(who knew there was character limit?!)
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2) I own a Cane Creek Helm that I'm running on my V2 Walt hardtail. The air system works beautifully in terms of riding high in its travel and I love the manual balancing of the negative air spring. It's a really stiff chassis (even if the 35mm stanchions look small now). The fork is really easy to work on in terms of changing air volume and travel and travel adjust just uses clip-on spacers since there is no transfer port.
I'm running about 17% sag and quite a bit of damper support since it's on the front of a hardtail and it still does an admirable job of providing initial traction and absorbing small bumps on rough tracks.
So the Helm is a fantastic performing fork but I'm perfectly happy with the Dur'on and on the front of a hardtail where you aren't trying to balance a bike's suspension front/rear the sophistication of the damper etc isn't necessarily as important so where it wins my investment is the intrinsic value of being - arguably - the last true factory fork. Cane Creek is doing QC/QA on crowns, stanchions and steerer tubes in their North Carolina facility before pressing them together, building and dyno testing dampers in house, and then assembling complete forks on-site.
Because of how the negative spring works the Helm is both really easy to travel adjust and works great at a huge range of travel settings. I'm currently running mine at 120mm and thinking about trying 130mm and I've also ridden the fork at 160mm. It's just (really nice) clip-on aluminum spacers.
I'm early days on my Helm so I can't comment on the CSU yet personally, but I know of enough folks happily riding them now that I'm way more confident in it than other options on the market.
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April 20, 2020, 10:52 a.m. - Andrew Major
(who knew there was character limit?!) ... 2) I own a Cane Creek Helm that I'm running on my V2 Walt hardtail. The air system works beautifully in terms of riding high in its travel and I love the manual balancing of the negative air spring. It's a really stiff chassis (even if the 35mm stanchions look small now). The fork is really easy to work on in terms of changing air volume and travel and travel adjust just uses clip-on spacers since there is no transfer port. I'm running about 17% sag and quite a bit of damper support since it's on the front of a hardtail and it still does an admirable job of providing initial traction and absorbing small bumps on rough tracks. So the Helm is a fantastic performing fork but I'm perfectly happy with the Dur'on and on the front of a hardtail where you aren't trying to balance a bike's suspension front/rear the sophistication of the damper etc isn't necessarily as important so where it wins my investment is the intrinsic value of being - arguably - the last true factory fork. Cane Creek is doing QC/QA on crowns, stanchions and steerer tubes in their North Carolina facility before pressing them together, building and dyno testing dampers in house, and then assembling complete forks on-site. Because of how the negative spring works the Helm is both really easy to travel adjust and works great at a huge range of travel settings. I'm currently running mine at 120mm and thinking about trying 130mm and I've also ridden the fork at 160mm. It's just (really nice) clip-on aluminum spacers. I'm early days on my Helm so I can't comment on the CSU yet personally, but I know of enough folks happily riding them now that I'm way more confident in it than other options on the market. ...