Has anyone tried a shock from a different bike?
 

Liking my RX3 so far, but the stock rear shock is horrible. It's both harsh, and it bottoms out easily. I'm wondering if anyone has experimented with shocks from different bikes. Like perhaps an EX250, EX500, or even an SV650 or something?

Charles.

CSC can help you with a different spring. I found the OEM spring to be too stiff. Have you adjusted the preload or the valving? What is your sag?

I just read through a post describing how to adjust the preload. I'll give that a shot first, and I'll measure the sag too. $500 seems a lot for CSCs aftermarket shock... so I'll play around with the stock one first.


Charles.

Yeah, that shock is probably the worst thing on the bike. In the end, I upgraded mine to a KTM shock. And the rest of the bike around it...

Without measuring anything, I could tell I had a lot of sag. So I adjusted the hell out of the preload... too much, now it feels super harsh. So adjusted some back out. Still harsh. And it feels like for all the world like a cheap old car with a busted strut. Every little road imperfection feels like a thump. I'm not at all happy with the rear suspension. Going to keep adjusting, but I'm not a shock connoisseur. Usually I just don't have a problem, but this shock is actively hurting me. Potholes and raised manhole covers jar me hard enough to hurt my back, and gravel roads cause the bike to bounce all over the place - so much so that I ride the road about 15mph slower than I take it on my SSR Buccaneer.

I've got to either dial it in, buy the $500 (ridiculous) shock from CSC, or maybe see if I have an EX500 shock laying around that I can try...

Charles.

Charles.

It's definitely awful for sure. Sag should be set by adjusting preload, and then the shock rebound should be set to control the amount of spring pressure you have. If you don't already know how to do that, I would google "motorcycle sag rebound setting" and read up about it. More to know than could be efficiently typed out here.

The rebound setting is odd. Slow and fast marked on the shock seem to have the opposite effect. Twisting the adjuster all the way to slow made the bike unbearable to ride. Harsh and excessively vibrating and hard to control. Felt like a geo metro with bad struts on a cobblestone road, but the pavement beneath me was fresh and new. I adjusted it all the way fast, and that is more like what I expected. Slow response to shock input made the ride plusher and I even got a little wallow in fast corners. The busted struts feeling is mostly gone. It doesn’t get quite soft enough for really rough dirt roads, but it’s goos enough. Out of 15 settings, the fastest works for a mostly fire road ride. Two or three clicks from max is fine on the street. Anything more is far too harsh.

So either my understanding of fast and slow rebound dampening is wrong, or Zongshen printed the words on the shock wrong.

Charles.

slow=more dampening, fast=less. a lot of people think its "soft and firm" which is the opposite.

Cool. Well it’s more or less sorted now. If I find my ex500 shock I might try it out. My ex500 is running an sv650 shock and the original is somewhere in the garage...

Charles.

be careful out there, a guy I knew hit a depression a few miles from my house and it bounced so hard it threw him from the bike, apparently over the handle bars because he landed face first, he bled to death before anyone could get there to help him. he had just retired about 6 months prior to the accident. I had ran through the same hole quite a while before he did and it threw me around and bounced me out of the seat but I got lucky. after his accident I rode that stretch about 4 times with a can of blaze orange paint in my bag and never found it. no more accidents and I have rode the recon that way a few times so either the county fixed it or my luck has improved.

When I bought it back in 2017 there was a lot of talk on here about trying to find something that worked but I guess they gave up. I found the suspension similar to Japanese bikes from the 60s-70s, over sprung and under damped. Maybe Hagon or IKON shocks or a company close to you that does suspension work could be of some help.