If you’re looking for a fully featured long travel fork but don’t want to sell a kidney to afford one, then the all-new Durolux could be the answer to your dreams. Not only is it hundreds of pounds cheaper than big name rivals, but this R2C2 model offers more tuning and tweaking potential than any of them with both high and low speed compression and rebound adjustment from the sealed cartridge damper.
The chassis now uses 36mm upper legs to beef it up over the outgoing model and it’s also only available for the 650b wheel size. There’s a hollow-forged aluminum crown and the legs are black anodised, while the lowers are cast magnesium. In use, this makes it impressively stiff and it tracks very precisely through gnarly terrain, with no hint of flex or squirm.
That precision is helped by the 20mm thru-axle on the model we tested, though it’s possible to use a 15mm axle with a reducer kit. The axle to crown length is a bit longer than most, raising the handlebar and bottom bracket height noticeablely. At 2,360g it’s also a fair amount heavier than the circa-1,900g benchmark of a comparable RockShox Pike or Fox 36.
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There are some nice touches however, with a bolt-on mini mudguard and quick-service lube ports for keeping the seals fed with fresh oil. The latter is part of SR Suntour’s policy to make servicing the fork as simple as possible for the end user. That means that the damping cartridge uses an internal floating piston rather than a bladder to compensate for the change in oil volume as the fork moves through the travel. It does mean a little bit more internal friction, but Suntour reckons that the design is much more reliable as well as being easier to bleed properly to ensure consistent performance.
While the fork is air sprung, it uses a coil negative spring for similar reasons of simplicity. It does add more weight but that’s a compromise Suntour has been willing to make. It’s also possible to alter how progressive the spring is adding up to three volume spacers, while overall travel can also be adjusted from 160mm up to 180mm in 10mm increments.
Tuning time
While having adjustable high and low rebound damping is probably overkill, as a whole the damping adjustments are set within a useable range and make a noticeable difference to performance. You’ll want to dedicate a bit of tuning time when you first get set up on the fork, but we found it was easy enough to get there or thereabouts and then alter settings to suit what we were riding.
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