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Hi
I have the new Whyte S-120C RS with the new Fox Step Cast Grip fork.
Have done three rides on the bike now and really love the geometry of the bike, but the fork is the most harsh and unsmoothest fork I've ridden.
I have set the sag to 20% (recommended maximum), but I very rarely use the full travel. I'm a very aggressive rider and often needs to add air volume spacers to not bottom out to often, so I don't know what's up with this fork.
Should I give it a full service even though its new? Is this a common problem with the GRIP forks?
/M
Love my fox Grip fork. I did find i had to drop the pressure a fair bit from what I was used to with Rockshox though.
Take it back to the shop you bought it from and ask them for help to setup or check fluid etc.
Remove all the air - ALL the air by compressing the fork. Add air, cycle the fork up and down 10 times. Check air, add/ remove and cycle the fork again 10 times - repeat until you have the appropriate psi which as above may be less than you think.
Cycling the fork balances the positive and negative air pressure, sounds to me you have no / less negative pressure so the fork isn’t soaking up bumps.
Unless the fork is damaged Grip is a good damper with no real common issues recorded.
As above, something is up with the setup because my Grip damper Fox 34 is fabulous, makes me wonder what the point of paying extra for Fit damper is.
Have you checked how many tokens are in there already?
I always do a lower service on a new fork before use.
I would have done just that with a fit4 fork as sometimes theres not quite enough fluid in there, but with the open grip damper needing teflon fluid as well as gold its not quite so straight forwards.
open grip damper
The Grip damper is not “open” in the sense of the old “open bath” fork that Fox previously used on thier lower end forks.
Also, with the lowers off, it's worth checking there's enough grease in the air spring.
Thanks for all the answers.
I tried letting all the air out now, and when I did that some fluid came out of the air valve.
Also, with all the air let out, the fork doesn't come all the way down. It hanged at around 90 mm compressed, and then I could push it down to 112 mm, but there it was bottoming out.
It then came back to 90 mm.
So the fork is bottoming out at 112 mm, missing 8 mm of travel.
This seems strange?
What I'm saying is that if you drop the lowers of a grip fork, you are going to have to deal with the green Teflon damper fluid that is shared between the damper and lower bath on the damper side of the fork as well as the gold air side bath fluid.
Opposed to the fit4 where you are not interfering with any sealed damper fluid, just replacing the oil bath gold on both sides
Drop the lowers and remove the air-spring to check it's not over-greased (and thereby decreasing negative-spring air volume).
Any damper will have some springback, in this case it's the coil behind the IFP that's pushing back. The damper is self-bleeding, so it cannot hydrolock; the missing travel is most likely due to excess fluid either in the positive air chamber, or in the lower legs.
The Grip damper is not “open” in the sense of the old “open bath” fork that Fox previously used on thier lower end forks.
That is true, however the bath oil is the same as the damping oil and the cartridge will both (slowly) ingest and expel that oil during operation.
https://www.pinkbike.com/news/inside-foxs-new-grip2-damper.html
If the missing travel was due to excess fluid either in the positive air chamber, or in the lower legs, shouldn't the bottoming out when releasing all the air be "soft" then?
Now it's a hard bottoming out, metal to metal it feels like.