Suspension school · Damping Adjustments

The Bracketing Method

One change, one section, and the truth about your settings

Bracketing is how suspension professionals tune, and it costs nothing to copy. The idea comes from photography and motorsport: instead of hunting for the perfect setting directly, you deliberately test either side of your current one and let the comparison tell you which way to move. It is the answer to the most common setup failure of all, which is changing three things at once and having no idea what did what.

The Method

• Pick a short test section, one to three minutes, that reliably shows the thing you are chasing: braking bumps for rebound, a rock garden for HSC, a supported berm for LSC.
• Ride it at your baseline (this calculator's numbers) at your normal pace. Note how it felt.
• Change one adjuster by two clicks in one direction. Ride the same section at the same pace.
• Better? Go two more clicks the same way and ride again. Worse? Return to baseline and try two clicks the other way.
• Keep moving in the direction that improves until a run gets worse, then step back to the previous setting. That is your answer for that dial, on that terrain.
• Move on to the next adjuster, always one at a time.

Why Two Clicks, Not One

On most dampers a single click sits close to the threshold of what a rider can feel, and trying to detect it invites imagination to fill the gap. Two clicks is a real, honest change. Once bracketing has found the right neighbourhood, refine by single clicks if you like, but do the searching in twos.

Deliberately Go Too Far, Once

The fastest way to learn what a dial does is to ride it at its extremes, somewhere safe and slow. Set rebound fully open and roll around a car park: that bouncing, uncontrolled pogo is what too fast feels like. Set it fully closed: that dead, sunken sluggishness is too slow. Do the same with compression on a gentle trail. You cannot recognise slightly too slow if you have never felt far too slow, and ten minutes of this calibrates your hands better than a season of cautious single clicks.

Discipline That Makes It Work

• One variable. If you change rebound and pressure together, you have learned nothing.
• Same section, same pace, same line. The comparison is only as good as the repeat.
• Same tyre pressures, checked before you start. Tyres are suspension too, and a few psi can mask everything.
• Write down every configuration and verdict in a phone note: date, pressures, clicks, terrain, one line on how it felt.
• Do it fresh. Fatigue reads as harshness and will send you the wrong way.
• If you get lost, return to the calculator baseline and start again. A known baseline is the whole point of having one.

The eMTB Advantage

Bracketing needs repeats, and repeats are exactly what an eMTB is good at. Five runs of the same 90 second test section in twenty minutes, arriving fresh at the top every time, is a session an unassisted rider simply cannot ride. If you have ever wondered why eMTB riders often end up with better sorted suspension than their fitter mates, this is why. Treat the motor as a tuning tool.

When You Are Done

Settled settings deserve recording somewhere permanent, with one caveat: they are settings for that terrain in that season. A bike park week rewards a little more compression and rebound control than home trails. Cold weather thickens damper oil, so a setting from a warm evening can feel slow on a frosty morning, and opening rebound a click in winter is normal. None of this is drift or failure. The dials exist because the right answer moves, and bracketing is how you follow it.