Let's talk about springs, man.

"Springs? It's about time you wrote about springs, Bill. Whohoo, let's get to it." - No one, ever. 

I know you don't think about, or want to think about, or even want to know about springs or spring rates, so I'm not really going to talk about them here. Springs kind of fall under the banner of Civil Engineering in my mind, and I would rather blow my own brains out than be a civil engineer for a single day. See, I don't want to know any more about concrete, or sediment composition for anchoring bridges, or...well, springs, than I need to. I get to a certain point on the topic and I just don't care to know more, and I'm pretty sure that's how most people are with things so mundane.

So here's all you need to know about springs when it comes to bikes, first and foremost: preload will affect the amount of force it takes to get the spring to begin moving, but it will not do anything for the amount it takes to get that spring to bottom out. One has to increase the spring rate or manipulate travel with a damper to keep your suspension from bottoming.

Second, on a bike, right now, you're gonna either run into a coil spring or an air spring. Coil springs are what you see above: just a piece of rod iron (or ti or whatever) rolled around a mandrel. You can do it while the metal is hot, or cold, and you can roll it different ways, and you can use different alloys or heat treatments, but they are all essentially the same as a pogo stick or what is in a Bic pen. You can push down fast or slow on a coil spring, but it'll always push back at you fast (at least in the mountain bike world, for now).

Companies can get somewhat fancy with coil springs, but usually they choose to get fancy and hype their super lightweight air spring, and for good reason: they're light. I like air springs for that reason, and you can also play with twin tubes and chambers and negative springs and manipulate them a bunch. That's exciting, and the price you pay is that you have to hold tighter tolerances with air springs and deal with heat expansion, but a lot of companies now have that all sorted. We don't need to worry about all that, so when envisioning an air spring all you need to picture is an air tight trash compactor. Don't care about all that other stuff, just take away, "air tight trash compactor." 

What you should care about, and what I care about, and what this Rant is about, is old technology being passed off as new tech. Exciting tech! And price-gouging. Maybe you make a ton of money and don't have to worry about such things, but I don't, so I care about price gouging. 

So where does it all come together: the springs and the price gouging and the old technology being passed off as new? Right here, they all intersect right here. 

What you see above are 3 (three) of Rockshox's "Bottomless Tokens." They are made out of plastic, they take up space in your Rockshox air spring chamber so you effectively are left with a smaller air spring. Smaller air springs ramp up more at the end of their travel, so you can run lower pressures to keep your small bump performance nice and buttery without wallowing in the mid to end of your stroke and/or bottoming out. It's a great, simple, solution to fine tuning your air spring. So what's my beef with 'em? 

Well, washers of some sort are a solution that's been around for decades, for one. Don't try to tell me you've solved the riddle of the air spring with freaking washers in 2015. Come into the paint with that crap and you're gonna get Dikembe Mutombo rejected in this house. For twos (yeah, "for twos" I say) they cost around $20.

20 bucks isn't all that much, right? Well, it is when it's just crap to jam into your air spring to take up space. Crap they call "Bottomless Tokens." Bottomless Tokens to me sounds like I'm about to have the time of my life at the Family Fun Center on a Friday night circa 1991. That would have been magical, but there's nothing special about these. They can be replaced with any incompressible material... strike that, the material could be compressible. Meaning, "Bottomless Tokens" could be replaced with literally anything that takes up space. Straw? Sure, cram it in there. Old 8 track tapes? Smash them up and pour the bits in your stanchion tube, it'll have the same effect. Pennies? God knows we all have a boatload of those layin' around. You bet.

Of course, using an incompressible material (read: any liquid) would make sense in taking up space in an air spring, especially if that material were slippery and non-corrosive. If only we had something like that handy in a bike sho-p-p-p....wait a minute. Those SOB's take the place of about 10ml of oil? 10 ml of any type of oil costs...I have no idea because there's tons of it lying around. It costs nothing.

Oh no you di-in't Rockshox. Once again, you've wasted my time and money.  

Pictured: Two blue Air Volume Spacers reporting 

for their duty of...just taking up space.

For the record, Fox has a similar product that sells for even more for their new 36 Fork (which is amazing, BTW). These are blue or orange spacers for $25 but they escape my ire here because Fox rightfully calls them "Air Volume Spacers." An air volume spacer is almost anything. Hell, I'm an air volume spacer on this planet. There is nothing new or exciting about an air volume spacer, there is no hype. Bottomless Tokens are what Scrooge McDuck unwisely dives into in literally every episode of Duck Tales. 

Once again: advantage Fox.  

-BC