2005 RockShox Recon 351 Solo Air Review
In the spring of 2006, my wife convinced me to buy a basic hardtail mountain bike; a Giant Yukon. Shortly thereafter, I was bashing through the trails around my house, and having a lot of fun.
As my old BMX skills started coming back, I began to notice that I was having quite a bit of trouble keeping the front end of the bike under control once the hits started getting bigger. At one point, a hard landing bucked me clean off the bike.
A closer inspection of the front fork revealed that the bargain-basement Suntour XC fork was really just a spring. It had a preload adjustment, but no damping at all. Compress the fork, and it was going to rebound back at full speed. For little bumps on the scale of a bike path, no harm no foul. But as soon as I got off into the singletrack, it was like riding a pogo stick.
Off to Bicycle World for a new fork.
I picked up a 100mm RockShox Recon 351 Solo Air with the remote lockout kit. This was mated to the Giant, and later, to my Norco Faze.
This version of the Recon - RockShox loves to have multiple options on each of its basic chassis - has Motion Control rebound and compression damping, plus an air spring that fills the negative and positive chambers to the same pressure. There is plenty of authority on the rebound damping (which eliminated the "pogo stick" effect of the undamped springer fork). Installing the lockout deactivated the compression adjuster (the lockout twists the adjuster to "full stiff" on compression) but "full soft" on compression seems stiff enough; maybe even a little too stiff.
With the lockout engaged, the fork retains a couple of mm of travel, and a really big hit will supposedly pop open a floodgate and let the fork blow through, but I've never hit the fork that hard when locked out; I use the lockout for extended climbs and that's not conducive to producing big hits.
Like most air forks, figuring out where to set the air pressure to get full travel takes a bit of trial and error. I found RockShox's recommendations to be a bit on the high side.
Small bump sensitivity was also not great. On larger hits the fork did well, but smaller, high-frequency bumps would pass right through. Based on some advice I found online, I disassembled the fork and lightly greased all the O-rings in the air spring with a silicone dielectric grease. This made no change on the stand, but made a huge difference on the trail, greatly reducing (but not eliminating) spring stiction.
While I was in the fork, I discovered that it had a 30mm "all-travel" spacer in it. This was removed, and travel was thus extended to 130mm. This made a huge difference to the front end of the bike, as it softened up the initial travel and made the fork more active. I now routinely get 100mm of travel out of the fork, with 30mm of room for absorbing a really hard hit.
Overall, this is a decent, workmanlike fork. It does the job, and while it isn't the plushest, nor the lightest, it is certainly good enough, and it isn't limiting the performance of the bike in any way. More recent RockShox forks apparently have better damping and less stiction, and one day there may be a 15QR SID XX in my future, but for now, this is good to go. Recommended.