Fork oil is not something you think of when admiring your newly washed mountain bike.
Hidden deep inside the recesses of a mountain bike’s suspension system, fork oil is an important but underappreciated fluid dynamic, directly influencing your ride experience.
Why is fork oil important? To answer that question with clarity, it helps to understand what oil does in your mountain bike’s suspension system.
Fork oil has two functions: lubrication and damper compression. Mountain bike forks feature seals which enable to the stanchions to slide in and out of the lowers. Without these seals, the fork’s internals would hopelessly clog with contaminants.
Seals are designed to protect, but they also cause natural friction as a containment barrier, which isn’t great when you want your mountain bike fork to be buttery smooth and sensitive to terrain inputs.
To reduce the stiction (‘friction’) that inhibits a fork’s movement, its seals are oil lubricated, making them slipperier, without diminishing their inherent protective function.
Beyond the lubrication function, fork oil is what regulates the initial movement on your mountain bike’s suspension.
Taming terrain
Controlling the speed and feel of your fork’s compression are the properties of fork oil moving through shim stack in the damper.
The shim stack is made up of different sized discs, to allow for fluid flow. How your fork oil moves through these stacked ports, is what makes a fork feel buttery smooth or harsh and rubbery.
The quality and condition of your mountain bike’s fork oil is influential on how comfortable and responsive it will be to ride over technical terrain. When you desire that suspension sensitivity over the slightest of bumps, or controlled compression when you roll down a steep sequence of rocky steps, it is all a function of having quality fork oil flowing optimally through the damper’s shim stack.
What makes a good fork oil? The centistoke rating is a viscosity coefficient and suspension engineers meticulously test their systems and then recommend a specific centistoke value. You could think of the centistoke value as being an expression of your fork oil’s thermal stability or viscosity.
If you are impacting roots and rock gardens at speed, and your suspension is dramatically cycling through its travel, oil is being forced and recycled via the shim stacks with great force and frequency. This generates heat and the better your fork oil is at resisting the breakdown of its own molecular structure under load, the more fade-free and consistent your mountain bike’s suspension performance will be.
How do you keep your fork oil in the best condition? Maintenance is the obvious action. Even though fork seals do their best, containment ingress remains inevitable. As contaminants reach the deeper damper oil, they will accelerate molecular degradation.
Riding environment also has a significant effect on fork oil breakdown. Wetter conditions are more benign than extremely dry summer dust, which is finer and has an ability to seep past seals with greater success.
To keep your suspension riding smoothly and effectively, stay true to the recommended fork seal replacement intervals. And always replace damper oil with a manufacturer-approved product, instead of assuming that any motor oil will work – because it won’t.
