Originally Posted by armourbl

I'm new to the RC world, just started back in November. Ever since I opened up my first RC shock, I've been wondering why the design is so primitive.

I have dirt bikes, and I do all of my own mechanical maintenance, including suspension work. Dirt bike suspension has really evolved over the years, and most are very tunable. Of course you have pistons with holes in them designed to flow oil in a specific manner, but there are also shim stacks that help control the amount of force it takes (usually progressively) to have the suspension move a certain distance in the stroke. These shims look like very thin metal washers, that basically act like a spring. Stack them up on top of each other in various diameters and thicknesses and you create an environment that is very tunable.

For example, you can have a suspension that really floats nicely over the small chop, but can also really take a big hard hit too. Traditional springs are still used to get the desired ride height. The entire design is actually more complicated than this, but I wanted to paint the picture.

So, why don't RC shock designs take more advantage of the technology in the suspension industry? All of the basic pieces are there, just seems to me that someone has to take the next step.

Having just a small disk with a few holes in it to act as the piston and control the way shock oil flows and/or various oil thickness just doesn't seem efficient to me. I know making shims to scale for RC would very challenging, so maybe this is why you don't see them in use. You can't easily tune compression stroke and rebound stroke to act independently from each other. I know some guys will bevel the hole in the piston on one side to allow it to flow oil differently in that direction, but that seems so simple with no real way of measuring the result.

Just curious, had some thoughts and wanted to share. What do you think?

ben