Mileage: 20667

I’ve never been very happy with the suspension ( or front brake ) on my Tiger.  The front suspension is both too harsh and too soft – if that makes sense.  Too much fork dive under braking, doesn’t damp well.  I think this is because of the triple-rate springs my ( very late ) 955i comes fitted with as stock.  Progressive/multi-rate springs try to be a ‘catch all’ system in my opinion, but is actually just a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none.  They make it impossible to achieve the correct damping across the full range of suspension travel. 

The rear suspension is *adequate*, but to get anywhere near the kind of ride-height I need at the back to get the bike to steer nicely I have to bang the preload right up, which obviously is not right – and it shows.  One of the biggest annoyances is that the bike behaves badly when cranked over in bumpy corners – something my old GS’s used to be great at.  So I’ve ‘ummed’ and ‘arrred’ for months now about what to do.  Thought about a new bike but nothing really grabs my fancy at the moment and I can’t really afford it anyway, so I decided to bite the bullet and do some proper upgrades to the old Tigger to see if I can sort it out.  The next few posts will document my journey!

OK so the front suspension.  Given that the late 955i’s already came with triple-rate springs, other than buying a completely different set of forks the only option open to me was Race Tech Cartridge Emulators.  I had mine supplied and fitted by the very good people at PDQ in Taplow.  Very impressed with these people – very professional and “customer-focused”.  Fitting emulators basically disables the old damping rod and adds a new component to emulate cartridges.  Obviously.  You can then use proper ( quality ) fixed rate springs and the correct weight oil etc to tailor the ride specifically to the rider / bike / riding style etc.

I’m really happy with the results.  Vastly improved damping.  Fork-dive has the effect of being reduced – it’s not actually, it’s just that the new single-rate spring compresses / decompresses equally up and down the travel, and you don’t get the initial fork-dive associated with dual/multi-rate springs where the ‘soft’ part of the spring just compresses as soon as you hit the brakes.  Combined with having everything set up specifically for me, the single-rate spring etc, the new front end feels much more controlled and supple and predicable – without any hint of harshness – very plush.  Critically for me – the front-end now behaves much better when cranked over in bumpy corners.

All this feels a bit like the icing without the cake at the moment though – the cake being the new Hyperpro height-adjustable rear shock I’ve ordered.  I’ll post when that’s on.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 27th, 2010 at 09:23 and is filed under Tiger 955i. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.