Spring Rates....

[syoung]

When the 'washboard road' scenario was first mentioned, my interpretation of it was someone hauling ass rallye style and then wondering why it didn't handle well... misinterpretation on my part. A spring with insufficient dampening will bounce- and when you cross washboards at speed it will cause a loss of control. A spring with heavy dampening will handle that better at speed, but at low speed will cause the whole truck to bounce. On washboard roads, you don't want to plant the tyre in the ruts at speed- so a heavy shock will help avoid that. Watch rallye cars- they only touch the tops of the ruts on washboards.
Off-road driving, as in on a trail, is much different. A softly dampened spring works better to a point.
Dual shock setups on race trucks and rock buggies are really softly dampened, not stiffer.

 

[Slunnie]

Ah ok, fair enough.

The duel shock setups we run are quite literally standard versions. Eg, running 2x Landcruiser shocks unmodified. Some are modified though, especially for the high speed comp trucks here (eg, Outback Challenge vehicles), but these are touring and handling setups, not what the average person would bother with.

Like you say though, the rock crawling buggies here prior to the start of the FoxShocks era were coilies, and surprisingly just ran shocks straight out of a truck and with 14" travel! That was most of them and the series winner! They were the days also as now they're all into 14-18" Air setups..

 

[syoung]

My big complaint is that the remote reservoir adjustables out there don't have a wide range of adjustability. How many people have nitrogen at their house so they can play with the charge rates to get the ride they want?
I don't know a whole lot about it, but couldn't a shock be charged with CO2 instead? Since people often have access to CO2 from PowerTanks etc, couldn't that make 'home tuning' a shock possible?

 

[Slunnie]

You may find some tyre shops have nitrogen. Some people use it for tyre inflation. The valve on the shock is just a normal tyre valve (Schrader).