reducing sag. If I were to do it again I'd go stiffer, as they still dive quite a lot on the brakes, mainly due to the 320mm disc and 4 pot caliper fitted