Two rides in, so do not take this as a be all and end all, but I will say my initial impressions are positive.

Just going to come out and say it.... I truly believe you will ride better, feel better and have more fun if you ride with longer chainstays and add weight to your bike. Hear me out...

As the snow firms up and the temps drift away from minus 15, those of us not in the Fat Bike Club will be itching to get out to ride. If you are like me, you like to ride your Plus tires or normal MTB tires to retain the handling feel from the summer months. So.... here are a few things to remember when you set up your bike to head out.

I am going to beat this one to death, but setting up your sag is the most important adjustment to your suspension you can make. If you want to get out there and Murder Some Dirt... you need to get this right, otherwise you might find the trail trying to murder you!

Ever encountered that situation where you grab a handfull of brakes and it feels like, or infact your wrist shoot forward on your grips and you hang on for dear life????? Your brake lever angles might not be ideal for your terrain and riding situations.

We have a lot of new Mountain bikers out there right now, so these tips/tricks are to help you Ride #MOREAWESOMER and stick with us all!
Old guard... maybe this will introduce something new to you!

The highest end offerings certainly has some sex appeal to us Mountain Bikers, but do we really need the creme-de-la-creme, the cherry on top, the uber-ultra-juicy-mega-sweet??? Probably not.... I will try and explain why.

For the purpose of this lets stick to Rockshock and Fox/Marzocchi to highlight the why nots of maybe not needing the highest of high end offerings.

1. What do you get with the highest end offerings.... adjustability. High Speed/Low Speed compression and rebound are usually independently adjustable, but is that a good thing? I would argue to say that for 95% of riders out there, no, it is not. Here is why... you are probably F'n things up because of an incomplete knowledge of how one adjustment effects another. Add to that, to really get it right you need to do some bracket tuning which takes multiple runs, one adjustment at a time, multiple runs again, one adjustment again, across all your settings. A long process to do, which is all for not if you didn't set your sag right and reset it every time you made adjustments.

2. The dampers in the mid level forks... are damn awesome and use to be the highest end version only a short time ago. Point in fact... GRIP in the Marzochhi Z1 use to be the DH damper in FOX.

3 Wipers seals and fluids are usually exactly the same, or at the very least at your first 50hr service you can replace them with high equivalent, or potentially aftermarket superior.

4. Set and forget and simple and calculated changes. When you only have a single low speed compression adjustment and a single low speed rebound adjustment is is a lot easier to get things right. Plus, the manufacture has preset how those changes will affect the high speed compression and rebound circuits as well. So you don't have to fiddle with those other adjustments to get everything right again.

5. Reliability. Simpler very often means longer life and less likely to go wrong. Remember, the chassis are the same (except for Marzocchi where the chassis is of a heavier and stronger material, which actually causes some noticeable performance improvements... weight aside) so you are getting the same outer shell, just a simpler damper.

6. Can not finish without mentioning price... save several hundreds of monies, which you could them put into better brakes and/or pads, better tires, improved cockpit through grips/bars etc... Or, extra skrilla for that bike trip you plan to take!

LAST TIP.... lastly, the single most important factor to squeezing the most out of your bike is SAG... proper SAG. Get it wrong and everything else is wrong, you may not even notice it until you now go and set your sag correctly. Bike rides better for climbing, the suspension is more supportive where it needs to be etc....
Also, tokens do not negate you from running less air/sag because of more bottom out ramp up to achieve more sensitivity. All this will do is cause the bike to wallow into the wrong curves of the suspension and hinder your ride experience. If you make token changes, re-set your sag again.
Forks, 15% to 20% ids a good ground base setting, Shock, strictly follow your manufactures guidelines first. They have done a lot of work with tuning the suspension curve to certain pressures to get the best ride quality out of the frame.

So set your sag, test and adjust your settings and Go Ride #moreawesomer