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If we can think of compression damping as being designed to keep your wheel on the ground
by letting your wheel hit an obstacle and then the damping kicks in to keep it from
getting kicked away and taken off the ground, we can think of rebound damping as designed
to--it allows you to get your wheel off the ground. Obviously if your rebound, the force
at which your fork returns is incredibly slow, your wheels--well, it's not going to leave
the ground in a bad way, it's going to run into things, your forks isn't going to return
back to full travel and stuff like that. If your rebound is too fast, your wheel's never
going to be in contact with the ground. It's going to hit things, and there's going to
be so much spring force, that it's going to bounce back off and not touch the ground.
On this suspension fork, and most new suspension forks, you've got a pretty good range of adjustment.
Rockshox has a sense of humor, so as you can see the rebound goes from turtle to hare.
Obviously, turtle is slow, hare is fast. So, right now I'll check to see where I have the
rebound set. Feels like I've got it all the way to the left, which is hare. So, as I press
down, it bounces back very, very quickly, almost just like there's no damping at all.
If I turn it all the way slow, let's see what happens. Well, that's probably too slow to
do any good. So, you need to find a middle ground. And it's fairly commonly accepted
that the appropriate middle ground is fast enough that you're getting the amount of travel
that you want without the front wheel kicking back at you. So, on most shocks that's a few
clicks out either direction from full fast or full slow. And rebound is a preference
thing. Some people do ride with it really fast, but the idea is, your bike should feel
stable, both in your compression and rebound settings. It shouldn't be going all the way
to the bottom and bouncing all the way back to the top when you hit a root in the trail.
You want things to stay at a good height. And that just takes patience and experimenting
with your settings if they're external to make sure things work well.