If you know anyone who runs Cane Creek‘s Double Barrel shocks, you’ve probably heard them go on about how they love it. The twin tube technology allows for infinite adjustability so you can fine tune your ride, and now, Enduro style riders rejoice, you can get the same high end suspension for the climbs too. Cane Creek may seem a little late to the platform and lockout scene, but there’s reason for that: they wanted to use the shock, not work against it. Brandon Blakely, one of the engineers and avid riders over at Cane Creek recently told us “you buy a full suspension bike for a reason — you want the rear to be moving; locking out is taking away from your bike. Good suspension aids climbing by giving you better traction.” The new Climb Switch dampens both low speed compression and low speed rebound specifically for climbing. Drop in after the break.
The goal with CS is to use what your bike already has, suspension, to aid your climb rather than becoming inefficient dead weight that you’re carrying with you. Click here for Cane Creek’s full explanation. The basic philosophy is that most lockouts heavily dampen compression, while leaving the rider to handle rebound. And the bucking of an overactive rebound can get pretty annoying, to say the least, while working against the bike’s ability to grab traction, two things the rider counteracts.
Or as Cane Creek puts it: “Simply put – the rider is less fatigued and more comfortable. Traditional climbing ‘platforms’ only deal with one half of the climbing dynamics, and thus require the rider’s body to respond to the minimally damped rebound forces that are common during technical climbing.” Climb Switch “mitigate[s] unwanted chassis motion while climbing without compromising the traction and control one expects from a modern suspension bike.”
Now, having 4-way adjustability plus a special climbing circuit that adapts two of those adjustments might be a little overwhelming to the average rider, but don’t worry, Cane Creek is there for you, set-and-forgets and tinkerers alike, with an ever expanding database of base tunes for your shock based on which bike you run it on. Likewise, they offer set-up field guides to get you going, because a company made up of riders wants you to spend more time riding the bike than thinking about and tinkering with it.
Check back next week for more on Cane Creek, Industry 9, Suspension Experts and the rise of enduro riding in North Carolina.
