Suspensions

First we need to caveat that we are by no means any experts on suspensions. What you read here is basically what we have done/tried. And we are sure that we will be making changes based on personal preference (how the bike feels) as we get more miles under our belts.

Second, this is now a How-To guide explaining everything about your suspension (again, we are new to this as well). What we are telling you is that you need to pay attention to YOUR suspension.

When your bike comes from the factory, they are all set to some predefined settings. Are these right for you?  Who knows. We have no idea how you want your bike to feel as your drive it OR what type of terrain you are driving. We will just go through what we have done (up to this point).

Talk about confusing....sag, preload, damping and the list goes on. We opted to first use what Triumph states. In your owners manual, in the Maintenance Section (that is where ours is located) you will find a section on adjusting the front and rear suspension. We have Rally Pros. We can adjust the preload, compression, and damping on the front shocks with a few turns of some nuts or knobs. The rear suspension, we can adjust the preload and damping. Once is a knob and one requires a flat head screwdriver.

The first thing to do is read the manual. They have a chart that defines the various settings to use. That is where we started. We made sure that our front and rear shocks/forks were set to the values in that chart. We set them to Solo - Normal. Now we do carry our panniers but that is not a lot of extra weight so we will stick to that table. One of us did crank up the rear preload a bit since they weigh a bit more but for the most part have followed the table.

Honestly, we cannot really tell a difference yet. We have decided that we are going to find a route that mixes in tight turns, bumps, dips, etc and we are going to figure all this our. We will start out at the extremes. For example, setting the damping to the extreme (full damping and then no damping). Take a ride on each settings and see how it feels. Once we get a good feel for that, set it to the chart and see if it feels ok.

As for the preload, there are so many videos that state it needs to be this % of travel or whatever. We have no idea what to think. That is one reason we will start with the owners manual settings first.  Maybe with time and experience, we will start to get a good fee for the different preload and damping settings.

At this point, we are not much help in what to set them too. All we do know is that you DO need to pay them some attention since the factory settings may be totally incorrect for your riding style. We will continue to update our findings on our bikes as we make adjustments.