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Remember this list:

* Bilstein
* Penske
* Koni
* Ohlins
* Sachs
* Dynamic Suspension

Not on this list? Almost certainly crap.

(The reason why JRZ and Moton aren't on the "good" list is simple - I never dynoed any. In the absence of any dyno information one way or the other, I choose to remain silent.)

Perhaps I should elaborate a little.

For a while, I was the shock engineer for a race team, and was designing, building, and rebuilding shock packages for customers. A big part of this service was running customer shocks on the dyno to set a baseline for where they were currently at. I dynoed a couple of hundred shocks, representing the spread of almost every shock brand extant.

(All the shock dyno plots on this page came off my dyno.)

Amazingly, save those brands mentioned in that earlier list, this was a non-stop parade of horror, including, but not limited to:

1. Adjusters that did absolutely nothing;
2. Adjusters that had more crosstalk effect than they had primary effect (ie, a rebound adjuster where 1 click made a 10% change in rebound and a 30% change in compression);
3. Adjusters that were nonlinear and exponential;
4. Adjusters that peaked in the middle of the adjustment range (in one example, "full hard" was softer than "full soft");

5. Shimstacks assembled upside-down;
6. Sets of shocks where a front and rear shimstack had been exchanged;
7. Shocks valved with forces that were insane (1600 lbs/in @ 3 in/sec was the record);
8. Shocks that faded so fast (as they warmed up) that no two runs were ever alike;
9. Shocks with adjusters that varied by 10% on the same shock at the same setting, depending on if you got there by going harder or softer; and
10. Shocks that adjusted rebound and compression in lockstep, but had so much compression that backing them down to reasonable levels made rebound way too soft (very common with the Japanese brands like GAB, JIC, Tein, etc)

The only shock brands I worked with that actually did what they said they would do were the shocks on that list - and even then, they had their quirks:

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